As a fourth year graduating this May, the past few months have inevitably become a time of reflection for me. There are so many things I have loved about the past four years at U.Va. — the interdisciplinary coursework I’ve explored, the lifelong friends I’ve made, and the opportunities that have been afforded me here. Like most fourth years, I have a few critiques of our fine institution, but there’s one in particular that worries me the most as I prepare to leave the University: U.Va.’s treatment of its low-wage workers.
Most students here are aware that U.Va. and the local community have a tense history. Personally, it was not until my third year that I learned that more than 2,000 U.Va. employees who enable our University to operate everyday are not paid enough to cover their bare-bones living expenses in Charlottesville, where the cost of living is 10 percent higher than the national average — in part because the presence of students drives up housing costs.
The idea of a “living wage” is similar to that of a minimum wage, but one that reflects the local cost of living and is adjusted yearly for inflation. The city government has determined that $13 an hour plus benefits constitutes a living wage in Charlottesville, based on calculations by the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute. U.Va. has a moral responsibility to pay its employees a wage commensurate with the most basic costs of living, particularly as it is the largest employer in the area and a public institution.
In the last decade, MIT, Georgetown, UC-Berkeley, all eight Ivy League schools and many other institutions have committed to paying their employees a living wage. At U.Va., paying employees a living wage would require a reallocation of a fraction of one percent of the annual operating budget. Why has U.Va. refused to join its peers?
It has not been for students’ lack of trying. U.Va. was actually one of the earliest campuses to form a Living Wage Campaign , with a group of students, faculty and community members first taking a stand in 1997 to proclaim that no one who works full-time should be living in poverty in our community. The campaign has been able to achieve multiple increases in wages for the University’s direct employees by engaging in peaceful protests, marches and public forums with a broad coalition of University and community members. Efforts to make change through the conventional channels of power have had little success. The administration did not publicly respond last year when the campaign delivered thousands of petitions from students and over 330 faculty members in support.
Exasperated with the lack of progress, campaign members started a hunger strike last spring, using their bodies to call for an end to the injustice. As a result, the administration quietly raised direct employees’ wages to $11.30 an hour at the end of last year, though this still falls short of a necessary living wage. Moreover, the University has increasingly “contracted out” dining, housekeeping and other services to private companies who can pay their workers as little as the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. The administration refuses to acknowledge the poverty-level wages of this growing group of workers.
After 15 years of escalating efforts, I have to wonder, what will it take? Even the city of Charlottesville, with much shallower pockets, has paid all of its workers living wages since 2000. Why won’t our University do the same?
To those who would say that workers earn what they’re “worth,” because “the market determines the value of their labor,” know for certain that the low wages earned by University workers are not determined by market forces. The real value of the minimum wage has steadily declined since 1968, despite increasing worker productivity and levels of education, and the lowest-income segment of our society has steadily gotten poorer. Furthermore, as long as U.Va. refuses to pay living wages, it is externalizing the difference between its wages and the local cost of living onto taxpayers and the Charlottesville community. Consequently, our community bears the burden of uncompensated hospital visits, subsidized housing, food stamps and soup kitchens.
But more than the economic implications, I’m worried about dear friends of mine like Mary, who works in dining services and struggles to balance working two jobs, taking community college business courses and caring for her two sons. It has become clear to me that a living wage is not a matter of charity, but one of justice. Before leaving U.Va. this May, I would like to know one thing from the administration: what will it take?
Claire Wyatt is a fourth-year College student and a member of the Living Wage Campaign.
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