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April 28, 2006 -- Editors note: Protests by student
members of the Living Wage Campaign at U.Va. have been
under way since February. This special report is intended
to provide a balanced overview of the issues and of the
differing perspectives of those involved. The goal is to
give readers sufficient information to sort through the
rhetoric and more fully to understand the complexity of
the issues.
By Kathleen D. Valenzi
Members of a student group campaigning to increase the pay rate for U.Va.’s
lowest-paid employees to what they describe as a “living wage” conducted
a four-day sit-in in the lobby of Madison Hall this month.
The sit-in, which ended with the arrest of the 17 students for trespassing,
was the latest in a series of events conducted by the Living Wage Campaign
since its members issued a report in February calling for the University
to set its entry level rate at $10.72 per hour, the amount that they have
said constitutes the minimum hourly rate necessary for an employee to be
able to pay basic monthly necessities, like housing, food and health care,
in Charlottesville.
The U.Va. students are part of a national movement, the Living Wage Action
Campaign, which has seen similar protests being conducted this spring at
the University of Vermont, the University of Miami, Swarthmore College
and the University of Notre Dame, among others.
A little more than a month before the sit-in, U.Va.
President John T. Casteen
III had announced an increase in the University’s minimum hiring
rate from $8.88 an hour to $9.37** an hour based on a recent market analysis
of local wages.
In a letter announcing that increase, Casteen wrote: “The University
of Virginia values all of its employees and its contractors’ employees
and respects the work done by all who contribute to teaching, research
and public service here. These persons … deserve the best compensation
we can provide consistent with the law and relevant market conditions.
They deserve to be rewarded individually for superior performance.”
While representatives of the student group termed that increase “an
important first step,” they continued to press for the $10.72 rate
for both classified employees and employees working for private businesses
contracting with the University.
Calculating a ‘living wage’
In calculating the living wage for the Charlottesville area, the student
protesters use a “basic needs budget calculator” developed
by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit organization established
to broaden discussions about economic policy so that they include the interests
of low- and middle-income workers.
The $10.72 figure uses a “market basket” approach, which tallies
the cost of basic necessities to arrive at the minimum annual income needed
to keep a Charlottesville-based family of four out of poverty. According
to the students’ report, that figure is currently $44,592 per year
for a family of four with two wage earners, and includes the cost of “taxes,
other necessities, transportation, health care, food, housing and child
care.”
University administrators, on the other hand, use a “market survey” approach
to determining wage rates, which led to the latest increase of the minimum
hiring rate from $8.88 to $9.37**. (The federal minimum rate is $5.15 an
hour, and the state’s entry-level rate for classified employees is
$6.83*.)
U.Va.’s $9.37** is not only one of the highest minimum hiring rates
in the region and among state institutions, but the figure does not include
any benefits, such as health care. Were the University to add the $1.44
hourly cost of employer-provided health care benefits to the $9.37** minimum
hiring rate, the resulting total of $10.81 would exceed by 9 cents the
protesters’ $10.72 living-wage demand.
As Casteen has pointed out both in his meetings with students and in a
letter to the community that followed the sit-in, the flaw in the living-wage
methodology is that the calculations used to get a figure of $10.72 an
hour counts health care costs twice — both in the base wage rate
and, again, in the employer-paid health benefit. When all other benefits,
including insurance and pension, are added to the U.Va. wage package, that
$9.37** figure becomes $12.66 an hour.
The students have countered by arguing that benefits, though necessary,
are not a substitute for higher wages. “You can’t buy food
or diapers with health benefits,” they wrote in a statement issued
March 24. “People also have health care expenses that are not covered
by any benefits plan, no matter how ‘excellent,’ and which
must be paid out-of-pocket.”
This argument doesn’t resonate with William R. Johnson, professor
of economics. “U.Va. offers very good benefits, especially health
benefits, which are generally hard for people in lower-wage jobs to get,” Johnson
said. “In the local news coverage of the Living Wage Campaign, a
spokeswoman for the campaign was quoted as saying that benefits don’t
enter into their calculations about compensation. Benefits are valuable.
