Facing deficit, People’s Potato slashes workers’ hours, salaries

The People’s Potato’s deficit has jumped to above $25,000 between July 2007 and June 2008.
With no savings or sellable assets, the Potato has been forced to roll the deficit over into the current year’s budget, and has begun slashing its paid staff’s hours in order to cut costs.
According to the Potato’s outgoing finance co-ordinator Tony Alfonso, the Potato is mulling over a number of strategies for dealing with its deficit. “We’ve brainstormed a bunch of ways to deal with problem,” he said. “We’ve considered fund-raising, as well as the possibility of taking on a bank loan temporarily. In the short term, we’ve already decreased our salary costs by $40,000 this year, and are expecting to drop them by another $30,000 as well.
In the recently cancelled referendum, the People’s Potato had asked students for an increase in its fee levy from $0.27 to $0.37 per credit, increasing the groups’ total fee levy from approximately $160,000 to $222,000.
Of the $217,000 the Potato spent on all expenses last year, more than $201,000 was spent on salaries, payroll and related expenses. In comparison, the organization spent approximately $13,500 on the purchase and growing of food in the 2007/08 fiscal year.
According to Alfonso, the Potato employs between 10 and 11 regular staff, seven of which are currently Concordia students. These staff, who work at the Potato between 15 and 35 hours per week, are paid an hourly wage of $13.91, and are guaranteed annual raises based on the level of inflation set down in the Consumer Price Index. Unfortunately for the Potato’s bottom line, Alfonso noted that over the past eight years, these workers’ wages haven’t been adjusted to reflect the price of inflation, regardless of their contracts. As a result, workers at the People’s Potato have had to subsist on an hourly wage of $13.91. According to Alfonso, if the fee levy had passed successfully, the Potato would have been able to increase the wage paid to its staff to approximately $16.75 per hour.
Without the new fee levy, however, Alfonso predicted that more cuts would be inevitable in the short-term.
The last time the People’s Potato won a fee levy increase was in 2005, when its fee levy was increased to $0.25 per undergraduate credit.

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