We have some demands to make of the Living Wage Campaign. Today marks the deadline which the campaign has set for the University administration to meet its demands, lest action be taken. Composed of students, workers and faculty, the campaign certainly has executed the tenets of activism without fail. Historically, its members have sat-in or stood outside Madison Hall to meet and to protest; hitting points on economic and rhetorical fronts, they have marched and demanded and demanded and now called for disobedience.
The campaign has cited the administration's continued neglect of its cause, erstwhile celebrating the longevity of its own effort. But its members have yet to realize the lack of progress is not because of the University's inflexibility but their own.
University President Teresa A. Sullivan is a sociologist of demographics and labor; if anyone is committed, or at least knowledgeable about the issue of workers' wages, our money is on her. She met last year with the campaign and has consistently put its initiatives on her agenda. It is true, however, the wages of many non-faculty and contracted employees are not at the level we would like - or feel compelled - for them to be. But the campaigners have demanded too much from the supply of available resources.
What is apparent is that the failure to raise wages is not a case of moral arrest but economic handcuffs. The University has faced a salary freeze since late 2007 and cuts in programs of all types; all the while students have seen increases in class sizes and tuition. These problems can be attributed to the economic downturn, and, more directly, the Virginia State Government.
The administration has also redirected concern to a 2006 letter from the Attorney General, which spelled out what legal blockades stand in front of a living wage opposing the students behind it. Whatever grievances some might have against the letter - a document in which then-Attorney General Bob McDonnell gives a fiscally tight interpretation of the Virginia Public Procurement Act - it cannot be neglected that the person who signed it now signs bills in Richmond.
The campaign can nevertheless point to construction projects on Grounds and say how easily the money could be transferred to its more worthwhile cause. This fails to acknowledge that much of the available money granted to the University comes with strings attached from legislators or donors. More generically available funds, by virtue of their swimming in pools of discretion, would have to be pulled from one or several equally noble causes. The campaign demands increased worker wages without layoffs or a loss of benefits. Fine - but, if successful, this same batch of students will be out next week calling for lower tuition.
We write from a position without the benefits of vantage; without knowing what the campaign might do or the nature of Sullivan's commitments. Certainly, this generation is ready to expend its political energy on whatever causes it equates with some measure of progress. But campaigns of such theatricality might learn from the so-called bourgeois ranks of our Student Council, who, dissatisfied with University funding, hike up in suits to Richmond.
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