The Fight for a Living Wage

Across the country today, workers are joining the struggle for a living wage.

Why we seem so thoroughly convinced that universities shouldn’t get money from the state and yet seem perfectly content to let those same dollars subsidize the externalized costs of big companies is something tragic.

In any case, the reason I bring this up is because UNCG participates in this shameful low wage cabal. What I mean is that we aren’t all poor struggling to get by, UNCG just has some employees that it pays a pittance to and some who get fat raises at the same time.

For example, Tim Crews who has worked for UNCG for 19 years is employed full time for $10 an hour. If minimum wage had kept up with cost of living increases it would now be $18 an hour. So, we pay him only slightly more than half of what the absolute bare minimum pay should be.

After 25 years of loyal performance, Alice Courts only makes $23,762 a year. And she’s on the list of essential employees who must come to work at UNCG even when hazardous weather causes others to stay at home and the university to close.

Imogene Cathey, however, pulls in a handsome $85 an hour.

Jan Zink rakes in $137 per hour.

And they get to stay home.

UNCG has more than 200 full time employees earning less than $15/hour. Adjunct pay is shameful too.

Nancy Maree has been willingly teaching our students in the nursing program for 12 years and in return? She get $1,000. That’s all a class is worth? That’s all her expertise and insight are worth?

And, of course, the enormous raises given to those who already make more than they deserve continue to roll in. The execs get bigger salaries while the rest of us have to deal with nothing or fight among ourselves for scraps.

We are the workers.

We are the people.

We can do better.

How Much is Too Much? A Quick Note About Raises at UNCG

I have been going back through UNCG salary data since 2008/2009 and looking at the raises that each individual has received who is still employed by UNCG.

Wait, let me correct that. Generally speaking, I have been looking at the raise (singular) that most people have received during that time. Rhetoric of financial crisis aside, I have already found something disturbing…and I’ve only made it from Z – R.

James Ryan received a $4,000 raise.

Okay, I know that’s not terribly shocking on the face of it. I mean, it’s certainly not the largest raise (I could refer to Mike Tarrant’s $25,000 but why bother since he is leaving - I'll certainly refer to Kim Record's raises, but that's an article in and of itself to be address later).

What is shocking about it is that James Ryan was already being paid $350,000 per year. Yes, he makes more than the chancellor. He is, in fact, the highest paid employee at UNCG. Now, I will grant that he has done less damage to UNCG than the chancellor and for that he should be rewarded, but the question it raised in my mind is this:

We have folks who have been working with us for 10, 20, 30, 35 years who are making $20,000 a year. The raises the folks in that range have been given generally amount to no more than $300. Spread that over 12 months and you are saying, before taxes, here’s another $25 for your dedication, don't spend it all in one place!

Many who received these meager sums are the ‘essential employees’ who haveto come to work even when the university is closed. These raises certainly don’t keep up with the cost of living and we should be embarrassed as a university, as a government entity, and as human beings to hand another $4,000 to a man making $350k in the face of the poverty wages being paid to other members of our UNCG community.

I hope that should I ever be in the position to earn $350,000 a year and someone were to offer me a $4,000 increase, I would have the decency to not only decline their offer but to shame them for having made it in the first place.

Opportunistic Greensboro Gives Community Service Award to Brady

I had to reread this story several times before I was able to overcome my firm belief that I must be misunderstanding it. However, and hold on to your barf bags, here is what was released in the Campus Weekly this morning:

“Chancellor Linda P. Brady and NC A&T Chancellor Harold Martin received the Thomas Z. Osborne Distinguished Citizen Award from the Greensboro Partnership at their annual dinner. The award is presented to a citizen who has demonstrated extraordinary service and achievement within the community; it is the highest honor given by the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce and is presented jointly with Duke Energy. Brady and Martin were recognized for not only the significant work done at their respective universities, but also for the unprecedented level of teamwork and collaboration that they have exhibited in working to make projects such as the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering, Opportunity Greensboro, and the Union Square Campus a reality.”

