Some might say climbing the steps to the president’s office requires turning your back on the Living Wage Campaign, which starves and strikes on steps across the street at the Rotunda. But the campaign’s message was heard from Madison Hall, where we met with President Sullivan on President’s Day, reviewing the demands and responses shuttled to and fro, ourselves somewhere in the middle.
Wednesday, Feb. 8, the campaign issued a list of demands for the administration to address by Friday, Feb. 17. President Sullivan sent out a student-wide email on deadline. Calling her message “deceptive, evasive, and totally unsatisfactory,” protesters moved forward with their campaign’s next steps the following morning.
The campaign then revealed a hunger strike and a new website, along with a list of programs scheduled thrice daily in the upcoming weeks.
It seems like mighty fast logistical work for the campaign to have suddenly orchestrated such a scaling of its efforts. Thus, it can be deduced the campaign’s members were prepared to move forward with their actions ahead of time. Given this, the campaign might be charged with making demands in bad faith by planning to take action regardless of the administration’s response. More likely, however, the campaign felt it was improbable the administration would meet its demands in what was, it can be conceded, a rather small window of time.
And what is to say the University will suddenly do otherwise? Shouldn’t the same degree of skepticism — the campaign cites the administration’s decade-long negligence — still hold? And so, why move forward with a hunger strike knowing the University would nevertheless respond with only the same reluctance?
The campaign will say this is precisely why a hunger strike is necessary. Not eating is a “last resort,” according to campaign supporter Jason Hickel, intended to change things especially because satisfactory progress has not been achieved, and the uncertainty of success is inherent to the risk and promise of political fasting.
Yet it is still unclear what conditions will now satisfy the campaign’s demands. It is obvious the campaign’s members are not fasting until higher wages are actually implemented; the bureaucratic process alone would ensure that all meals and strikers will have gone cold.
According to their released demands, the protestors await a “guarantee.” As President Sullivan said, “The Living Wage people, I believe, and I might be putting words in their mouth, want me to sign a piece of paper.” She agrees with their aims of raising wages, in principle, but added, “I’m picking a way to do it in which the outcome I’m looking at is not a piece of paper I signed, it’s what we actually are able to accomplish with the budget.”
The campaign is not now seeking a change in remuneration or budgetary policy, but a promise Sullivan is philosophically against and which would carry little weight. Even if Sullivan capitulates, the fiscal ramifications of increasing wages — including hikes in tuition and cutbacks in other areas — will remain postponed until they can be examined by the Board of Visitors, who often look to state appropriations before deciding on changes.
The Living Wage Campaign has moved forward with its timetable without considering the consequences. It has triggered a nuclear device of activism, and we now have 14 human bodies whose biological clocks are ticking.
The whole hunger strike feels like an impulsive move by dramatic activists who got bored with the occupy movement. Didn’t they learn as two year olds that they can hold their breath until they turn blue but they can’t have the candy bar in the grocery store checkout line without momma saying she’ll pay for it. Come to the table protesters. Eat something and then negotiate like grownups.
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Hot debate. What do you think?
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The focus is no longer on the living wage but on the attention seeking protesters. The same people who watch car accidents will be watching to see how skinny and sick they get. Freak show.
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Give them their props.
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to call president sullivan’s message (and impliedly the president herself) deceptive is the typical horse manure hyperbole you get from illogical/irrational liberals like these kids. Sullivan like her predecessors clearly is working to better the situation of workers at UVA (and frankly not a terrible situation in comparison to being unemployed). This reincarnation of the Madison Hall occupation is even more foolish than the last group.
When will the CD publish a clear counter point to these loons? You can have your pick of the liberal one (we provide good wages and benefits and advance people up the ladder) or the conservative one (minimum wages overprice labor and thus decrease demand for it).
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Who is using their meal cards? The professional homeless under the bridge? The hippie drummer with the pit bulls? Why not a Living Wage hunger striker and a panhandler as a Love Connection article? He’ll provide all the drinks and smokes bought with his begging money, and she’ll provide all his grub for free!
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The “hunger strikers” need to go back to middle school and begin again with Economics 101. Especially when including benefits and health insurance, the so-called “low wage workers” at UVA are earning much more than market rates for comparable jobs when stacked up against non-UVA workers in Charlottesville and all similar workers in the mid-Atlantic states. If the self-righteous “hunger strikers” want the University to pay well above market wages for these workers, they need to be prepared for major hikes in tuition, but they shouldn’t start protesting and whining when the tuition rises. As Margaret Thatcher famously and correctly said, “the only thing wrong with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
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Lynnewood – perhaps you should bother to inform yourself about the movement prior to writing as though you already knew. They have been trying every other means at their disposal for the past 15 years or so, to no avail.
