Living Wage 101

...In large part because of student pressure, seventy-eight colleges have joined the Worker Rights Consortium, the strictest of the independent groups that monitor workers' conditions in textile factories...

...At Swarthmore, where there is no union, students are often doing the work union organizers would do, and networking with them for help and advice...

...Workerless Wage Campaigns...

...After the Harvard sit-in," Blair says, "that changed...

...Globalophobicos (the Spanish word for the protesters) has the wrong ring to it—people afraid of the world...

...With welfare-to-work "reform" touted as the way to get people off the rolls, the living wage campaigns are the logical moral conclusion—if you are going to require people to work to support themselves, then their jobs should pay enough to support them...

...To their credit, many of the students are well aware of this and speak of organizing with the workers instead of for them...

...Along with students at twenty other college campuses, Swatties spent a good part of last year causing a ruckus, marching up and down the beautifully manicured lawns, demanding meetings with the president, and publishing heartfelt manifestos...

...Winning a campaign [like Harvard's] definitely helps," says Jenn Kern, director of the Living Wage Resource Center run by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) "but we'd be here anyway...

...At Harvard, one of the facilitators of the large-scale protests in Seattle and Los Angeles during the Democratic National Convention was flown east to help with last-minute negotiations...

...LIVING WAGES 101 Yet the majority of the organizing is being done by students, many of whom were active in Union Summer (an AFL-CIO organizing project for college students) and the antisweatshop movement...

...For Kalwick, the living wage campaign is as crucial to students' education as the classes they take...

...At each of these colleges, it helps that well-heeled parents and alumni are joining the fight—blast-faxing the administration, picketing the Harvard Club in Boston, and generally being pains-in-the-ass until the administration takes note...

...At Harvard and Johns Hopkins, strong Service Employees International and Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employee unions already existed...

...The campaign's premise, whether at the city, county, or campus level, is that federal and state minimum wages do not allow full-time workers to adequately support themselves or their families...

...At Brown, where only some of the workers are organized, union organizing has been part of the student campaign...

...Students began meeting one-on-one with staff to listen to their concerns: not only the need for a more livable wage, but also the lack of respect from both students and administrators and the lack of decision-making power (there is no union at Swarthmore, and a failed attempt at unionization eight years ago has not been repeated...

...However, they affect a relatively small number of workers for the energy that's put into them (two hundred workers, at most, at Swarthmore...

...In the first year of the campaign, Conscious Consumers gathered more than a thousand supporting signatures and met with the administration...

...Jess Walsh, in an article in New Labor Forum, raises the specter of workerless living wage campaigns on campuses: If campus living wage campaigns are to have material effects for workers in the form of wages and benefits and an ongoing voice on the job, then coalitions must foster worker participation and create worker representation vehicles within universities....The challenge is to adapt new institutional arrangements for worker representation that can work without union organizing and collective bargaining, but that do not work to the detriment of organizing, and can in fact promote and support unionization...

...But as it is, we have to balance DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 59 LIVING WAGES 101 paying for the education of our students with paying for our staff...

...for the work they did and if the government provided the funds to make that possible...

...They are creating broad-based coalitions with staff, faculty, unions, and almost anyone else who will support the cause ("Micro-Physicists for A Living Wage" read one sign at Harvard), and they are using all the technology and media connections at their disposal...

...That's one thing the global justice movement has helped remind students: if you don't reach out to the community and make sure to involve workers and keep them engaged, it will fall apart...

...The list of universities currently engaged in living wage battles reads like a high school student's wish list...

...The exact wage amount can be calculated in a number of ways...

...Thinking about Swarthmore, Kae Kalwick echoes Walsh: "The ideal, for me, would be . . .that workers run their workplace and make the decisions that relate to their workplace...

...Campus campaigns are most relevant for dining hall, maintenance, and grounds staff...

...Also unaddressed by most campaigns are non-wage issues such as advancement, child care, medical and disability benefits, and quality of work...

...Initially, the group was accused by some administrators and students of being too "confrontational" for Swarthmore's Quaker style...

...That's a whopping $10,712 a year before taxes, which doesn't put you above the poverty line in most urban areas...

...Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Bozeman, Montana, both have active campaigns...

...pROBABLY THE worst thing that could happen to the living wage campaigns is that they fight solely for a wage increase— which could be reversed at any time—and nothing more, so that even a victory would leave decision making in the hands of the administration...

...It got to the point where people were arguing over international monitoring bodies and it was becoming a very distant fight...

...The campaign argues that, given Swarthmore's billion dollar endowment, it can't morally afford not to pay the staff a living wage...

...In addition to Harvard and Swarthmore, campaigns have been won or are being fought at Princeton, Wesleyan, University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins, Brown, Stanford, American University, Earlham College, American University/George Washington School of Law, Fairfield University, and the University of Tennessee...

...The Swarthmore Living Wage Democracy Campaign sees the final minimum living wage as negotiable, but the basic premise of the campaign isn't: People working full time should be able to support themselves and their families on their salary, and the administration has the moral responsibility to ensure all workers earn a livable wage...

...What Is a Living Wage...

...Living wage campaigns seek to pass campus or local ordinances requiring the institution or city to pay workers enough to live...

...Living wage campaigns, at their best, are part of a movement for worker democracy and decision making...

...Living wage campaigns take some of the best lessons from the antisweatshop movement—including the need to work with unions and community groups—and apply it at the most local level...

...Students at more than twenty-five colleges participated in a dining hall boycott of Sodexho Marriot—a food service company that also invests heavily in private prisons, which often serve as some of the lowest wage domestic sweatshops...

...There are now sixty-seven living wage ordinances on the books and seventy-five active campaigns (including twenty-three on college campuses...