Apparently, Opportunity Greensboro members hold the mistaken belief that Brady has “demonstrated extraordinary service and achievement within the community.”

I am having a very hard time imagining where that idea came from.

First though, let me clarify, while the award could be, in theory, given to any citizen, it just so happens that this time the citizens who ‘deserved’ it were both members of the Opportunity Greensboro cabal.

I have no beef with Harold Martin, I don't know him or his work, but the mere idea that the words community service and Linda Brady could be put together in a sentence without a negative separating them makes my skin crawl.

Apparently, you can severely damage several communities and yet still receive an award for outstanding work if, and here’s the catch, you benefit in some way the people who are giving out the award. So that raises the question: which benefits are being given to whom in such a way that Brady’s work would seem meritorious?

Let’s take a look at this “significant work done at their respective universities.” During Brady’s administration:

• The Glenwood fiasco
• The Wreck Center and its fee hike
• The UNCG3 / Paul Mason
• The unnecessary $12 million give back
• Raises for the highly paid
• Shrinking student numbers
• Academic Program Review Circus
• Alienation of HES donors and alumni
• Forced reorganization (twice!)
• Multiple new upper administration positions
• Massive loss of employment
• Underperforming nano program
• Ever shrinking Union Campus Initiative
• Demonstrated racism in UNCG police
• Wood frame housing subject to fire at Spartan Village
• 85% of faculty experience morale as a significant problem on campus
• Culture of bullying rampant in administration
• Rise & Fall of Learning Communities
• Faculty flight
• Staff disappearance
• Enormous increases in health care premiums & co-pays
• Increased teaching loads
• Lost course sections
• Wrestling program dissolved
• UNCG Magazine abandoned
• #36 on list of Fastest Growing Sugar Baby Schools
• Fallen off list of best places to work
• Jan Zink's fundraising impotence
• Tragic branding campaign #dsba
• Greatly increased police presence at BOT meetings

I could go on. And on. And on.

Now put that up against the benefits of the nano school and union square campus:

• Union square already twice reduced in size
• Currently at 85,000 square feet that will cost $90 million to build (a popular number as the rec center cost $91 million)
• Meanwhile, 500,000 square feet of unused space at Gateway East and Gateway North
• Nanoschool has currently produced four PhD graduates in 4.5 years at an outlay of $700,000
• Unfortunately, the outlay for those who dropped out was about $2 million
• In other words, this is a program that produced 4.5 students at $971,000 per degree)
• The nanoscience program was supposed to enroll 110 students (and the nanoengineering a further 110)…in nanoscience they seem approximately 100 short - makes you wonder about the University's prediction of 320 for the Dr. of Nursing to be offered at the Union Campus
• The JSSN cost $65 million to build and equip (odd that the rec center should be so much more expensive…)

I’m still waiting for the benefits from either of those projects to become clear to me.

What is clear to me is that Randall Kaplan, who is a member of Opportunity Greensboro is also part of the founding group for Capital Facilities Foundation, the group that purchased the rec center land in Glenwood and made it available to the university.

Here is what Brady has really done that has earned her this award:

Turned the university into a mechanism for real estate development.

It is clear that a lot of university money is being pumped into real estate in and around Greensboro and that some people benefit directly from the sale of that real estate, some benefit from the property value increases, some benefit by skimming, some benefit through kick backs for construction contracts…and some benefit from lying through their teeth while rubbing elbows with the Greensboro elite.

What are we positioning for here? Who is benefiting from all of these projects? I guess it could be a coincidence that despite the lived experience of thousands of people which indicate that Brady has been nothing short of an unmitigated disaster, when that is placed by the side of hundreds of millions of dollars of student and taxpayer money being funneled into private hands that Opportunity Greensboro sees Brady as a hero, but I think not.

The poor bastards writing for Campus Weekly should be given hazard pay for having been made to handle this toxic material.

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’?

You Already Knew This, But...