Ridiculous – apt name, at least; props for that! You need to educate yourself as well. Go to the UVA Living Wage website, and see what the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute calculated as the minimum living wage for Charlottesville, given its cost of living. And try telling a contract worker about “advancing up the ladder”. As for the conservative “argument” you mentioned, how well did that theory hold up during the Great Depression? Oh yeah, it died. Completely. It was entirely discredited, and the people who held on to it in the face of mountains of contrary evidence came to rightly be regarded as loons.
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“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong … somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. … I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. … And an enormous debt to boot.”
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morganthau, Jr. (1935-1946)
Sound familiar?
The only loons around here, Josephus, are the UVA faculty who has given you an un-education.
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If you want to learn about the living wage, go look up who the roughly 300 faculty supporters are. Count how many COMM and ECON professors there are. I don’t think any even signed up.
Make a wish, it’s 11:11
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Hmm, the site has a bad clock. Interesting…
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Sean, I never had a UVA un-education, and – with regard to the UVA economics department – I consider myself lucky. Joel, their absence in the list of faculty supporters of a living wage is a strong endorsement of its economic soundness. Assuming that you both had an education as opposed to an un-education, you no doubt have concluded that the economics department’s silence on the buildup to the financial crisis completely vitiates their claim to any relevance whatsoever. Their irrelevant-model-based methodology left them ignorant and unprepared to warn against the cancer-like growth in debt, derivatives, credit default swaps, and the unregulated shadow banking system as a whole that sent the entire global economy into a tailspin. Turning to them for economic wisdom would be like asking evangelical preachers for insight into the workings of evolutionary biology.
Speaking of people whose understanding of economics makes them irrelevant (or worse): Henry Morganthau. An orthodox economist of his day, a decade after he wrote the words you quoted the then-orthodoxy he espoused had been relegated to the fringe. Why? Because the record-breaking deficit spending entered into during the war had completely saved the economy, and had ushered in what is now known as the golden age of capitalism. Ironically, the poor results Morganthau decried in that quote were due to the recession of 1937-38, itself the result of the Morganthau-supported spending cuts to reduce the deficit.
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Oh, and Gershon: actually, the non-UVA employer known as the city of Charlottesville pays a living wage, and has for years. And “major hikes in tuition”? Really? Sounds like you need an education from Living Wage at UVA: “The marginal cost of implementing a living wage would be roughly one quarter of one percent (0.25%) of the annual [UVA] budget. It is less than the interest earned on the endowment in 7 days.” And: “In an extensive study of twenty cities, Andrew Elmore found that contract costs increased by less than 0.1% of the overall local budget in the years after a living wage law was adopted.” But hey, neoclassical economics students: these facts are based on studies of the real world, not a mathematical model of a fantasy realm. Please proceed to ignore those findings.
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Josephus: 1) The Economic Policy Institute is not a “non-partisan” think tank, but a bunch of far leftist economists and academics supported almost exclusively by labor unions like SEIU, so don’t cite them as an authoritative “non-partisan” source. 2) When I wrote in my prior post about “non-UVA employers” in Charlottesville, I was speaking of private sector employers, not the City of Charlottesville. It matters not one whit that the City pays what you call a “living wage.” The City of Charlottesville is a governmental entity that does not have to live in the real world of profit and losses, becase it can simply use its governmental power to seize (a.k.a. tax) as much money as it wants from the hapless taxpayers. Private entities do not have the power of force and seizure, and they must exist in the real world. So, when comparing wage scales at UVA, look at what the private sector in Charlottesville pays, not govermental entities with the power to tax/seize at whim. And while you are at it, read some Hayek and Milton Friedman. As noted yesterday, the only thing wrong with socialism is that eventually you (and the government) run out of other people’s money.
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Josephus, I agree with you about 49%. Yes, the UVa economics and business department/school missed the impending doom entirely while the UVA endowment itself invested heavily in derivatives. But the match that started the entire global inferno was the quaint notion back in 1989, thanks to Bill Clinton and Frank Raines, that Freddie, Fannie, and other mortgage lenders should be coerced by the government to give a mortgage to pretty much whoever wanted one. Anyone against that idea would be labelled a racist, and the NY Times and WashPo would help. That didn’t go too well.
