For an opposing point of view, see “Collective bargaining will only further divide Virginia’s universities,” by Derrick Max.
The president of Virginia Tech makes over $700,000 a year. George Mason pays its president $823,000. In December, a month before Gov. Spanberger asked five of its members to resign, UVa’s board appointed a new president at a salary of $1.3 million. The head of UVa’s health system makes hundreds of thousands of dollars more than that.
The salaries of these and other lavishly compensated public university executives — paid by Virginia taxpayers and voters — are hard to swallow. This is especially so in recent weeks. On Feb. 13, a Virginia House Appropriations subcommittee voted to strip collective bargaining rights from higher education workers, changing the earlier collective bargaining bill that passed the House Labor and Commerce Committee. If this change stands, it would devastate the employees of the 15 four-year institutions and 23 community colleges in the state of Virginia. Just as gravely, it will attack the towns that host these institutions and the low-wage workers who make our colleges and universities run every day.
Take, for instance, the University of Virginia, where one of us works. It is the largest employer in all of central Virginia. The university says it employs almost 31,000 people, but this number is likely an undercount. The official tally doesn’t include contracted employees — such as groundskeepers who maintain the picturesque grounds, the food service workers who keep students fed, and the janitors who ensure that the hospital is safe for patients, nurses and doctors. It’s important to remember that when you hear “higher education employee,” you shouldn’t imagine a professor: less than 10% of UVa’s employees are faculty.
Consider also that, given its size, UVa sets and controls wages — and not just in Charlottesville but the entire region. In fact, in 2012, when the UVa administration quietly raised wages for its lowest-paid employees in response to pressure from the Living Wage Campaign, the city of Charlottesville followed suit, raising its own minimum wage to match what UVa offered.
Virginia Tech, where the other one of us works, is the largest employer in Blacksburg and the surrounding metropolitan area; George Mason University is an employment anchor in Fairfax and Northern Virginia; and Virginia Commonwealth University and VCU Health dominate the Richmond employment landscape. From north to south, from the coast to the mountains, higher education anchors Virginia’s economy and has the capacity to reshape worker power.
That is why any exception carved out in a public sector collective bargaining bill will hurt all workers. Even if low-wage workers employed by contractors — those working for the dining services company Aramark, for instance — can still collectively bargain under the amended bill, they will face an uphill battle. Higher education’s lobbyists know that their effectiveness will be greatly reduced if they cannot organize alongside direct UVa employees. UVa and other higher education institutions can easily, and swiftly, limit collective bargaining’s power by hiring a new contractor if one company’s workers unionize.
These facts show us the price we will all pay if higher education workers continued to be deprived of our collective bargaining rights. It is already too expensive for many higher-ed employees to live where they work, to find affordable healthcare and housing, to set down roots. Without the ability to collectively negotiate wages, higher education workers cannot agitate to lift the wage floor for themselves and for all workers in the vicinity.
Faculty and staff are hearing that university presidents have lobbied to remove higher education workers from the bill, pressuring lawmakers behind closed doors rather than out in the open where the public can judge and respond to the harm they seek to do. If this is true, these administrators are undermining their own institutions, especially their lowest-paid employees. People deserve jobs where they are treated with dignity and with pay that allows for decent living. When the delegates in Richmond make a final determination about whom to include in the collective bargaining bill, they must prioritize the needs of their constituents and what is best for the communities they represent, not the whims of out-of-touch university presidents who are paid 200-300 times more than the average worker.
We call on elected representatives and university leaders to join us in supporting collective bargaining for all public sector employees. No exception.
Laura Goldblatt is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, and a member of United Campus Workers-UVA. Nick Ruktanonchai is an assistant professor at Virginia Tech, and the chair of the United Campus Workers chapter at VT.