Dismissing them totally struck me as odd.”
The issue of contract employees
The protest isn’t only about minimum hiring rates. Student protesters
argue that the University not only has a moral obligation to pay a living
wage to its classified employees, but also to require private contractors
doing business with the University to pay such a wage to any of their employees
who work at U.Va. The students point to the City of Charlottesville, which
adopted a living wage policy in November 2001 for both city and contract
workers. (At present, the city’s “living wage rate” is
$9.36, a penny less than the University’s minimum hiring rate.)
U.Va. administrators, citing a March 21 letter from the state’s attorney
general, say they have no legal authority to require that private contractors
pay a living wage — either as a condition of receiving a procurement
contract under the terms of the Public Procurement Act, or as the result
of the Board of Visitors’ general regulatory authority.
The students dismiss the attorney general’s letter as opinion that
is open for legal interpretation. They contend that the act’s “best
value” provision does give U.Va. the latitude to insist on a living
wage when negotiating a contract. They say the act names a variety of entities,
including universities, and gives those entities the right to accept a
higher bid if the higher bid is believed, in turn, to give the entity the
best value for the money spent — the presumption being that contract
employees who are paid well will arguably do a better job (provide better
value) than contract employees who are not paid as well.
Their argument presumes that localities like the City of Charlotteville
and state agencies like the University of Virginia are comparable legal
entities.
According to U.Va. law professor Rip Verkerke, director of the Program
for Employment and Labor Law Studies, “U.Va.’s relationship
with the state is quite different than that of the City of Charlottesville
with respect to the commonwealth. An agency — in this case the University — is
a direct instrumentality of the state and therefore subject to the immediate
direction of the commonwealth and, by extension, the governor, as the chief
of the executive branch. In other words, the governor is our boss.”
Verkerke added that U.Va. may be correct “that the General Assembly
did not intend for the ‘best value’ provision of the Public
Procurement Act to authorize living wage ordinances or other similar requirements.
The opinion letter concludes that a living wage (along with health insurance,
vacations, labor relations and hiring practices) are matters of ‘social,
political or economic policy’ and thus unrelated to ‘the needs
of a public body or the quality of the product or services.’”
Even if there is room for interpretation of the act, however, “the
City of Charlottesville is more entitled to express its interpretation … than
is the University as an instrumentality of the state,” Verkerke said. “There
is a distinction there.”
How to test that distinction? One way — a suggestion made by Casteen
to the student protesters during the sit-in — would be for someone
to file a lawsuit on behalf of individuals who are “aggrieved by
[the attorney general’s] opinion letter and its interpretation,” Verkerke
said. “The suit would use the judicial process to … get an
authoritative interpretation of the Virginia Public Procurement Act.”
According to Verkerke, the University itself can’t file this type
of suit because it isn’t an aggrieved party.
“My own sense of the matter is that the University would be on thin
ice
if it directly flouted a firmly expressed directive from the governor’s
office,” he summed up. “I am less certain about acting contrary
to the firmly expressed legal ‘opinion’ of the attorney general.
To my mind, this is the crux of the matter.”
Another complication is that the term “contract employee” covers
a wide cross-section of individuals. Some contract employees, such as housekeepers,
may work part-time at U.Va. and part-time at one or more other places during
any given week. The question becomes, would a contract worker only receive
U.Va.’s minimum hiring rate for days (or hours of the day) spent
working specifically for U.Va.?
Carmen Comsti, a fourth-year student from Woodbridge, Va., and one of the
17 students who engaged in the Madison Hall sit-in, said that the contract
employees the Living Wage Campaign is most concerned with are the “full-time
service employees” within U.Va.’s labor force.
