“President Zimmer, rich and rude, we don’t like your attitude!” protesters chanted outside the Administration Building, as week-long demonstrations against a plan that might jeopardize the jobs of University housekeepers continued Thursday.
The protesters were responding to a recent announcement that the University will merge its housekeeping staff into the facilities department, which outsources its employees to subcontractors. The protesters demanded the University’s assurance that the new subcontractor will maintain the same quality of work and compensation for the housekeepers.
“We’re demanding that the University contractually stipulate with its subcontractors that they keep the same employees’ [current] wages, benefits, and union representation,” third-year Larissa Pittenger said. Pittenger, a member of the RSO Students Organizing United with Labor (SOUL), was one of the rally’s organizers.
The administration met with Union Local 743 on April 19 and is anticipating future meetings, though no specific date has been set, according to University spokesperson Steve Kloehn.
“It is our intention to work with union leadership, through a respectful process, to protect the jobs and salaries of our staff members,” director of Undergraduate Student Housing Katie Callow-Wright wrote in an email to students in housing yesterday.
“University officials have worked diligently over the last three weeks to be clear about the goals for this transition, and the process for getting to implementation,” Kloehn wrote in an email.
However, School of Social Service Administration graduate student and protester Maria Martinez said that the University has not been forthcoming with the process.
“I found it amazing that the University has been able to hire them for that long for over 30 years. Now there have been secret meetings where they’ve decided to give the workers to one of these subcontractors,” she said.
Tarescha Cox, who has been a housekeeper at South Campus for the past nine months, also said that the process has been highly uncertain.
“July 1 is the beginning of the end to our jobs,” she said. “We won’t be guaranteed our jobs anymore.”
On the current plan, housekeepers earn hourly wages of $15 to $16, plus health and dental insurance. The protesters fear that the new subcontractors will lay off housekeepers or lower their pay close to the minimum wage of $8.25 an hour without benefits.
“We believe that this change will allow the University to provide the highest level of service and best use its resources,” a statement on the University News Office’s website read.
Second-year and SOUL member Lexie Grove believes that the change “is likely a maneuver to cut labor costs and bust unions.” She said that the current employees are ideal because they have experience in the residence halls and have strong connections with students and coworkers.
“We went back to BJ to talk to some housekeepers. I was able to talk to some people who I knew,” she said. “They gave me a hug. I really believe and feel that there are personal connections.”
The number of protesters was far lower than the 142 who replied to the rally’s Facebook page. However, as of Thursday night, 622 people have signed a petition, which the group will drop off at President Zimmer’s office at 3 p.m. today, according to second-year and SOUL member Patrick Donnelly.
Students protest to (i) maintain the privilege of paying above-market wages for housekeeping services to the privileged few who happen to have the jobs right now (and ignoring all the many others who would be willing to do the jobs at lower pay), (ii) block efficiency-enhancing and cost-reducing innovations that are ultimately responsible for improving people’s standards of living.
Destroying jobs = reducing the amount of labor needed to get work done.
Moving jobs from people who demand higher wages to people who demand lower wages = increasing labor market efficiencies.
This is not a textbook. This is not a lecture hall. This is not the 19th century. We are talking about actual people here. Real people who live lives, have children and other loved ones, who make plans, who make mistakes, who get hurt (physically and emotionally), who want to provide for others, who want to live long and fulfilling lives. For some of these people, loosing these jobs might be it. No apartment, no heat, no medicine, no insurance, no college for their kids.
I know that you know that, and I know that there are other actual people who would take these housekeeping positions if they were offered with lower wages or no benefits. But reducing the amount of compensation people receive from housekeeping work (which is notoriously strenuous and physically harmful) just doesn’t seem to me like the best way to improve people’s lives.
And with a 5.5 billion dollar endowment it is simply not true to say that the University can’t or shouldn’t afford its housekeeping staff. As one of the biggest employers on the south side, and after the incredible strain and destruction it has leveled on the surrounding communities, seems to me the University can endure the burden of paying a living wage.
Craig —
(ii) I’m sure there are plenty of other things the University might cut to save money, including highly over-inflated salaries for graduate students such as me (and many other things that I won’t mention here, for fear of offending other recipients of University welfare). I don’t see how that is relevant to the point I was making.
