“Where is Hennessy?” chanted students, workers, faculty and community members as they walked out of last night’s standing-room-only town hall meeting on Stanford’s workplace policies. Upset that University President John Hennessy did not attend the meeting, student activists led the meeting attendees to Hennessy’s house to voice their concerns about improving worker’s rights on campus.

The University organized the town hall meeting for the public to give feedback and ask questions about the Presidential Advisory Committee’s Report on Workplace Policies, issued this past June.

Hennessy commissioned the Committee to write the report last year after students went on a week-long hunger strike to improve labor conditions for workers on campus. The committee was charged with studying temporary and subcontracted workers, living wage policies, employee education opportunities and unionization procedures.

Meeting attendants held up signs that read “Nice first step Stanford, keep on moving” while the Presidential Advisory Committee presented its report.

Although relatively satisfied with the report and its recommendations, members of the student activist group Stanford Labor Action Coalition expressed concern that the University might not act on the committee’s findings. They read a statement asking for the recommendations to be expanded into a code of conduct and implemented immediately.

More than 10 student groups have signed the statement, including the Asian American Student Association, the Black Student Union and the Stanford Community for Peace and Justice.

“Where is President Hennessy?” was the first question raised after the committee presented a summary of the Report.

“He signed off in good faith to commission this study after our hunger strike, and he will ultimately make the decisions about workplace policies,” said senior Molly Goldberg, a member of the Stanford Labor Action Coalition. “So why isn’t he here to listen to our viewpoints and hear our statement?”

After about an hour-and-a-half of discussion, Goldberg stated that the meeting was not productive without the presence of members of the University administration. Committee members indicated that they could not answer questions about how the University would implement their recommendations.

“I cannot speak for President Hennessy,” said committee co-chair Economics Prof. John Pencavel. “But I would be very surprised if he does not address these issues.”

Goldberg then asked Pencavel to give Hennessy a phone call on the spot, but Pencavel denied the request, stating that the Stanford Labor Action Coalition had not asked for Hennessy’s presence when the group initially planned the meeting. At that point, Goldberg made the decision to march to Hennessy’s house, and all but a handful of people followed her lead.

“It is these students taking actions like this that got all these people in a room together,” said Zev Kvitky, an operations engineer at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and president of United Stanford Workers. He also served on the Presidential Advisory Committee. “The University did not start this study out of good will; they did it because these students fasted for a week,” he said as he made his way out the door.

During the meeting, Kvitky praised the report’s recommendations, but also emphasized the limitations. The Presidential Advisory Committee had to work within the University’s existing budget and did not have access to information about the University’s endowment, he said.

“The limitations were so severe that they prevented this committee from finding solutions to problems that we faced,” Kvitky said. “So the recommendations will only amount to a first step towards addressing labor problems on campus.”

The Stanford Labor Action Coalition’s written statement on the report also took issue with the amount of funding the committee had at its disposal to conduct the study.

A woman who works at Stanford Hospital raised another limitation about the report at last night’s meeting: The report studied workers at Stanford University, but not at Stanford Hospital.

Committee member Mark Granovetter, a sociology professor, responded that although the committee initially wanted to include Stanford Hospital, it could not do so because the hospital is legally a separate entity from the University.

The committee recommended that students read the report, available at the workplace policies Web site, in order to understand the complexities of the problems of workers on campus. A show of hands at the meeting indicated that at least half the audience professed to have read the over 100-page report.

The report recommends that the University enforce its parity rule that temporary workers get paid the same amount as regular workers when they do the same jobs. However, it did not recommend that temporary workers receive the same benefits, like health care, that regular workers receive.

The committee members were divided on the point of parity in benefits and also disagreed on whether the University ought to institute a living wage policy. The committee ultimately chose not to recommend the adoption of a living wage, but expressed the opposing point of view in the report .

“We wanted to put our own disagreements [about parity and living wage] out there for debate, let the University gather more information and come to their own informed conclusion,” Granovetter said.

Stanford Labor Action Coalition members advocated for the adoption of both a living wage and benefits for temporary and subcontracted workers at the meeting last night.

“It is a statement of principle that we should be seeking parity across these groups [of workers] antecedently,” said Todd Daves, a Symbolic Systems lecturer.

Although the committee did not unanimously agree on the questions of parity and a living wage, it did make firm recommendations on three other fronts.

First, it suggested that the University adopt a clear grievance procedure for temporary and subcontracted workers to voice their concerns about the workplace. It said that procedure ought to include a Worker Advocate position — an employee to field workers’ concerns and bring them to University personnel for resolution.

The committtee also recommended a pilot program to analyze what skills workers need to advance their careers and what skills workers actually have. If the pilot program points to a need for increased worker education, Stanford should “create a comprehensive educational development program for low-wage temporary, casual and regular employees,” states the report.

The final recommendation of the committee was that the University comply with the intent of the law rather than the letter of the law when workers are considering unionization. An analysis of the University’s collecting bargaining agreement with United Stanford Workers was not included in the committee’s report. The report focused on temporary, subcontracted and other low-wage employees who are not part of a collective bargaining body.