Kylemore to take over all on-campus catering and food outlets (apart from SU shops_

stop

havinamare wrote: »

Kylemore recorded an increase in staff due to new contracts such as ucd,microsoft, st vincents etc. The number of staff in UCD has been cut dramatically since kylemore took over. When any company takes over another company, which is in effect what has happened here, that company immediately looks to make savings and as always the first place they look is staff costs. Given you know hs, how many of the old staff are still left? - none. How many in the library cafe - none.
You don't understand how education is funded in Ireland. The gov pays the salaries through budgets. UCD grossly overspent that budget and have made cutbacks in an effort to reduce the deficit. By selling off all the catering on campus, they are freeing themselves from a huge expense in terms of wage and pension committments. The downside of this policy falls on students and UCD staff by way of poorer quality food, higher cost food and constantly changing catering staff.
UCD policy will bring in a flood of wealthy foreign fee paying students resulting in fewer places available for the cheaper courses like arts and business.
There is more to come and UCD will become an increasingly unpleasant place to be.

I would say the majority of staff & students would say that the place with the worst quality food is the main restaurant, staffed by UCD.

All the other outlets were staffed by non-ucd folk for years, so there is no change really.

Tayto2000

havinamare wrote: »

Kylemore recorded an increase in staff due to new contracts such as ucd,microsoft, st vincents etc. The number of staff in UCD has been cut dramatically since kylemore took over.

Have you any evidence of this at all? What's your source?

havinamare wrote:

Given you know hs, how many of the old staff are still left? - none. How many in the library cafe - none.

Not familiar with the Library cafe. There's at least one I know working in HS still, the senior person from HS is now working in Quinnbucks, according to her, they all had to move (from that outlet anyway). Some chose not to join Kylemore and stuck with their old employers and so left voluntarily- they weren't made redundant. Turnover used to be pretty high at the best of times although that's probably changed with the recession.

Also, as mentioned by stop, all the food outlets other than the main restaurant were operated by external companies anyway (kylemore were already running Blackrock restaurant), all that changed was that all the individual contracts were rolled up into one. Good from the college coffers pov but maybe not in terms of choice etc (although the outlets seem fairly diverse). The main worry seems to be what the effects of a monopoly will be on prices over the next while. Here's hoping UCD negotiated a pricing control structure. All the arguments over quality are anecdotal - personally, I've been pretty happy with what I've tried in the various places.

havinamare wrote:

You don't understand how education is funded in Ireland. The gov pays the salaries through budgets. UCD grossly overspent that budget and have made cutbacks in an effort to reduce the deficit. By selling off all the catering on campus, they are freeing themselves from a huge expense in terms of wage and pension committments. The downside of this policy falls on students and UCD staff by way of poorer quality food, higher cost food and constantly changing catering staff.
UCD policy will bring in a flood of wealthy foreign fee paying students resulting in fewer places available for the cheaper courses like arts and business.
There is more to come and UCD will become an increasingly unpleasant place to be.

That is a grossly oversimplified version of third level funding. I'm not disagreeing with you about the fact that it's going to get worse in terms of commercialisation, but please have a read of the reports and funding figures released over the past few years.

The government grant is only a percentage of what UCD receives and it's been getting cut back year after year. It was cut back by 8m in 2009 and has been reduced further since. Non direct funding has also been getting choked off. For instance, the folklore collection was government funded as a national resource that happened to be located in UCD until a few years ago when the funding was just straight up cancelled, leaving UCD with the choice of skipping the whole thing or coughing up the money needed annually to maintain everything. The HEA report from September last year stated clearly that third level funding needs to rise by 500m a year overall to 1.8b by 2020 if quality and student services are to be maintained. This is clearly not going to happen with the state of the national finances and regular multi billion cheques leaving the country, hence the spiralling registration fee and massive recruitment drive aimed at postgrad (fee paying) and foreign students (fee paying). Actual tuition fees may even make a comeback shortly.

The payments and allowances made during the bubble are a bit of a red herring - all of the allowances accounted for 0.3 percent of the college budget in 2007-2008 and were well within what equivalent staff were paid elsewhere internationally and at the time were needed to retain top level staff. The colleges were poaching staff off each other non stop (UCD poached an entire research team off trinity before the research collaboration agreement), to retain your staff you had to offer the equivalent to what was being paid elsewhere. Remember benchmarking? This was to stop public sector workers deserting en masse for the (then) higher paying private sector. Bringing public sector pay down now that the gap has gone the other way is an ongoing problem.

The various colleges have not been coy about this at all, the annex built onto admin is dedicated to chasing research grants, Hugh Brady has been talking about 'alternative revenue streams' since before the initial cuts and there has been a huge increase in commercialisation by leveraging an effectively captive market. Just look at the britvic and kylemore deals. Most of the new buildings are PPP jobs (Sutherland school of law, NIBRT etc etc) According to the president's talk back when things got bad, the aim is to reduce exchequer funding to about 30% of what the college is spending. 'Alternative revenue streams' has also crept into government language now though, Ruari Quinn has used the exact term when discussing how the government basically cant afford to fund 3rd level...

Commercialisation is probably bad for an academic institution or at least what people's idea of what such a place should be like but if it's helping to take the strain and reduce the need for fees, it's worth it.

giulia21

Marygoss wrote: »

4.50 for an egg sandwich bloomer , very dear. Also some little hitler women with short blonde hair barking out orders to the girls . Feel sorry for the staff ,

Do you know who was the little hitler women?

havinamare

She was a girl employed by kylemore specifically to oversee the transition of the former Insomnias, 911 etc to kylemore. She would have been taken on before the tender was announced because they had not enough time to do it after it was announced

smunchkins

I've got an update on this.
Earl's Deli in Richview have announced they will be closing on the 20th July and not opening again till September. So no food for Richview people.

WoollyRedHat

smunchkins wrote: »

I've got an update on this.
Earl's Deli in Richview have announced they will be closing on the 20th July and not opening again till September. So no food for Richview people.

The U.N will have to initiate food drops for them as a matter of urgency.

pixietoes

havinamare wrote: »

Of course Vilemore made most of this profit by laying off most of the old staff of the restaurants they took over. Whatever profit ucd might make from this deal and i don't think they made any at all, it is wiped out by the social welfare costs of all these loyoffs - bad deal all round!!

ACTUALLY! no staff were 'laid off' by ksg when they got the tender, all staff members of ALL units were given the choice to stay or to go find other employment. needless to say many stayed, some are still here and have moved up to higher positions, others have left, of their own accord!