As for Morganthau, I wasn’t presenting him as a genius. But his quote was correct. The depression was not ended by taxing the rich more or any such thing. That’s why they abandoned that idea in 1938. The war ended the depression, not any at home fiscal policy. It was deficit spending, yes, but that was easy to defend as the rest of the world’s industry was being bombed flat – ripe for huge growing markets with the smoke cleared.
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Gershon, last I checked, “non-partisan” meant “unaffiliated with a political party”. Oh wait, look at that; it still means the same. “Far leftist” economists supported “almost exclusively” by labor unions? Not that it matters, but a “far left” economist would be one who supports a communist or anarchist economic model, not economists who support a capitalist model along the lines of EU states. And the majority of the EPI’s funding comes from foundation grants, not unions. As regards your second point, I will repeat myself: “In an extensive study of twenty cities, Andrew Elmore found that contract costs increased by less than 0.1% of the overall local budget in the years after a living wage law was adopted.” Therefore, the coercive power of taxation is irrelevant here. Or, to be fair, it is only one one-thousandth relevant. As for private employers, in the absence of pressure from organized labor or scarcity of workers, wages will gravitate towards the cost of the most meager sustenance. Which is bad for workers, and for the overall economy which then suffers from a lack of effective demand. Which is why all civilized countries have minimum wage laws; unfortunately for this country, our minimum wage was never pegged to inflation, so it is now below the amount required to both provide for a decent living and sustain a healthy level of effective demand in the economy. As for Hayek and Friedman, I have read them, and even though they are rightwing economists (Friedman might even be considered a far rightwing economist for his support of the fascist Pinochet regime), they are not entirely bereft of good ideas; Hayek supported a guaranteed employment program operated by the government in The Road to Serfdom, and Friedman supported the nationalization of some monopolies provided competition not be made illegal.
Sean, I don’t know how to put this gently, but I’ll try. The meme you brought up has spread widely in conservative circles, since it provides a way to reduce the cognitive dissonance produced by the financial collapse among adherents of laissez faire ideology. However, here in New York among those who work in or are familiar with the operations of the financial services industry, this meme is viewed as a laughable red herring, suitable only for the kinds of dupes and marks who lost their savings while making financiers so wealthy. No serious observer of the financial system thinks that government efforts to undo redlining was a substantial component of the financial crisis. The demand for mortgages to package into CDOs, and then bet against in synthetic CDOs, was a force so powerful that it puts most other factors (other than the non-regulation of the derivatives market as a whole) not only in the back seat, but at the very back of the bus.
To more distant history, Morganthau was actually for taxing the rich much more than they were, but that was not done to his satisfaction. At any rate, spending cuts were initiated in ’37 to draw down the deficit, prematurely as it turned out, since the cuts in New Deal spending ushered in the 1937-38 recession. The war spending created lots of goods with absolutely no economic value except to blow things up and kill people. What it did do was radically reorganize the economy to take advantage of human and natural resources that had lain fallow due to the hold neoclassical orthodoxy still had over politicians and the wealthy. It was only after the war that foreign markets, some of which were suffering from the decimation of their own industry, became significant export destinations. Yet, importantly, even in the postwar period the vast majority of demand for U.S.-made products came from the domestic, not foreign markets. Weak foreign post-war competition did not save the economy; what saved the economy was its reorganization by a democratic government after private industry had failed on its own.
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http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/killer_stimulus_ScvgdRPBbq77Mr7Ej1p5qO
Here’s a good article on the job-killing effects of minimum wage laws, especially among teens and uneducated-unskilled workers. Yes, I know its the NY Post, but the author hits the nail on the head. The best way to decrease opportunities for teens and uneducated-unskilled workers is to mandate a minumum wage. Bye bye!
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Mmmm, yeah, an editorial in Rupert Murdoch’s Post ain’t gon’ cut it, particular when written by an employee of the Koch-funded Manhattan Institute. (Worst of all, my old Contracts professor Lester Brickman is affiliated with it – aaaaaaah!)
This sort of armchair theorizing is attractive because its reasoning is simple, and, like Ayn Rand novels, makes people feel good by providing a pseudo-intellectual rationalization for selfishness. But it doesn’t hold up to empirical examination. Google “The Wage and Employment Impact of Minimum‐Wage Laws in Three Cities” by Schmitt and Rosnick, and “Do Frictions Matter in the Labor Market? Accessions, Separations and Minimum Wage Effects” by Dube, Lester, and Reich.
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