“As I know it,” Comsti said, “most of the contract workers who
work only a day or two are already making above a living wage. We’re
primarily interested in helping full-time contract workers who provide
janitorial services, or work in the dining halls, or facilities management.”
The sit-in
After several weeks of rallies on the issue, on the morning of April 12,
17 student members of the Living Wage Campaign — carrying sleeping
bags and backpacks containing books, laptops, cell phones and a several-day
supply of food — took up temporary residence on the lobby floor of
Madison Hall.
“We are sitting in because we have exhausted every avenue of dialogue
with
the administration that could lead to a living wage,” they said in
a prepared statement. “Our basic demand remains the same as always:
All University employees, whether directly employed or hired through outside
firms, must be paid a living wage of at least $10.72 per hour before benefits,
adjusted at least annually to inflation and the cost of living in Charlottesville.”
The sit-in and the initial stream of reporters who wanted to interview
the students disrupted daily operations, which in turn caused administrators
to restrict access to the building to visitors with prior appointments.
On the sit-in’s first day, anthropology professor Wende Marshall
was arrested for trespassing when she entered the building after being
denied entry at the front door.
As the students occupied the lobby, rallies and a 24-hour vigil were held
outside the building. More than a half-dozen tents were pitched on the
front lawn of Madison Hall.
Explaining that while they respected the students’ right to protest,
administrators chose not to provide amenities like wireless Internet access.
The students were able to communicate through cell phones. They also had
access to rest rooms and water.
Since students had brought food with them into the building, a decision
also was made not to allow visitors to bring additional food. When a couple
of professors, and the mother of one student involved in the sit-in brought
food and textbooks to Madison Hall on the sit-in’s third day, the
items were left outside.
Over the course of four days, Casteen met with the student protesters on
three separate occasions and provided them with two sets of written communications.
On the sit-in’s first night, he shared a preliminary response from
the attorney general, which indicated that the University did not have
authority to regulate the wages of contract employees. Then, on Friday
night, he responded to their request for a proposal with a document that
offered to work jointly with the students on resolving disagreements over
the methodology of their calculations and to support a “serious campaign” on
the issue of wages for classified employees with the General Assembly.
The president’s offer was contingent on the students agreeing to
vacate Madison Hall and return to their studies or move their protest to
some location that would not be disruptive to University business.
When the students voted to end the meeting at about 3 a.m., Casteen asked
for a response to his proposal by 2 p.m. that afternoon. In response to
a request for food by some of the students, the president asked University
police to sort through the food that had been left outside Madison Hall,
and to select enough of the best of that food to meet the students’ needs.
The next afternoon, at 3 p.m., Casteen and the students met for a third
time. During that meeting, the students provided a document to which Casteen
responded. At the meeting’s end, Casteen asked for a response to
his proposal from earlier that morning and was told that the students unanimously
had decided his proposal “did not merit” a response because
it had made no concessions. At that point, it appeared to administrators
that the group intended to stay on the floor in Madison Hall indefinitely.
Feeling that an impasse had been reached, Casteen expressed his hope that
the students soon would leave the building.
At 7 p.m., U.Va. administrators notified student protesters that they would
need to leave Madison Hall immediately or face arrest for trespassing.
When the students declined to leave, all 17 were arrested and taken to
the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail.
“The University takes no pleasure in having to arrest its own students,
but it was time for the disruption to come to an end,” Casteen said.
Faculty feelings
Although Houston Wood, outgoing chairman of the Faculty Senate, has indicated
that the senate has taken no formal position on the student protests, an
April 11 letter to Casteen signed by 230 faculty members urged the president “to
put the weight of upper administration behind the lately revived movement
to institute a fair wage policy for full-time workers at the University.”
In the week following the student arrests, the Living Wage Campaign continued
to conduct rallies and staged a teach-in. Speakers included a former City
of Charlottesville vice mayor, a U.Va. classified employee who is a member
of the Staff Union at UVA, and the president of SUUVA who has been actively
involved in the Living Wage Campaign since its inception, as well as eight
faculty members who addressed the student protest and “living wage” issue
from a variety of perspectives.
