|
« AAUP Homepage
|
Fighting Back: A Fair Wage for Staff in Colorado
True-life success stories of academic freedom and campus equity. Send us yours, too.
By Jeff Livesay
In winter 2001, student activists at Colorado College initiated a campaign protesting the college’s contract with Sodexho, the campus supplier of custodial and foodservice laborers. Under the name Colorado College Fair Labor (CCFL), the students aimed to ensure that the college pay its workers a living wage. Their remarkably successful campaign catalyzed campus sentiment in favor of reform and set in motion a significant cultural transformation that continues to evolve.
To complement a series of rallies and petition drives in 2001, CCFL students Teague Cohen, Michael Neil, Greg Piesco-Putnam, and Kai Stinchcombe wrote an exposé titled Workers’ Rights and the Colorado College Dream. The seventeen-page document, which included an extensive bibliography and footnotes, focused on the wages, workload, benefits, and grievance procedures of the college’s Sodexho custodial workers. The college’s business manager, David Lord, quickly expressed his willingness to rethink the college’s relationship with Sodexho. Shortly thereafter, the college’s outgoing president, Kathryn Mohrman, responded to community pressure by appointing the Ad Hoc Fair Labor Practices Committee composed of faculty, staff, and students. The committee was charged with articulating principles to guide the college’s treatment of campus workers.
During the final month of the 2001–02 academic year, my sociology class on inequality expanded the campus discussion beyond the Sodexho workers to the college’s support staff by conducting a survey we called the “Support Staff Wage and Life Conditions Study.” Our response rate was 66 percent. We found that almost 80 percent of support staff members felt they were not compensated fairly for their work; that almost 25 percent lived in households with total incomes that fell below the “basic family budget” recommended by the Economic Policy Institute, a provider of research aimed at encouraging a prosperous and fair economy; and that the Colorado College wages of 85 percent of the college’s support staff would have left their households below this alternative poverty line if the staff members were the only wage earners in their families. Moreover, during the previous year, almost 50 percent of the respondents had worried about their families’ food running out before they earned money to buy more, could not pay their rent or utilities, or could not afford needed medical care.
In 2002–03, the political terrain at the college changed dramatically with the arrival of new president Dick Celeste, who launched his presidency with a yearlong community “mapping” process in which representatives of all the college’s constituencies contributed to a discussion about the college’s mission and goals. One of the mapping groups issued a report supporting the effort to reform the college’s labor practices. This report echoed the recommendation of the Fair Labor Practices Committee, which had earlier released a report of its own. The committee called for the college to establish a pay structure based on a “self-sufficiency wage” of $13.05 for employees who had worked at the college for at least four years, to institute automatic cost-of-living wage increases for all workers, and to create a system of representation for all who work at the college, including Sodexho workers.
In response, the college and Sodexho raised the minimum hourly wage for all workers from $7.48 (the college) and $7.80 (Sodexho) to $9.64 beginning in the 2003–04 academic year. The college simply eliminated the two lowest grades of the staff salary structure (occupied by only a handful of people) to accomplish this goal. At the same time, the salary pool of non-faculty employees increased an unprecedented 7.35 percent; about a third of this increase was dedicated to overcoming the gap between the college’s wages and the predominant wages for similar occupations in the local labor market.
With support from increased tuition and fees at the college, Sodexho not only raised its workers’ minimum wage, but also combated the problem of wage compression by increasing the wage pool of all its custodial workers by 19 percent. On its part, the college sought to amplify the voice of its support staff by combining two separate committees—the Support Staff Advisory Committee and the Committee on Administrative Issues—into one, called the Staff Council.
A sense emerged on campus that important changes were occurring as a result of pressure from the student activists and the arrival of a new set of leaders: President Celeste; Barbara Wilson, the college’s human resources director; and, more recently, political science professor Bob Lee, who assumed the position of chair of the college’s Committee on Compensation. Campus decision-making processes now seem more transparent, and administrators and faculty seem more willing to take seriously the concerns of the support staff.
We still, however, face significant challenges. All the CCFL activists have graduated, and no current students have organized to maintain the political pressure on the administration. The sizes of the wage increases for both support staff and Sodexho workers have diminished dramatically recently. Gaps persist between the support staff’s wages and the predominant wages in the local market, and some people on campus contest the appropriateness of local market wages as the standard of comparison. In addition, despite the recommendation of the Fair Labor Practices Committee and the Committee on Compensation, the college has so far failed to implement automatic cost-of-living wage increases for its support staff, relying instead on the potentially capricious reward of merit increases.
Moreover, the college is using one-half of the “self-sufficiency standard” of the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute for a family of four (composed of two wage-earning adults, one preschool child, and one school-age child) to set its minimum wage, a practice that tacitly assumes the universality of the two-income household. (The Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute advocates adequate and fair fiscal policies to protect low- and moderate-income citizens of Colorado.) Although Sodexho workers have access to a grievance procedure within the corporation, they still have no institutionalized channel of representation at the college. And now there’s talk of a new and significant parking fee for all college employees to underwrite the construction of new parking lots. There’s more work to be done, but thanks to the cooperative efforts of many people, there’s a sense that progress can now come more easily than it has in the past.
Jeff Livesay is professor and chair of sociology at Colorado College.
|