By G. (Pseudonym)
The Wooster Living Wage Campaign (LWC) was formed in 2016 to fight against the poverty-level wages of hourly workers at the college, which were $7.50/hr at the time. (This was poverty-level even for full-time workers, necessitating many of them to take on multiple jobs.) LWC’s first big protest came the same year, and, armed with data from a recent staff job satisfaction survey conducted by a staff liaison committee, they created a presentation about why the minimum wage at the college should be raised. The Board of Trustees was impressed by their research (according to one of LWC’s early faculty supporters, Religious Studies professor Dr. Charles Kammer), and it may have partially helped motivate them to raise the wage later. It certainly helped serve as a catalyst for LWC.. According to an interview by Ajay Bedesha ‘18 with Dr. Charles Kammer, a former religious studies professor at the college, the seeds for the movement had been laid in 2011, when, feeling that they were not being properly compensated, faculty had supported a resolution to cut the wages of the lower-paid hourly staff in order to raise their own. This showed either a startling lack of awareness of hourly workers’ wages, or an extreme degree of selfishness. By 2018, however, in part because of the efforts of LWC, faculty were interacting somewhat more with staff (particularly at staff appreciation events), and the minimum wage at the college had been raised to $11. A second notable protest occurred on October 26th, 2018,when LWC gathered approximately 200 students at a board of trustees meeting to show that students supported living wages for hourly staff. They were met with the response that students should try to convince former president of the college Sarah Bolton to throw her support behind living wages. While of course college presidents are themselves complicit in many injustices, this feels like another instance of the evident scapegoating they are subject to as a conveniently visible figure. In addition to correspondence with the president, the LWC concurrently started a change.org petition demanding the minimum hourly wage be raised to $14.08 (the living wage at the time in Wooster: it is now approximately $15). While this petition did not meet its goal of 1500, it racked up 1313 signatures. LWC’s most recent large action took place in April of 2019 when they held a panel with Sarah Bolton, other admin, and faculty, where Bolton gave many predictably deflective and bureaucratic answers. Then, COVID befell the world, and the strong team that LWC had built for themselves graduated with few to replace them, plans for the future sitting stagnant in their archives. Today the Living Wage Campaign is small, though it is still going, and it can certainly be said it has a strong and proud history.