In my view, the University has no moral obligations to people who work for it beyond the time period of their contract, just as those workers have no moral obligation to serve the University in perpetuity. It is hiring workers for the services those workers provide it, not primarily in order to improve those workers’ lives. Symmetrically, the workers choose to work for the university primarily to meet their financial (and spiritual?) needs, not out of altruism for the University.
I think this comes down to moral priors, but I see no moral imperative for the University as an entity to be more concerned about the welfare of people who work for it than for all the unemployed people who could be working for it instead, or for the students, alumni, and taxpayers who provide it money, or, for that matter, for starving children at the other end of the world.
Whether the university can “afford” a housekeeping staff therefore is not (to me) the right question — the question I’d ask is whether it “needs” (or “benefits” from) a housekeeping staff. If all the housekeeping tasks could be done by a robot that costs only $20,000 a year, then I would consider that progress.
Destroying jobs is (in my view) a _good_ thing — it frees up people’s most valuable resource — time — for other purposes. If mechanization and technological progress hadn’t destroyed jobs in agriculture, more than 30% of the current US population would still be doing back-breaking labor on the farms. But even moving jobs from people who are less desperate for them to people who are more desperate for them without changing the net number of jobs is (to me) progress, both from an egalitarian and an efficiency perspective.
You’re the same person who claimed in another maroon article that the lack of female math professors at the u of c is a non-issue. I see a pattern here.
An excellent example of the problems that arise from teaching theory removed from practice…this type of thinking nauseates me.
Craig, while we may have a multibillion dollar endowment, that doesn’t entitle us to spending unnecessary labor costs, pressured by unions. And Julia, just take a look at what happened to GM- the allowance of labor costs as demanded by the union forced the company to go bankrupt. So while the older members greatly benefitted, the newer members lost their jobs due to the overly high wages the union demanded over decades. It’s essentially a pyramid scheme that the union creates itself.
Julia: The contradiction between theory and practice puzzles me.
The sentiments expressed in the news article and some of the comments seem vaguely reminiscent of “make work bias” discussed here:
reason.com/archives/2007/09/26/the-4-boneheaded-biases-of-stu/singlepage
(i) The only real distinction between the current housekeepers and the new ones that will be hired is that the current ones have union benefits, higher wages, and more experience with the position. Allowing the university to hand the affair over to the subcontractors would simply reverse the situation, leaving potentially the same amount of people with jobs with less benefits, lower wages, and less experience. So if you’re talking about overall welfare here, your argument just doesn’t make sense.
(ii) Making the argument that unregulated labor markets generate more efficiency and welfare here is just stupid. Even if that hypothesis were true, it only makes sense on a large institutional scale whereby all companies were actually operating as efficiently as possible AND using the profits generated from that to hire more people who need jobs into the workforce. The university is probably not going to hire any additional people and is simply potentially ruining the lives of a lot of families. It’s not even like you’re going to save a couple dollars off your tuition bill next year, since the university’s budget is primarily dictated by returns from its 5.5 billion dollar endowment.
Kevin, you write: “(i) The only real distinction between the current housekeepers and the new ones that will be hired is that the current ones have union benefits, higher wages, and more experience with the position.”
It seems that you are supporting the currently “privileged” workers and lamenting the possibility that less privileged workers (perhaps unemployed people for whom a job at even 80% of the pay would be a major improvement to their life conditions) may take their place.
You also write “(ii) Making the argument that unregulated labor markets generate more efficiency and welfare here is just stupid. Even if that hypothesis were true, it only makes sense on a large institutional scale whereby all companies were actually operating as efficiently as possible AND using the profits generated from that to hire more people who need jobs into the workforce.”
I didn’t talk about labor market regulation at all in the comment, my point was simply that if two people are seeking a job, and one of them is willing to work at a lower wage, then hiring the person at the lower wage is more efficient. The person who demands the higher wage likely does so because he/she has a higher opportunity cost for seeking that job.
Second, you’re mistaken when you say that unless profits are used to hire people, they don’t enhance efficiency. The fewer people you need to hire, generally, the better, since it means that more resources are freed for other purposes. The main value Facebook creates value for the world is not measured by the number of people that it hires (a measly 2000 when I last checked) but by the large number of users it has (600 million) who benefit, often greatly, from the services and offerings. The unusually high user:employee ratio of 300,000 is a _good_ thing. It’s called leverage.
