Two former Cal Poly Uloop.com representatives have filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board accusing the company of illegally firing them for attempting to form a union.
Austin Garrido, a second-year computer engineering student, and Sarah Doolittle, a second-year agriculture science student, were fired from their Cal Poly representative positions in January.
The students claim they were fired because they were discussing the possibility of forming a union with other representatives after an unannounced pay cut.
Ryan Commons, the Southern California campus representative manager for Uloop, stated no Uloop employee has or ever will be fired for attempting to start a union. Uloop has not addressed this situation specifically, however.
"We came back from winter break and signed onto the company's [Web site]," said Doolittle. "We went to look at our paycheck, and it was dramatically lower than what we expected to get because they cut our pay from $10 per hour down to $8 per hour without even bothering to inform us."
Uloop.com is a Web site intended to help students find textbooks, jobs, housing and rides through a forum that is individual to each campus. Two students for each school belonging to the Web site are hired to promote the company on their campuses.
In response to the pay cut, Doolittle wrote a letter to the company stating her dissatisfaction with the company's decision and urging a response.
"They said if we work 15 hours a week for them, they would give us $10, maybe," said Doolittle. "It is very unrealistic for college students who are working two jobs already to work 15 hours a week for them. They said they would talk it out, and if we didn't like it we should quit."
After working for Uloop for the last two quarters, they decided to stay and work it out.
"We worked so hard to get where we are and to get the confirmed registrations we have right now," said Garrido.
Campus representatives are given a base pay plus a bonus of $1 for every confirmed registration more than 89, and this is what increases the average pay.
"Because they changed the pay and the bonuses were so different, we were getting much less than what we had gotten before, and a lot of the reps were upset," said Garrido.
According to Commons, there was no cut in representative pay, and it has actually increased to an average of $13.17 per hour.
"Austin and I decided we were being taken advantage of," said Doolittle. "We posted on the employee page that we thought it would be a good idea to start a union."
Garrido and Doolittle started talking with other campus representatives who shared the same concern about the cut in pay. They agreed to write a post addressing the formation of a union for other employees to sign.
"We decided that the only way to go was to get our own voice so we feel that we're not just a drop in the ocean that is Uloop," said Garrido.
The students claim they were fired moments after posting information about forming a union on the employee Web site.
"When the Uloop union topic was taken down, I got a lot of calls from other Uloop reps saying that the topic was taken down," said Garrido. "So then I called Ryan Commons and asked him what was going on, and he told me I was fired before I could ask him anything."
They were informed the reason they were fired was because they were not meeting company goals.
"They said that we were not making enough registrations," said Doolittle. "However, on our page there is a scale that shows what our numbers are, and we can either be in the green, which means we're doing great, or in the red, which means we're doing bad. In every single category, we were in the green."
Whether the reason they were let go was caused by their desire to form a union is still unaddressed.
According to the NLRB Web site, the National Labor Relations Act protects employees from being fired if they attempt to form a union when one does not currently exist. Employees are free to talk about unions with other employees without risking their jobs.
Garrido and Doolittle filed a complaint with the NLRB and are still waiting for a response.
"[NLRB] sent us paperwork, and we filed the complaint together and sent it back to them," said Doolittle. "So we should be getting a call soon to find out whether or not they're taking us on."
Doolittle said the situation just doesn't make sense.
"It's really not right for a company that is supposed to be bettering college students' experiences to cut down at people that they're employing," said Doolittle. "We're college students too. They expect us to get the word out for them, but they can't even pay us the amount they told us they would. We have to pay for our books, and we have to pay for our schooling."
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