The FabLab and Makerspace reopened on April 6 and will remain open for the remainder of the semester. The spaces’ 20 student workers were laid off without warning following their abrupt closure in February, but these workers have now been rehired with a cap of five weekly paid hours.
Several FabLab and Makerspace employees — alongside students involved in mutual aid and labor groups — met with President Maud S. Mandel before spring break, according to Arlo Varon ’29, a member of the organizing committee for the Williams College Youth Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA). At the meeting, the group discussed the situation and advocated for the FabLab and Makerspace to be reopened.
“This is an actual labor struggle on this campus,” Varon said in an interview with the Record. “We’re oriented towards labor struggle and winning fair treatment for workers, for students or faculty or anybody.”
According to FabLab worker Julia Zhou ’29, a group of students who felt passionate about the FabLab and workers’ rights approached students who had been laid off and proposed the meeting to ask for the spaces’ reopening. In late March, the group met with Mandel.
The meeting initially felt unproductive to its organizers, Varon explained. “It left us without much steam,” he said. “[Mandel] was like, ‘We can’t,’ and the main reason she cited is [that] it’s not possible to move money around in the budget.”
However, in an April 1 email, Mandel announced that student hours would be shrunk in order to enable the spaces to remain open for the remainder of the semester.
The hours were reduced by Academic Technology Programs Specialist David Keiser-Clark and Director of Academic Technology Tattiya Maruco, who reduced the spaces’ operating hours during the summer to allow students to continue working in the spring. Students are now limited to working five hours per week, down from the eight-hour cap imposed in the fall. “We recognize that it is not any of the students’ fault that the hours were exhausted before the end of the academic year,” Keiser-Clark and Maruco wrote in a joint statement to the Record. “So, we [Academic Technology Services in OIT] were able to reallocate a portion of our hours reserved for summer employment to ensure that each student who would like to return as FabLab and Makerspace workers can work.”
Following the FabLab and Makerspace’s closure in February, many students staffed the spaces on an unpaid volunteer basis and advertised these open hours on a public Google Calendar available on the College website. Now, students who choose to volunteer at the spaces are barred from publicly displaying these hours on the Google Calendar. They are only permitted to log the hours they are working. “I was trying to volunteer on a Saturday because I saw there were no open hours, and I had a project I wanted to work on, so I asked my manager,” Zhou said. “And he was like, ‘you’re allowed to be in there, but you’re not allowed to put your hours on the calendar.’ So other students have no way of knowing it, but I am allowed to be in the space, which I don’t think makes a lot of sense.”
To prevent the spaces from exhausting their funding next academic year, OIT is planning to reevaluate their staffing model, according to Keiser-Clark and Maruco. “The hours-per-position and open positions available for prospective student workers will be more accurately driven by the known allotted hours for the entire academic year,” they wrote.
While the spaces are unlikely to lay off workers in the future, Varon remained worried about the potential for other student workers to be laid off without notice. “There is still a cause for concern about [running out of funding again],” he said. “It just could happen elsewhere, with other student workers.”