The efficiency enhancements from Facebook arise through the low-cost services (free in money, fast in time) it makes available to users, and the satisfaction that it provides them. If Facebook could do all of this using just 1 employee instead of 2000, that would leave 1999 talented people free to improve the human condition in their own way.
What an ironic sense of entitlement, to have someone who can afford to teach/study at this university (however much one works to pay for that service) call university workers who earn $15-$16/hour “privileged”.
Yes, we are against the possibility of replacing the presently employed, “less desperate” workers with the unemployed, “more desperate” people you invoke:
(1) There’s no guarantee that we can hold down wage demands as the only factor separating two people eager for the same job. (i) Wage difference may result in a qualitative difference in the labor a worker provides in return. (ii) The number of years that a worker has spent in that job offers a further qualitative difference.
(2) You fail to account for the psychological and emotional distress that arises from job instability. The formula you suggest, in which lower-wage workers constantly replaces higher-wage workers for the same job, would only work if knowledge/channels for seeking of alternative jobs are much smoother than they are in reality.
Colin,
To the extent that existing workers have more capability/experience than possible new hires, that greater capability would in principle translate to negotiating power for higher wages.
If a more experienced worker can get twice the amount of work done per hour, then any hourly wage less than twice that of the prospective new hire is good enough reason to keep the existing worker.
It may be a valid argument to say that the university or its subcontractors are solely focused on cutting costs without accounting for quality deterioration. That, however, was not the original argument made, and I see no justification offered for it.
The argument is about treating the job as an entitlement, or about the university having a moral obligation to existing workers, at the expense of possible new workers and the students, trustees etc. I dispute that the university has such a moral obligation.
That said, if you feel personally moved by the plight of these people who might lose their jobs or accept a pay cut, you can offer your help to them, financial or otherwise.
When jobs get destroyed, people are obviously hurt. But job destruction is a critical part of the continuous restructuring of the economy that improves everybody’s living standards. Even low skilled workers in the US today can save money during their periods of employment to weather them through a few months of unemployment, without forsaking food and shelter. Compared to historical and international living standards, they are extremely well off. Let them count their blessings. If you want to feel empathy, feel for those who make less in a day than you can make on minimum wage in fifteen minutes. And speak against the bad 3rd world policies and 1st world immigration restrictions that prevent them from improving their condition.
(Note: please hit “REPLY” directly under my comment if you wish to respond to it; that way, I can get an email notification so that I may answer more promptly. I only just found out that you replied to my earlier comment, for example.)
“But job destruction is a critical part of the continuous restructuring of the economy that improves everybody’s living standards.”
Sorry, but your use of “everybody” in “everybody’s living standards” is misleading. Laissez-faire economics, as you’re advocating here, does not assure equitable wealth distribution in any way. It only assures an increase in the economy’s total wealth, most of which is distributed to those who already own much of the wealth. The downsizing of costs in the name of “restructuring/increased efficiency” does not necessarily translate into better living conditions for those who need it; increased profits do not necessarily translate into further, wiser investments.
“If you want to feel empathy, feel for those who make less in a day than you can make on minimum wage in fifteen minutes. And speak against the bad 3rd world policies and 1st world immigration restrictions that prevent them from improving their condition.”
Sorry, I don’t see why I should accept your false dichotomy for which oppressed economic groups deserve empathy over others.
While I am on Vipul Naik’s side, I think you do bring up a good point.
“Laissez-faire economics, as you’re advocating here, does not assure equitable wealth distribution in any way. It only assures an increase in the economy’s total wealth, most of which is distributed to those who already own much of the wealth.”
Basically, the analogy is that the pie grows bigger, but the slices are getting more and more unequal.
There’s really nothing I could say to this, I guess it just depends on your philosophical perspective on what is best for a society (efficiency vs. equity).
So far, I must agree with Vipul Naik.
We can all empathize with displaced workers, but life just isn’t fair sometimes.
If we keep current workers, we’ll make them happy and all that jazz about not ruining their lives. But for each person that we keep, we have to NOT hire at least one other person. What about those other 1+ people whose lives are ruined because they cannot get a job? Especially if those other people have the same ability as current housekeepers and are willing to work for less.