Rain poured around a 20-by-20-foot white tent on Rand Terrace, one of campus’s most highly trafficked spots. Unfazed by the weather, the uniformed workers and students huddled under the tent on Oct. 27 and pleaded for a living wage at Vanderbilt.
“This is a question about justice, dignity and fairness,” Divinity School professor Melissa Snarr shouted above the crowd’s “amens” and “mmhms.”
“Morality demands a living wage,” Snarr said.
Grounded in the idea that someone who works full time should not have to live in poverty or rely on public assistance, the living wage is calculated differently by supporters for every city. The living wage in Nashville calculated in 2005 by the student-led Living Income for Vanderbilt Employees organization is $10.18 an hour or $42,336 a year for a dual-income family of four.
University officials do not acknowledge the term “living wage,” but they agree that the lowest-paid workers should receive a pay increase. They said that LIVE’s calculations are arbitrary and that the market determines pay for employees. In addition, officials said organizations like LIVE do not take into account other advantages of working at Vanderbilt, such as the environment and health benefits.
About half of the 603 Vanderbilt employees represented by Laborer’s International Union of North America (LIUNA) are paid less than $10 an hour, according to the union.
The living wage sit-in, organized by LIVE, took place just weeks before the employee contract is set to expire Nov. 15. Among other terms of employment, the contract determines rate of pay for Vanderbilt’s workers. It is negotiated every five years between LIUNA and the administration.
Beau Worsham, the union representative in Vanderbilt’s negotiations, said he expects to make big changes in the employee contract this year because of a recent spike in union membership. The new members are mostly those who earn the lowest wages at Vanderbilt.
The union, which is primarily composed of blue-collar workers, has almost doubled in size, increasing its dues-paying members to 400 within the last two years, Worsham said.
The union’s proposed pay plan would increase employees’ base pay and give them a pay increase each year on the job, regardless of performance.
“We are asking for some pretty cutting-edge, out-of-the-box sort of language that will completely change the pay plan system here at the university,” he said.
While university officials said they support an increase in wages for those at the bottom of the pay scale, they also want to keep pay in line with the market and what other Nashville employers pay their workers.
“We share in the desire to modify the rates of the lowest paid,” said Kevin Myatt, Vanderbilt’s chief human resources officer. “We may differ on how to get there, but we agree on the need to do it.”
Myatt said that the union is “trying to take the negotiations to the public.”
“Know that our interest is to have as much equality in the system as we can,” Myatt said. “We are supportive of an evaluation process, but we have a difference of an opinion with the union of what pay for employment is. Beau is asking that we reward employees for every year in the job. That is not how we structure our compensation policies.”
Part of a larger movement
The voices of living wage supporters at Vanderbilt echo those of other colleges and organizations across the country.
The first living wage ordinance was passed in 1994, after workers in some of Baltimore’s homeless shelters and soup kitchens noticed that many of their visitors coming for food and shelter held full-time jobs. They noticed that the working poor were often turning to food stamps, publicly financed health care and private assistance from churches to make up the difference from their low-wage work.
In response, a coalition of churches and labor organizations persuaded the City Council to raise the minimum wage to about $2 more than the federal minimum wage.
Now, more than a decade after the first living wage ordinance was passed, 140 municipalities across the country and universities such as Georgetown, Harvard and Belmont have adopted a living wage for employees.
However, according to Vanderbilt political science professor John Geer, the issue still receives little coverage in mainstream media, leading to a sluggish rate of improvement in workers’ pay.
“It is not a part of what most voters cite as an important issue,” Geer said. “There are, unfortunately, many pressing concerns that never get a lot of attention. This is such an example.”
History of living wage at Vanderbilt
At Vanderbilt, the living wage debate involves a disagreement between those who say Vanderbilt faces a moral imperative to adopt a living wage and those who view living wage as an intellectual argument that should be explored through theoretical discussion while the market continues to set the base pay.
