A FORTY-hour work week is meant to be the standard for full-time employment in the United States. At the University of Virginia, however, a 40-hour work week is the standard for living in poverty.
It seems outrageous that a person might hold a full-time job and fail to earn enough money to live above the poverty line in Charlottesville, but research conducted by the Virginia Organizing Project indicates that one in four people working full-time jobs in Charlottesville do just that. The failure of the University to pay its workers a living wage is a travesty that requires immediate attention and correction.
Throughout the past two weeks, terms and arguments regarding the living wage that require explanation have appeared in The Cavalier Daily. One such term is the idea of the "federal poverty line," which some writers continue to denote as a standard for need in the United States. The truth, however, is that the federal poverty line is a low estimate of the number of people who must do without basic necessities. Conceived in the 1950s as a way to determine poverty levels based upon the amount of money a family is able to spend on food, and eventually decried as an underestimation of poverty by Molly Orshansky, who first created the poverty thresholds, the poverty line at present appears to be a wholly arbitrary figure.
Also arbitrary, and also a key component of anti-living wage Opinion pieces and editorials from last week, is the bit of legislative caprice known as the minimum wage. The current minimum wage rate in the United States is $5.15 per hour -- to use this figure as a basis of comparison for the living wage bespeaks poor research, as the two are wholly separate issues; in addition, it announces the remarkably low standards to which critics of the living wage feel that pay rates should be held. In a Focus article in the Nov. 2 edition of The Cavalier Daily ("Living below the line"), University spokesperson Carol Wood made that very announcement by celebrating the University pay rates as being "72 percent above the federal minimum wage." This amounts to roughly $8.75 per hour, or an annual income of about $18,200. The federal poverty line for a family of four, meanwhile, is $19,350 -
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