Among the faculty speakers, history professor Tico Braun talked about why
it is hard to speak about class in America; religious studies professor
Heather Warren discussed the religious legacy on behalf of the living wage;
and history and American studies professor Grace Hale spoke on the history
of the local labor market.
Michael Smith, the Thomas C. Sorenson Professor of Policy and Social Thought,
who talked about what the Living Wage Campaign was teaching the community
about leadership, responsibility and trust, closed the teach-in with a
call to action: “Let’s use our collective reason to do better,” he
urged. “How can we move to reestablish trust? I challenge our leaders
to engage the Living Wage Campaign in serious dialogue at the earliest
moment.”
Not all faculty have supported the protest. “Living wage campaigns
have a distorting effect on the market, according to academic economic
literature,” Johnson of U.Va.’s economics department said. “There
are some economic subtleties that have not been addressed by the organizers
of the campaign. One of these is the issue of substitution: the people
the organizers are trying to help may not be the ones who would benefit.
If an employer had to pay a higher wage, he would want to get the best
worker for the wage he had to pay. At a higher wage rate, the employer
would have more workers to choose from and would select the best employees
it could. In effect, some people who might have been hired at a lower wage
would not be hired at a higher wage.”
Market Wage Campaign
A student group also formed on the other side of the issue. Fourth-year
American Studies major and Lawn resident Karin Agness, of Indianapolis,
organized the Market Wage Campaign in opposition to the Living Wage Campaign
after a Student Council-sponsored referendum ballot on the living wage
passed on March 4 with 77.5 percent of the students who voted.
“After the referendum ballot, and after President Casteen raised
the minimum wage to $9.37** on March 7, we realized that the Living Wage
Campaign had
momentum,” Agness said. “Myself and many other students were
frustrated that the Living Wage Campaign had been so successful in pushing
its agenda forward without much discussion about the issues at hand and
how this would affect low-income workers overall.”
The day of the sit-in, Market Wage Campaign supporters set up a table marked “Free
Market Zone” at the site of the Living Wage Campaign rally and passed
out leaflets describing the possible economic consequences of a living
wage.
Agness believes the student protesters are pushing their agenda forward
with passion more than with reason. “We care just as much about these
workers as they do, but we don’t think imposing an artificially high
wage floor is the best way to help the lowest-wage workers,” she
said. “Rather than engage in tactics like sit-ins and rallies, we’d
like to have them prove their point through a solid debate on the economics.
We think economic theory is on our side.”
What about the employees?
A constituency noticeably absent from the living-wage debate has been those
employees whom the student protesters intend to serve through their advocacy.
The protesters claim the employees are afraid to speak up out of fear of
losing their jobs.
Employees interviewed for this article admitted some reluctance to go on
the record, but said their lack of visibility is more the product of practicality:
they are too busy working.
Mary Russell, co-secretary of the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating
Officer Employee Communication Council, said that while she hasn’t
received any calls from her constituents in Printing and Copying Services,
she thinks employees are sympathetic to the students for what they are
trying to do but also that employees feel the University tried to give
them an opportunity to have their say.
“Generally, what I’m hearing has more of the sense that employees
haven’t been well informed about the issues,” she said.
There also seemed to be some curiosity, she said, about why the students
were going to so much trouble on behalf of contract workers when those
workers didn’t seem to be engaged in the protest.
Becky Marshall, chairwoman of the Provost Employee Communication Council,
said that the only call she had received from a constituent involved a
general concern among classified employees at the School of Continuing
and Professional Studies: If the minimum wage goes up, what will have to
be eliminated to pay for the increase?
“People are smart enough to realize that there is only so much money
to go around, and clearly something will have to give to make a living
wage
happen,” Marshall said.