...One way Swarthmore could show itself as a true leader in social justice [would be] to model those principles in the way it treats all people on campus," she said...

...They have to stay out of task forces and committees and stay on the streets...

...As was the case during the South Africa divestment protests at Swarthmore in the late eighties, the administration seems to be saying that the disadvantaged have to pay (there is no talk, not surprisingly, of cutting back on an extra computer class or new building...

...Students are also taking lessons from the large-scale demonstrations against the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Economic Forum, Free Trade Area of the Americas, and G8...

...At Brown, one successful strategy was a campaign called "I Work At Brown," in which students conducted interviews with staff about what their DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 61 LIVING WAGES 101 lives and jobs were like and their struggle to survive and then blasted them from boom boxes around campus, sometimes with accompanying hip-hop beats...

...Unless they expand to take on these issues, living wage campaigns run the risk of becoming short-lived policy campaigns, without any guarantee that their victories can be sustained...

...THE LIVING WAGE campaigns have not only brought union and community groups onto campus, but have infused local labor and activist groups with new energy...

...sometimes fifteen hundred in big city campaigns...

...You can't talk about race, gender, or any of these issues and not see what's happening right under your nose...

...Women's Association for Women's Alternatives, a national organization that helps campaigns develop living wage standards, calculated that to take care of rent, food, and basic necessities, a Swarthmore employee would need to make around $13.00 an hour...

...A living wage campaign gives people something very local and finite they can fight for...

...Living wage campaigns have already won a huge public relations battle just with their name—it's clearly a movement for something and for something concrete, and it's hard to say you are against a livable wage...

...There's nothing like having your offspring holed up in Massachusetts Hall to turn parents into activists...

...Essie Mae was here for thirty-nine years, and when she left she made $10.50 an hour," Michelle Hartel, a dining room employee, told the local paper...

...It would be great," President Al Bloom said in an interview, "if we lived in a world where people were paid justly...

...The federal minimum wage was recently raised to an extravagant $5.15 an hour...

...Still, the group has met with resistance from the administration...

...According to President Al Bloom, approximately 24 percent of the student body are people of color—including international students...

...Many campaigns define the living wage as equivalent to the poverty line for a family of four (currently $8.20 per hour)—although, depending on the city, campaign demands have ranged from $6.25 per hour (New Orleans) to $12.37 per 6o n DISSENT / Fall 2001 hour (Providence...

...One of the crucial lessons of the antisweatshop movement was the connection between what happened at the personal level and in the greater college community and its effect on workers around the world...

...Swarthmore likes to boast that it has one of the highest rates of racial and ethnic diversity of any college of its size and academic standing, not a small feat considering its location in a tiny, predominantly white and Lutheran hamlet outside of Philadelphia...

...Whether here at home or in sweatshops abroad, working people are disempowered and that's what we're fighting against," Blair says...

...There is a lot of talk in Swarthmore classes about social justice...

...The living wage campaign is about bridging theory and practice...

...SINCE HARVARD 'S highly publicized and successful living wage campaign ended on May 8 after a twenty-one-day sit-in (the longest in the university's history), living wage campaigns have gotten a boost of energy and media attention...

...The Swarthmore campaign came out of the Conscious Consumers student group, which focused on international issues—divestment and worldwide working conditions—until last fall when Kae Kalwick, an administrative assistant, came to speak to them about staff wages...

...The difficulty in creating change at the large financial institutions and the greater police violence at recent demonstrations have encouraged some activists to return to local campaigns...

...solidly Republican Suffolk County, New York, and Kankakee County, Illinois, have passed ordinances...

...62 n DISSENT / Fall 2001...

...It's a lesson that the larger anticorporate globalization movement is struggling to learn...

...These ordinances aren't just in the traditionally liberal towns either...

...RACHEL NEUMANN is an assistant editor of Dissent...

...Yet engaging workers is one of the areas where some campaigns have run into difficulty, in part because a living wage—on its own— doesn't address the issues of respect or decisionmaking that the Swarthmore staff cited as being as important to them as wage increases...

...According to Kern, "these campaigns have got to be public if they are going to survive...

...Although there was no Harvard-style sit-in, the movement was an important shift for the predominantly liberal but sleepy student body and an example of the way living wage campaigns have become a key economic justice issue both in cities and on college campuses...

...Yet the cleaning, dining, and maintenance staff— which is predominantly African-Americanmakes wages below the average necessary to feed and take care of a family, even after many years...

...The unions learn, too, often hiring student organizers to help with future campaigns...

...Although the antisweatshop movement is still strong, according to Kern, many students thought that there wasn't much more they could do at the local level...

...Living wage campaigns can make a huge material difference to the workers they affect, often raising wages by a few dollars per hour...

...We decided to focus on wages because that was the most concrete thing," says Sam Blair, a senior involved in the group...

...We can't act with integrity without doing the work at the local level that we are trying to do at the international one...

...In 2000, minimum hiring wages ranged from $5.36 per hour to $8.53 per hour...

...City campaigns affect city employees and any company above a certain size that does business with the city...

...People started to understand what we were doing and why...

...At the alumni event, Bloom argued that increasing staff wages would mean a cutback in educational services for students, including, possible cuts in "scholarships for low-income students...

...Baltimore passed what is considered the first modern living wage ordinance in 1994, and since then campaigns have sprouted up in cities, counties, and on both urban and rural campuses...

...Yet clearly the movement needs both— the detailed, very local work and the reminder that the different movements are interconnected and have common goals...

...The reason was not a sudden burst of pride or the creeping nostalgia of age—rather it was seeing the Swarthmore living wage campaign in the news...

...And so they are as much about establishing a model as they are about the campaign itself, which is why linking wages to worker respect and self-determination is so important...