Living Wage Fervor Spreading Across U.S. Campuses

by James Parks, Jul 3, 2006

College students across the nation have put the heat to university administrators and shown the power of students and workers united in more than 250 actions and events. Today, with the support of AFL-CIO union movement, students at more than 50 colleges and universities are running living wage campaigns in support of campus workers.

Living wage campaigns, which seek to ensure campus workers are paid a sufficient wage to support themselves and their families, took off a few years ago, mostly at at Ivy League and private colleges, says Jack Mahoney, a staff member of the national Living Wage Action Coalition (LWAC). Since a national student week of actions around the living wage issue last summer, the movement has broadened to include public universities and schools in the South, he says. The growth has come through a combination of grassroots organizing by campus chapters of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) and training provided by LWAC.

Says Carl Lipscombe, national coordinator for SLAP:

Students are drawn to living wage campaigns because they live their lives among the workers. They come into contact with them daily and they see how poorly they are treated. And, they realize they themselves will be workers soon as well.

When classes resume this fall, many campus living wage campaigns will seek commitments from universities to remain neutral when workers seek a voice at work through a union, according to Max Toth, lead campus organizer for USAS. Under a neutrality agreement, an employer agrees not to interfere in any way with workers’ desire to form a union. Such agreements usually include a pledge to recognize the union once a majority of workers sign cards authorizing union representation.

Says Toth:

The best enforcer of a living wage agreement is the workers. If the workers can get organized, they are empowered. This is especially important in the right-to-work states and in the South [where there are fewer unionized workers]. These living wage campaigns are strengthening workers’ rights in placed where workers’ rights are not usually recognized.

Over the past year, student living wage activists have won key victories:

• In May, nearly 500 janitors at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., won a promise from their employer, P&R Enterprises, the company with whom Georgetown contracts to clean campus buildings, to accept the results of a majority sign-up process, the most democratic process for winning union representation. In March 2005, Georgetown students, members of Georgetown Solidarity Committee, staged an eight-day hunger strike in support of the workers’ effort to win a living wage. In the wake of the hunger strike, the university promised to pay the janitors $13 per hour, a promise that it so far has reneged on.
• The same week, 450 poverty-wage janitors at the University of Miami also won an agreement that gives them the right to form a union through majority sign-up and raise living standards for their families. The agreement came after a two-month strike by hundreds of university service workers and a  a 17-day hunger strike by janitors and students. Nearly 1,000 professors from 200 colleges and universities across the country signed a petition to Miami’s President Donna Shalala, former Clinton administration secretary of Health and Human Services.
• University at Buffalo (N.Y.) students have been working to support campus workers for almost two years and this spring won a major victory in their campaign when school administrators announced they would no longer contracting out custodial work at the university. Over the next three years, the janitors who now work for a contractor will be put on the school payroll at a higher pay and will be represented by the existing union on campus, an AFSCME affiliate.
• Several campaigns that began this year will continue at full throttle when colleges reopen in the Fall, Mahoney says, including efforts at the University of Vermont, Western Michigan University, Arizona State University, Notre Dame University and many more.

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