The student protesters have argued that with an endowment valued at $2
billion in 2004, U.Va. has plenty of money to elevate the wages of the
approximately 935 employees (a number that includes full-time salaried,
part-time salaried, and non-student wage employees in both the academic
and medical divisions) who currently make less than the $10.72 target the
Living Wage Campaign has set.
Marshall recognizes that’s not entirely true. Having become more
informed about such matters through her Employee Council role, she said
that while some private gifts have been used to increase employee salaries,
more often than not, the money held in the endowment is designated for
specified purposes.
Allocations from the unrestricted endowment have been designated for a
number of University priorities, such as Access UVa, the University’s
financial aid program.
One classified employee, who earns $9.37** per hour as a member of the housekeeping
staff, and who wished to remain anonymous, admitted that she and her colleagues “needed
a little more money.” Almost everyone she works alongside, including
herself, she said, “works two jobs. A lot are single moms, and there
are so many bills to pay.”
At the same time, she added, the University does so many good things for
employees, like providing good fringe benefits, including time off, dental
and eye care, and educational benefits. Last year those educational benefits
paid off for her when she earned her General Educational Development (GED)
certificate. “So I’m not complaining,” she said.
Mo Nichols, a trades technician who worked as a temp with Facilities Management
before starting there full-time in January 2005, admires what the students
are doing. “It shows commitment and conviction, faith and dedication,” she
said. “They are very knowledgeable and have a strong sense of justice.”
A lot of people she has talked to, Nichols said, don’t know much
about the campaign. “They tell me that they want more money, but
there is a lot of supposition that if our pay is raised, our health insurance
or our parking fees will increase to compensate for the pay increase,” she
said. “I don’t believe that, but a lot of people do.”
Nichols, who makes $9.45 an hour, said that the health benefits are a primary
reason why people work for U.Va. — that, and the fact that the University
is one of the most stable employers in the region.
Next Steps
Following the sit-in, Casteen invited the student protesters to come back
to the table for further discussions. The students responded that they
were willing to do so, and the meeting will be held today.
The students have indicated that if the administration will agree to a
concrete timeframe for implementing a living wage, they will put together
a committee of students, faculty, community members, low-wage workers and
legal advisers to work with the administration and negotiate a mutually
acceptable methodology for calculating what U.Va.’s minimum hiring
rate should be.
In a letter to the community dated April 20, the president expressed his
continuing desire to work with the students to persuade legislators that
under-funding of the public payroll for classified workers in Virginia
denies workers fair wages. He also agreed that an improved methodology
may have a place in the system for determining entry-level wages, and said
that he is “willing to try this approach.”
A larger context
At last week’s State of the University address, Casteen put the debate
into a larger context. “This is a human institution,” he told
the crowd of 300, including some 50 students wearing sashes bearing the
words “Living Wage” and “$10.72.”
“It’s imperfect,” he continued. “All, to my knowledge,
are.
“At the same time, it’s a work in progress. I have learned — I
hope you have learned — in profound ways, from the arguments made
by student protesters in the last semester or so. Their arguments are,
frankly, vastly more advanced, vastly more usable than arguments made in
prior years by anyone.
“We need to understand whether there is to be a devolution of responsibility
for controlling poverty from the government to individual employers. We
need to understand the nature of the public mandate; the General Assembly
needs to take positions; it needs to declare what the law is to be.
“As we do that, I urge you to see it, as I’ve come to see it see it,
as a source of strength. The demographics of our workforce — classified
employees, faculty, and so on — tell a story about an opportunity.
They say that the capacity to make dramatic differences in people’s
lives are out there and not far away.
“The opportunities for advancement as employees take advantage of
the educational programs that we offer; the opportunities for better and
fair compensation;
and the opportunities for impact on the world around us are larger at this
point than at any time in my recollection or knowledge.
“That’s the job. That’s what we do for the future.” V
* As of November 25, 2006 the state minimum wage was raised to $7.11 per hour.
** As of November 25, 2006 the university minimum wage was raised to $9.75 per hour.
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