Charlottesville
Driving here the weekend after 17 students were arrested for occupying an administration building for four days, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The University of Virginia, my alma mater, has rarely been a hotbed of political activism, yet reports in the press had suggested that tensions were high. As I wound my way through the University’s grounds, things looked normal; students were enjoying a break in the morning rain to play a round of frisbee-golf, prospective students were touring the campus with their parents, and a couple dozen hardy souls were lined up outside the local record store, Plan 9, trying to score Dave Matthews Band tickets. This wasn’t exactly Kent State, circa 1970.
Instead, it was one more campus with a “living wage” campaign, a small student movement calling on the university to raise the pay of its janitors, cafeteria staff, and other unskilled workers. Present at various colleges for about a dozen years, the movement claims several successes around the country, including at Georgetown, Washington University, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard.
At UVA, the demonstrations that began on April 12 and led to the arrests at Madison Hall on April 15 attracted up to 200 students, according to the organizers–this at a university with 20,400 students. The “living wage” they sought was $10.72 an hour (up from the university’s base rate of $9.37), a figure recommended by the union-funded Economic Policy Institute. (The Center for Union Facts reports that the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the National Education Association, and the American Federation of Teachers together have donated more than $1.1 million to the group.) The organizers and some media reports have left the impression that campus sentiment is running strongly in favor of the “living wage,” but the truth is more complicated.
It fell to UVA’s student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, to take the Washington Post to task for an account of the arrests that virtually ignored the views of students opposed to the sit-in and gave short shrift to the position of the university. Said the Cavalier‘s April 20 editorial, “The slant of the article was most evident in its closing paragraph, which read, ‘The sentiment appears to be spreading. A jogger running past Madison Hall yesterday morning shouted out, “What do we want?” A man sitting on a bench shouted back, “A living wage.”‘”
To make the case for widespread sympathy on campus, UVA’s Living Wage Campaign touts a student referendum this spring that gleaned 77.5 percent support for the cause. But it ignores the fact that only a quarter of students bothered to vote.
One alumnus and longtime professor of politics, Larry Sabato, offers some perspective on the scale of the protests. At the height of the Vietnam-era demonstrations at UVA, when he was president of the student council, Sabato recalled, “the antiwar fervor was intense, and also the civil rights movement was very much a part of campus life. . . . In the ’70s, protests were very widespread. Everyone was interested in something. This is a tiny group. A tiny group.”
Yet it has numerous supporters on the faculty. A group of faculty members recently composed a letter backing the student-led campaign, which can be found via the University of Virginia website. The 223 signatories include noted leftists–like anthropology professor Wende Marshall, who once denounced UVA as a “bastion of white supremacy,” and history professor Julian Bond, the former NAACP chairman who has proclaimed the Republican party “the Taliban wing of American politics”–but not a single member of the economics department.
One UVA economist, meanwhile, spoke up on the other side. In a Cavalier Daily op-ed, economics professor Edwin T. Burton laid out the case against the “living wage.”
“The argument that a minimum of $10.72 an hour would have no impact upon the pool of workers that the University draws from is one made only by those whose future prospects are far beyond these minimums,” Burton wrote. “If $10.72 has no effect on employment, then why stop there? Why not settle on a minimum of $25 per hour or even $100 per hour? . . . Raising the minimum will inevitably exclude more and more potential employees the higher you raise the minimum.”
While no one is talking about $25 an hour, it is true that the Living Wage Campaign has proven its unwillingness to take yes for an answer.
When I was a first-year student at Mr. Jefferson’s university, the Labor Action Group (the forefathers of the Living Wage Campaign) sported bright orange buttons emblazoned with “$8,” signaling their desire for all employees to be paid a minimum of $8. The Board of Visitors approved a minimum wage of $8.19 in late 2000, and over the ensuing five years the school’s president, John Casteen, proceeded to raise wages to $8.88, then, this year, to the present $9.37. According to a letter sent by Casteen to university employees, employee benefits including health care are worth an additional $3.29, for hourly compensation valued at $12.66.
Those involved with the Living Wage Campaign counter that health insurance does not put food on the table, though they continue to include health insurance when calculating their wage. As Casteen wrote in his letter, “One can understand wanting to have it both ways, but the immediate problem here is that one does not get it both ways when dealing with public employment in this state.”
Weak in the area of economics, “living wage” proponents couch their arguments in moral terms. At UVA, students claim that the school’s practice of paying janitors almost twice the federal minimum wage “compromises the values of the university.”
As Living Wage Campaign activist Victoria Young told me in an email, “This University uses the rhetoric of ‘Jeffersonian tradition’ and ‘Jeffersonian ideals.’ . . . In a recent meeting, a top administrator told students that ‘social justice has nothing to do with the mission of the university.’ . . . If UVA is so proud of being a leader in so many fields, it should step up and be a leader in paying its workers a wage which is adequate to support a family in Charlottesville.”
(Needless to say, not all “living wage” crusaders are admirers of Jefferson; in a recent issue of Critical Mass, UVA’s most radical magazine, student commentator Nathaniel Whelden called Jefferson “a slave owner and rapist who got rich off slavery and thus established this university.”)
Opponents of the “living wage” in turn use moral reasoning of their own. Josh Hess is one of the student founders of the opposition Market Wage Campaign.
“The primary risk is that any time you impose an artificial wage floor, you diminish the ability to employ labor,” Hess explained. “You place stress on retaining the current labor pool and make it hard to hire people in the future. An artificial wage floor plus benefits makes it vastly more difficult for people to have a chance at getting hired.”
It’s hard to know exactly how a wage increase would play out in Charlottesville, but even if there were no immediate layoffs, it’s likely that fewer people would be hired in the future by the university, the largest employer in the area. Either way, the good news for anyone interested in the economic facts on the ground is that local unemployment currently sits at an impressively low 2.5percent. Why mess with a good thing?
Sonny Bunch is an assistant editor at The Weekly Standard.
