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Monday, June 30, 2008
Poverty in Higher Ed
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Use this living wage calculator to find out who’s eligible for food stamps at your school.
Before I get to the proper business of this post, here’s something that really deserves a post of its own, but I know I’ll neglect if I don’t just link to it now.
Must-read bloggery over at Historiann on workplace bullying in higher ed. If you want to learn more on this topic, check out the thoughtful, gentle, amazing David Yamada and his New Workplace Institute.
Now to the advertised matter.
This just in from Jon Curtiss of the essential CGEU (Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions) discussion list, which I think all graduate students should join.
Jon urges all graduate employee organizers and associations to make use of the living wage calculator produced by Penn State’s Amy K. Glasmeier, as part of the Poverty in America project.
The calculator is organized by state, county, and municipality across the United States, with typical wages for many occupations listed.
Use it to find out who’s eligible for food stamps on your campus--graduate employees, contingent faculty, gardeners, undergraduate carpenters, outsourced restaurant and cleaning staff are a good place to start.
Then, just for kicks, compare their sub-poverty wages against the salaries of the deans, president, and provost--plus the associate deans, associate provosts, financial staff, and business/law/medical school faculty.
When you’ve tabulated the results for your campus, go ahead and tell me education is rendering class struggle obsolete in the United States.
As a preview of the postponed entry on the University of South Carolina, check the data for Richland County, where that campus is based. Not too many of the grads are making anywhere near a living wage. Many don’t earn half the living wage (and it’s pretty freaking low.)
Oh, and I learned today that South Carolina grad students don’t like to be described as attending the “other USC," and that some of them think I’m sometimes not very nice to administrators.
Yes, doubtless the kind, gentle administration will have a nice conversation with you and say, “Gosh, fellas, we didn’t notice how little we were paying you. Here, let’s rectify that promptly. We’ll double what you’re making. Would you like us to backdate that to the date of your matriculation?”
Here’s an alternate title. Join us at the University of South Carolina--Where You Have the Right to Work, But Not the Right to Eat.
A point of information: the most pompous of the faculty I used to work with, and that’s saying quite a bit, in a right-to-work state, used to wander around ignorantly harumphing to any grad student that would listen that “unions were illegal” in the state. Not true. Certain rights associated with strong unionism might be curtailed in those states, but unions aren’t “illegal.”
In fact, in nearly all right to work states, many groups--police officers, municipal workers, community college teachers, schoolteachers--form associations that may not have collective bargaining rights, but which still have a powerful influence on wages and working conditions.
Historically, the most unionized group of U.S. employees today--public employees--had to act in organized fashion to change laws that made their self-organization illegal or ineffective. Martin Luther King was shot while supporting an “illegal” strike for recognition of their union by municipal sanitation workers in Memphis.
Of course, I’m sure we’re all ever so much smarter than sanitation workers.
Oh. Wait. They get paid more. And have better retirement plans.
Oops, so do police officers. And firefighters. And municipal employees.
Huh. What do they know that we eggheads don’t know?
Comments
At least when and where I was in grad school, you didn’t qualify for food stamps if you were a single person involved in fulltime pursuit of a graduaet degree.
As someone who has worked in the grad union movement for the last nine years, I can tell you that things are pretty much the same all over. At the University of Oregon, a living wage is pretty much beyond our goals as we fight to bring the average wage up to the poverty line.
The arguments you face from your colleagues and professors are the same arguments everyone faces. I’m sure you’ve heard the one about how your primary mission as a grad employee is serving the undergrads and anything that takes away from that—union organizing, agitation, higher pay—is a bad thing.
Keep fighting!