More walkouts at York Student Centre

Yuni Kim
Assistant News Editor

Following the recent walkouts by staff members from the Student Centre, the student hub that gives space to student clubs and activities, three more employees have followed suit and walked away from their positions.
Excalibur reported Nov. 17 that after York University’s Student Centre’s (YUSC) marketing and events manager Saqueeb Rajan was fired Nov. 12, two of Saq’s employees quit their jobs as a sign of protest against Rajan’s firing.
Since then, both graphic designers for the Student Centre, Keith McLean and Kate Hudson, and the programming and events co-ordinator, Sanqeetha Ravi, have quit.
“I can’t stop staff from quitting,” Scott Jarvis, executive director of the Student Centre, wrote in an email. “The work will be taken on by other staff. We rehire each semester anyway, and December is not really a busy month for us.”
Chris Eccleston, who walked out of his position together with co-worker Sagi Mamalider, wrote in an email that one of the reasons he quit was due to team morale dropping dramatically as soon as Jarvis was hired.
“He never seemed to want to get involved in what [the promotional team] was doing, and a lot of our ideas were being shot down,” he said. “I don’t remember him even trying to get to know our promo team on a personal level when he was first hired.”
Jarvis, however, refuted these arguments, claiming his working relationships with current and former staff members have been great.
“That’s not true,” he wrote to Excalibur regarding the allegations. “Staff morale is great.”
Mamalider, who quit Nov. 15, said in an email, “what was once a wonderful workplace where ideas were shared and developed with support became a micromanaged environment where you were asked to take on a task only to be told that the decision was made to go a different direction weeks after having put in effort into that specific task.”
“The daily motivation I came in with to the Student Centre two years ago had disappeared,” he said.
TIMELINE
Nov. 12 – Saqueeb Rajan fired
Events manager fired as a result of an in-camera meeting between Scott Jarvis and the York Student Centre board
Nov. 15 – Walk-outs begin
Two members of the events and marketing team quit over Saq’s firing
Nov. 17– Walk-outs continue
Three more student employees in the marketing department quit