LAST APRIL, when the time came for President Casteen to give his State of the University address, the main public issue on Grounds was the inability of the University's low-wage staff to adequately support themselves and their families on the wages they make here.
Nearly 80 percent of the University's undergraduates had voted for a living wage calculated to ensure that those basic needs could be met. More than 200 faculty members had written to President Casteen, urging him "to decry the injustice embedded in a wage structure that consigns to economic hardship the most vulnerable members of the University community; and then to use [his] unique position to see that something is done to remove that injustice."
In his 2007 State of the University Address, President Casteen recognized that "we need solutions to the problems described by the living wage organizations." What problems? Simply put, wages were, and are, too low: the University's low-wage workers are being forced to choose between diapers and rent, and between heat and groceries. They are forced to miss parent/teacher conferences. Some of the University's workers live on the street.
Last year, students, faculty, alumni, clergy, public officials, and low-wage workers themselves were arguing that something must be done to more fairly compensate all the University's employees, including those employed by contractors, and to mitigate Charlottesville's 25 percent poverty rate.
Their proposal was a living wage: a new minimum hiring rate calculated to provide for those most basic needs, and which has been shown in places across the country to reduce the incidence of poverty. Hundreds of jurisdictions have instituted living wage policies, including four in Virginia. According to The Washington Post, "Arlington's experience, among others, appears to rebut the chief [economic] argument against living wage laws: that they push low-wage workers out of the job market and increase unemployment."
Last year, President Casteen said in his State of the University Address that he had "learned, in profound ways, from the ... arguments [for a living wage], which are, frankly, vastly more advanced, vastly more usable than arguments made in prior years by anyone."
After such words from the President, we were hoping for an update on the problems he spoke of last year at this year's State of the University address on Wednesday. They need solutions -- so what has been done in the last year to solve them? The arguments for a living wage are "advanced" and "usable" -- so to what use have they been put? How have they been improved? What better solutions have been proposed?
We heard much in President Casteen's speech about challenges the University has met and our ongoing projects. We heard about a lot of money being used for a lot of exciting projects, and about billions of dollars in donations being raised as part of the Capital Campaign. The progress the University is making is outstanding.
But what about the living wage? Can we fulfill President Casteen's commitment to "solutions" rather than abandoning it? The compensation of low-wage workers is one of many issues that confront the University, but it is one that we have a viable solution for. Rick Warren, who, as a purchasing agent for Arlington County, has seen the effects of a living wage policy firsthand, says "Ultimately...everyone benefits. Companies get more satisfied employees, who generate less [sic] turnovers." And, he says, the living wage has resulted in better-quality contractors. The living wage is not only a legal option and a moral imperative, but is in the financial best interest of the University.
In President Casteen's State of the University Address last year, he told us that "the capacity to make dramatic differences in people's lives [is here at the University] and not far away." He agreed that there are problems in our compensation policy.In the living wage, we have the capacity to solve some of them. If our acknowledged problems have other solutions or better ones, it rests on President Casteen and the Board of Visitors to find and implement them.
We have made great progress since Thomas Jefferson's day. The University of Virginia is now not only a "bulwark of the human mind in this hemisphere," but our belief that "all men are created equal" has been realized more and more by efforts to make the University more accessible to persons of every background. Narrowing the gap between preaching and practice has brought us our greatest successes, many of them under the leadership of President Casteen. After a decade of talk about the living wage, the time has come to implement it -- or to offer a better solution.
Hannah Pocock is a first year in the College. Benjamin Van Dyne is a fourth year in the College. They are organizers for the Living Wage Campaign.
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