Essential Employees at UNCG

The message sent out by the Chancellor’s office regarding winter weather was actually more interesting than I thought it would be. The reason for this is that it gives a list of ‘essential’ personnel. Those whose presence is absolutely required for the university’s live-in community to continue functioning. That got me thinking. If those people are essential, and I believe that they are, they should clearly be at the top of the pecking order on campus, right? They are singularly valuable and certainly we must be treating them as such, no?

If, for example, physical plant employees are considered essential, why is it that Margaret Coleman who has dedicated 12 years of her working life to that essential service making $23,837, Geraldine Coppedge after 14 years earns $24,049 and 17 years of hard work is only enough to earn Sarah Cottrell $25,718. This hardly seems the way to reward the people who are essential – the ones who are required to risk their safety even when conditions are considered too dangerous for the rest of the university employees to even attempt to come to work.

Who isn’t on the essential employee list?

The Chancellor’s Chief of Staff Bonita Brown, for example, is clearly not essential to the operation of the university. And yet, she earns $151,800 to stay at home if it gets icy outside.

I think we have seriously inverted the scale of worth here. Sure, it may be the trend across the country, but again, I’m not terribly interested in UNCG being a trend follower at a broken system when we could be a leader in something truly amazing. I also understand that not all value is reflected in money, however, in a place of employment there are two ways of conveying value: money and cultural capital (ie prestige) and we continue to assign these values incorrectly.

Assuming that the essential employees, those in physical plant, residence life, and safety are at the university closed or not, where else might we look for employees who are essential to the university when it is open?

It would clearly be incredibly difficult to run the university without any faculty. Although that would eliminate a troublesome sector for upper administration, they have not yet figured out how to get the money directly from the students without having to offer these ‘pesky’ classes.

In theory, students are here not only to learn but also here to earn their degrees, right? This would be impossible without the staff in the registrar’s office.

The gross inflation in the tuition caused by the Chancellor’s real estate development deals would be even more onerous (and in fact create an impossible burden) for a majority of our students if not for financial aid, making those workers essential to the functioning of the university when it is open.

Just as we have to maintain the upkeep of the physical plant at the university, the students’ human bodies require health services. It would be unacceptable to have 18,000 students enrolled and then leave them without access to health care – and this means both for their bodies and their minds (as the two cannot truly be separated in any case).

In other words, the circle of employees who are essential to the university continues to expand.

So, after we have students who can register, take classes, graduate, and be healthy through the experience, what else?

It would turn our university into a transparent joke if we were, for example, to eliminate the library. There isn’t even any need to waste my breath arguing for the value of the libraries, right? Surely, that’s a given. I mean, I would imagine the funding for the university libraries far exceeds that granted to something as extra-curricular as, let’s say, athletics, yes? I can only imagine a student who graduates going to a job interview and saying that they couldn’t access the latest research in their field but they sure could go the basketball games and not being laughed out of the job market.

We live in the 21^st century and while the role and applications of technology are continually changing and subject to philosophical debate, fluency in current technologies is a requirement for interacting with the world today. So my guess is we would be hard pressed to run a university without experts in information technologies.

So, the list gets longer and yet, it still doesn’t include anything indicating that it is essential to pay Kim Record $177,000 a year to direct intercollegiate athletics. In fact, quite the opposite.

We have made a fundamental error. It’s not the number on the salary so much as it is the message conveyed:

Is Kim Record worth 7.5 housekeeping employees? I sincerely doubt it. When it snows and the university closes, nobody in their right mind believes that without Record there will be a crisis. She is dispensable. She is what we pay for after we have paid for everything else and we have money to burn. Until every employee at this university makes a living wage and is rewarded for their dedicated service, the Chancellor should be ashamed of counting herself worthy of 15 employees who are required to drive over ice to make sure that our students survive even under adverse weather conditions.

And, of course, Paul Mason has proved himself to not only be not essential but actively dangerous and yet he remains, along with the burden of his salary.

Maybe those in upper administration should take a note from the president of Uruguay, José Mujica Cordano who donates approximately 90% of his monthly salary to charities and small entrepreneurs. Imagine if the Chancellor were to willingly accept a mere $112,000 (a 50% pay cut) and donate $10,000 to 11 members of the essential staff. That would increase their salary by a third and bring them above the poverty line for a family of four. 

Wouldn’t that truly be ‘doing something bigger all together’?