Dear fellow Macalester students,

My name is Jessie Miller, and I am one of the student managers at Café Mac with some unfortunate news to report. On Tuesday, Feb. 9, NINE of my co-workers were fired en masse without any advanced notice.

The nine workers who were fired were all from Opportunity Partners, a group that places workers with various kinds of physical and developmental disabilities into jobs. Café Mac management claims Opportunity Partners is too expensive. At the same time, Café Mac is constantly understaffed, and now we’re stretched even thinner. If Café Mac believes it would be cheaper to hire these workers directly, why didn’t it just directly rehire the nine fired workers?

It is wrong to fire these nine workers en masse without any prior notice. Café Mac workers are part of the Macalester community. When I found out on Tuesday that they were all being fired, my heart sank. Not only did they mean a lot to me, but they meant a lot to other students as well who regularly talked and interacted with them while getting food. I managed many of the Opportunity workers every day. I know how hard they work, and how much they care about doing their jobs well. They are a vital part of the Macalester community that cannot disappear.

These workers want to keep working at Café Mac. Students want them to stay. Please join me in telling Café Mac to re-hire the Opportunity Workers! Find me in the Campus Center during lunch to sign our petition.
Café Mac workers deserve better than this.