Following revelations that its student bar workers are paid just £2.50 of Sainsbury’s vouchers per hour, Newnham College has announced an eye-catching overhaul which will see volunteers offered the chance to earn ‘magic beans’.
The beans, according to a College spokesperson, can be used to grow lofty beanstalks on college grounds, providing students with the perfect vantage point to spot food banks, the latest controversy surrounding Mary Beard or even just some men at other colleges.
The proposal is understood to have been born from a lengthy consultation, during which students rejected the college’s proposal for pay to be delivered in a mixture of BHS vouchers and shares in Woolworths.
Marcella Atherton, a second year student who works at the bar two nights a week, expressed her happiness with the changes.
“What I love about this new scheme is that draining my energy clambering up beanstalks while kicking back my competitors so that they plummet thousands of miles to the ground and die is a perfect reflection of the Cambridge ethos.
“My friends at other colleges are all so jealous of the magic beans – one of them even offered me a cow in exchange for a bag of them!”
Bar workers at Emmanuel College are among those rumoured to be pressuring college authorities to implement a similar scheme, after financial advisers calculated that the current wage of £3.63 an hour is just 65% of the minimum wage and 0.00000000000000000000001% of the average college bill.
However, University Vice Chancellor Stephen Toope, speaking from a gold throne balanced on a cloud at the top of one such beanstalk, said that he could not see any problems with Newnham’s original pay scheme.
“I also get paid in vouchers – for small, tax-exempt archipelagos in the Pacific – and it’s never been an issue for me. Even my annual bonus isn’t paid in cash, but rather in giant barrels of diamond-encrusted goji berries. C’est chic.”
“The magic beans do offer real flexibility though – if students don’t want to grow them, they can always put them on toast – although being from Canada, I naturally prefer maple syrup.”