As far as Vanderbilt’s role in the national issue, Kevin Myatt, Vanderbilt’s chief human resources officer, said he is “not in position to determine what our role is on the national front.”
“Living wage is a complex issue that has many moving parts and is not solely about base pay compensation,” Myatt said.
Currently, the base pay for workers at Vanderbilt is $7.55 an hour. In 2004, the union and the administration increased wages to this amount from $6.50 an hour. The change was made in a wage re-opener, which allows the union and administration to discuss pay increases between contract negotiations, as provided for in the employee contract negotiated five years ago.
The employment contract in negotiation right now “may very well be their only opportunity within the next five years to address the issue of a living wage. The university is pushing for a five-year agreement with no re-openers,” said Beau Worsham, the union representative in Vanderbilt’s negotiations.
Economics and emotions
Kevin Myatt, Vanderbilt’s chief human resources officer, said that the human resources department thinks about what Vanderbilt can do to develop the abilities of each employee it hires.
“I would much rather spend time and energy to put a program in place to provide people the opportunity to gain new skills,” Myatt said. “That skill will allow them to provide the best for their families regardless of where they work.”
Administrators also said that the numbers behind living wage are difficult to calculate, and, according to Myatt, “folks don’t really understand what is behind the numbers.”
Nim Chinniah, deputy vice chancellor for administration and academic affairs, said he thinks that living wage started as an economic argument but has become too emotional to be discussed rationally.
“I think what organizations like LIVE do is they take an economic argument—this is what a person needs to be paid to survive, so to speak,” he said. “Now let’s move from an economic argument to a purely emotional argument. You find some human being. You put them on the front page and write it is despicable that this person is paid $7 an hour to work anywhere.”
Chinniah said this emotional argument is flawed because it does not account for the employees’ surroundings.
“I think it’s an irresponsible argument to just arbitrarily pick a dollar number because, you know, just getting people to that number does not say anything about the environment that they live and work in,” he said.
Chinniah said the argument ignores the longevity of Vanderbilt employees, which he says surpasses that of most other companies.
“When people say if you don’t pay your employees a living wage, you don’t care about your employees, I think that’s almost as silly as me saying anybody that is for a living wage is trying to disrupt American civilization,” he said.
Supporters disagree with administration
LIVE, a student-run organization, started in May of 2002, when a custodial worker approached a few students at Blair with a clipping about the Harvard Living Wage campaign.
According to Ellen McSweeney, an active member of LIVE, he asked them, "Why not here?" and they got to work on starting a student group dedicated to worker concerns.
“I think the university is being run more like a corporation than an ideal place for higher education,” McSweeney said. “You would be surprised with the small pay raises that the university will fight against.”
McSweeney said that the incremental pay raises the union is planning over the next several years are a positive step towards a living wage.
“The union must be practical and present contract chances which are within the scope of what the university will eventually do, but our group holds up the living wage as an ideal that both the university and the union should be aspiring to,” she said.
Beau Worsham, the union representative in Vanderbilt’s negotiations, cites some 300 employees who make less than $10 an hour as a “problem.”
But Worsham said that the negotiations are about more than a salary increase. In his view, they are meant to address “a long-standing problem at Vanderbilt in that you have the haves and the have-nots.”
“All I want is some distribution of the wealth,” he said. “I want the employees that go about their jobs quietly, unnoticed, and make things work at this university for the students and for the faculty to be recognized.”
What’s at stake
While Kevin Myatt, Vanderbilt’s chief human resources officer, said it isn’t likely that Vanderbilt will acknowledge the term “living wage,” he said the university will continue to evaluate and assess what it pays its employees, which it thinks is an “ appropriate market value.”
Union contracts expire Nov. 15. However, union officials say that they do not expect an agreement will be reached by that time. University officials, however, say they see no reason why a contract cannot be negotiated by the deadline.
In any case, the outcome of the negotiations will be anticipated by many, as this contract will likely set Vanderbilt’s pay rates for the next fiveyears.