I hate to be the bearer of bad news so early in 2015, but really it’s not new. Do you remember all those times that you kept working at UNCG even though you were told there was no money to give you a raise because you valued the community you belonged to and you knew we were all having to ‘tighten our belts’ to get through these ‘tough financial times’?

Well…It turns out there was plenty of money. There were a fair number of raises too. Some of them were really small – hardly enough to compensate for increases in health care co-pays. Some of them were pretty significant. The big raises went to those who needed them the least while the rest of us were left making less than we had the year before.

Laura Young, Associate Vice Chancellor for Business Affairs got a measly $2,500 raise. Of course, when you realize she was making $125,580 and went to $128,092 some of your sympathy might evaporate. During the same period, Jill Yesko, a public communication specialist also got a raise from $41,923 to $42,231 – doesn’t it seem like the $2,500 that Young got would have made a much bigger difference to someone like Yesko? Especially given that Yesko started only one year later than Young. After all, if we were all tightening our belts, why doesn’t the top have to tighten as much as the bottom?

Alan Boyette has seen his salary rise from $208,438 in 2008 to $221,486 in 2014. In other words his raise has been from ½ to 1/3 of the salary of many of the employees at UNCG.

Michael T. Byers, for being such a good friend and lackey during the first phase of the take over of Glenwood has moved from a comfortable $103,910 to $127,285 from 2008 – 2014. This was before deciding to jump ship as he watched the waters rise. Apparently, the work of Willie Brown, dedicated UNCG employee since 1999 wasn’t worth rewarding with more than a pittance in 2008 (less than $700) and yet Byers received a raise the size of Brown’s entire yearly salary.

Who is still here and working hard for UNCG? Willie Brown, of course. Byers leapt at an opportunity to get away before trouble started to rain down on his head for all the sleazy dealings in Glenwood. As Byers once said, “No matter how many showers I take, I just can’t get clean.” And that’s where we invested the university’s money. Why? Because that’s where the administration wanted to spend it.

We’ve been tightening our belts not because there isn’t any money but because this administration has decided that the people who do the work of UNCG, the ‘little people’ don’t deserve it. Instead they reserve it for lackeys and friends and as a way of buying the loyalty of those who are willing to sell it. This doesn’t mean that everyone who has gotten a raise has sold themselves. What it means is that every raise given is an attempt to buy that person. Some of that, I’ll have to address in a separate post when we look at who was cleared out by new managerial appointments under Brady (in other words…stay tuned.)

Of course, we’ve already seen the meteoric rise of Cheryl Callahan from the near starvation level salary of $140,000 per year to her current $188,181. It should come as no surprise then that she seems to have no idea either that students often have to take out loans in order to go to school at UNCG or how those loans might be structured. This is especially unfortunate given her position as Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, but when asked at a meeting about student fees in regard to the new rec center, she was unable to offer even any embarrassment over her ignorance in that regard.

Now, the reason that I bring any of this up is because, as has been said by others before, education at UNCG is not under attack, it is up for sale. And if you are not willing or simply able to aide those who would sell it then you will not be treated kindly. The real ‘crime’ that the UNCG3, and the rest of those who suffered banishment from University Relations (as well as those cleared out of athletics and advancement), are being punished for is an inability to make villains appear to be heroes and an unwillingness to quietly submit to making a lie of all of the good that UNCG has been. Cheryl Callahan and Michael Byers had no such compunction.

The positions involuntarily vacated in University Relations are now being brought back into being, reclassified as EPA (Exempt from Personnel Act) which will make them that much easier to clear out should any new employees prove to have the same lack of moral flexibility that was demanded of those who previously held them.

Just as we are seeing struggles across the country by those working in minimum wage positions for reasonable pay and greater job security, those very basics are being cut out from under the feet of every employee at UNCG. And so, we lose those who are dedicated or we grind them into the dirt, while raising those who are willing to abandon their principles or unable to take the risk of refusing to participate.

This slide down must be addressed in order for it to be reversed. We can’t strike, but maybe we can slow down?

It’s just a thought.