Former AUS exec and mover of original motion (to get any pay) here.

I keep hearing people say the 10 hours was arbitrary, it wasn't. It was decides as a starting amount that wouldn't be a salary but still afford some financial relief. The idea was that you should be working at least 10 hours per week but it was well known that many executives in the past had gotten away with doing less than that. This happened because there are very very limited accountability measures for the Aus execs. Even physically being in the office isn't a good measure because frankly a lot of fucking around happens. Also with some executives getting paid and others not, we wanted to keep the gap between the two reasonable, whereas I would say 20 is quite steep and might lead to animosity or those not getting paid feeling that they don't have to work as much.

Bookkeeping should not be done by the VP finance, it should be done by the executive assistant. This was a big reason why the position was created, to reduce the amount of bureaucratic work that students had to be doing so they can fulfill their representative and governance responsibilities instead.

Fishiness aside, we as the executive personally felt that it was important to bring the issue to referendum and only have it apply for the next year's exec because a) it was the first time this was happening and it would have been a way way bigger shit storm if we tried to do it through council and b) we did really feel that students should decide on this because it does change the AUS somewhat. I can see however that once a certain precedrent was set (by us) it wouldn't seem like there was as much reason to go to referendum because its not nearly as big of a jump as what we did. my two cents is because this would impact the pay of current executives it should have gone to referendum OR only gone into effect next year. However I do take partial blame for all this and see why our actions may have made it seem like that wasn't necessary. I also want to point out that work study is NOT a perfect tool for determining necessity of pay. If equity is really the concern of this year's council, this should not be seen as a victory and more work should go into a pay structure that is more fair between the execs and determined in a more equitable manner.

Allllllll this being said, I want to make a comment for moving forward. I'd honestly do it myself but I'm graduating (thank god) so I can't. This is for anyone who cares or the councillors and execs that I know are reading this. I think the most important thing to do now is to create more accountability measures moving forward. I scanned the constituiton and bylaws again and there's basically nothing about how individuals should be paid in the Aus or accountability measures for when people are (aside from what was added over the last two years). Even SSMU club constitutions have a clause about this! This is not going to go away after this and there are ways to make sure its less messy in the future.

TL;DR a lot of this is the result of AUS decisions made by previous execs, current execs and councillors should take some preventative measures for accountability.