Below is a message from the University of Virginia Living Wage Campaign, a movement of students, workers, faculty, and community members committed to the fair pay of UVA’s campus employees. UVA is one of three campuses engaged in Living Wage fights in the state of Virginia, showing the growth of the Southern labor movement despite the harsh realities of organizing in a “right to work” state. UVA is our newest USAS chapter, allying themselves with over 200 universities nationwide. If UVA President Teresa Sullivan chooses to do the right thing, UVA would make history as one of the 1st campuses in the South to pay its workers a living wage.
On Wednesday, February 8th the Living Wage Campaign at the University of Virginia sent a formal list of demands to President Teresa Sullivan and to the Board of Visitors. The Faculty Support Committee also delivered more than 325 petitions to the administration urging for a living wage. These demands call on the university administration to commit to paying wages that give its lowest-paid workers the ability to live with dignity in our community. The faculty petition highlighted the very real racial implications in not paying a living wage. Moreover, we set a deadline of February 17th for the administration to make a response to these demands at which point the campaign will make the decision whether to take significant action to publicize unjust wages and employment practices currently in place at the University of Virginia. President Sullivan publicized a response to both the petitions and demands somewhat recognizing the issue but made no tangible commitment to the lives of the University’s lowest paid employees.
These demands are the latest stage of a struggle that has stretched out over fifteen years. On April 15th, 1998, a public press conference was held to officially demand that the University pay a living wage and to begin the campaign. It was the first formal Living Wage Campaign to start on a college campus and target a university administration. For the majority of its history the Living Wage Campaign has pursued a strategy of respectful and supportive engagement with the administration. The end result has been that the Campaign has developed its arguments, has built a broad base of support, has shown itself open to reasonable dialogue, and it has proved that such dialogue does not work.
During its lifetime the campaign’s actions have been instrumental in passing a living wage ordinance for the City of Charlottesville and a resolution from City Council calling for U.Va to institute a living wage. In just the last three years the Living Wage Campaign has met with members of the university administration countless times and has had numerous teach-ins, marches, rallies, and protests. However the university continues to both pay its direct employees insufficient wages and ignore exploitative labor practices by the private companies it contracts with. All of this contributes to suffering in a city where nearly a fourth of the population lives below the federal poverty line.
The campaign has been a focal point for attracting those who seek to reform an institutional culture that has been painfully slow to recognize its relationship with privilege. The campaign is a consensus-based, non-hierarchical organization. We seek to recognize in our political struggle the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality with the economic issues that we are confronting. We have explicitly allied ourselves with those student and community organizations that are focused on parallel injustices.
Without a stronger demonstration of our just conviction, the same forces of administrative complacency that passively denied admission to black students until 1950 and women until 1970 will quietly suffocate our cause. However the campaign is confident that it has laid the groundwork for an action that rises to this challenge. In addition to being amazed by the support of the local community the campaign is also excited to be part of a national struggle for dignity and fair treatment both by and for working people—a struggle that is now playing out in a very visible way in the Occupy Movement. The campaign hopes for the support of similarly aligned organizations across the country in the next coming weeks.
For more information, please see Living Wage Campaign at UVA History 1995-2012!
