Lowest paid staff members need raise
COMMENTARY
Brandon Ortiz

If the university were to increase staff wages by a dollar an hour, it would only cost students $13 a month in increased tuition. At that cost, we have no reason not to lift low-paid staff members out of poverty.

For Susan, a housekeeper here, the ultimate Christmas present would be financial aid to beauty school.

That way she could afford to take care of herself when her three adult children move out of her home.

“I have a feeling that TCU is not going to help me,” said Susan, who asked that her real name be withheld because she fears retaliation from supervisors. “I am getting older, so I have to look for my future. I have realized that when my children decide they want to leave the house, I can’t afford it for myself.”

Susan has worked here for nine years and makes $8.22 an hour. Someone walking off the street would start off at $8 an hour — meaning that, apparently, TCU thinks Susan’s experience is worth less than a quarter an hour. To supplement her income, she sells cosmetics on the side.

In all, she works 60 hours a week.

Susan’s plight is like many low wage staff members who have to work second jobs and live paycheck to paycheck. Susan’s oldest and youngest children both work full time to help make ends meet. Her middle child hopes to help the family escape poverty by attending the university — but on his dime. He is 26, too old for the tuition benefit the university offers employees.

Many children of low wage staff members, he says, don’t take advantage of tuition remission because families need the extra income.

The family of four — Susan is single — rarely see each other except here and there on the weekend. They don’t talk to each other over warm meals at the family dinner table. They don’t have time.

“The way we communicate with each other is through a message on the board,” Susan’s middle son explains. “Or we leave a message on the breakfast table in the morning or say hello Mom when we see her. Even at night when she is resting for the morning, I am up studying.”

At least things are somewhat better.

Before Susan’s children could work, she said, life was difficult. Scraping up the money for food and school supplies required big sacrifices. But the biggest sacrifice of all was not a financial one.

“Time with my kids. The most important thing,” Susan said with tears in her eyes. “They are never going to be back at the same age, and you never get that time back.”

We can help people like Susan, but for some reason or other, we choose not to. TCU has more than enough resources to ensure every one of its employees a living wage.

It would cost about $1.3 million to give every hourly-paid staff member a $1 wage increase, according to research by groundskeeper and TCU alumna Tara Pope, a Staff Assembly member who is campaigning for such an increase.

That may seem like a lot of money, but it is less than 1 percent of TCU’s total operating budget.

Many on this campus, for either ideological or purely selfish reasons, oppose giving staff members a pay increase. They say TCU does not owe anybody a living, and we, the students, shouldn’t have to pay for it. Or they say staff members should blame themselves for their low pay. After all, if they only worked harder, the reasoning goes, they could better themselves.

Most of that smacks of ignorance or hypocrisy.

Most housekeepers, groundskeepers and Physical Plant employees work far more physically demanding jobs than students will ever work. Most of us will get white collar jobs from the degrees we will earn here.

It’s not as if they are welfare queens. These people work, but some are barely making it. It is a fairly American concept that people who work ought not live in poverty.

It won’t cost us much to give these people the meager dollar raise they are asking for. About 8,200 graduate and undergraduate students go here. If you were to divide Pope’s estimated cost by student, it would only cost each of us a little more than $13 a month to pay for this. (Pope, by the way, says she hopes the university can increase staff pay without additional tuition increases.)

I think we can spare the beer money for this one.

Having the ability to improve the lives of the university’s lowest paid employees but choosing not to do so directly contradicts TCU’s mission statement: To educate individuals to think and act as ethical leaders in the global community.

Unless TCU is telling students “to do what I say, not what I do,” I don’t see how the mission statement will be accomplished.

Please explain to me how paying so many staff members poverty wages is ethical leadership.

So what if other jobs pay less than those at TCU? If TCU wants to be an ethical leader, it doesn’t really matter what other institutions pay, does it?

Leadership, by its definition, is being ahead of the pack.

Under Chancellor Michael Ferrari, the entering wage for nonexempt staff has risen from $5.73 to $8 an hour in five years. Ferrari deserves genuine praise, no doubt. Unfortunately, he was only counteracting years of neglect from his predecessors.

We still have a ways to go.

In the meantime, let’s hope Susan gets into beauty school. Apparently it’s her only chance.

Editor in Chief Brandon Ortiz is a junior news-editorial journalism major from Fort Worth.