Your Turn: Letters to the Editor

Thanks

Dear CT editor,

I wish to express my belated thanks to you for acknowledging the anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s passing by running the AP wire story of the events commemorating his life and death in your April 3 issue. On behalf of the Catholic Campus Ministry at VCU, thanks for honoring this great figure of our times and a faithful servant of God.

Sincerely,

Peter J. McCourt, M.T.S.
Catholic Campus Minister

U. Va. lovers

The opinion brief in Monday’s CT about the recent U.Va. living wage campaign sit-in was completely uninformed, uneducated and misguided. The students engaging in the sit-in were not simply taking “cell phone pictures of our buddies being politely escorted away by university police.” In fact, the U.Va. police were extremely overzealous in their use of excessive force with the protestors. This included bending one student’s wrists back to nearly the breaking point and calling another one of the protestors a faggot as he was being removed from the building.

It should also be noted that these students were using a time-honored American tradition of civil disobedience to call attention to a very real social justice issue. These are students who are standing up for grossly underpaid workers at U.Va. These are workers employed by the same companies that contract with VCU to staff dining halls and clean campus buildings. These are workers who are supportive of the U.Va. students’ efforts. If the workers themselves were to take such action, they would be fired. It is an admirable act on the students’ part to take a stand for them.

The author of the opinion suggested, “These school employees should be able to negotiate their own contract.” It’s true. They should be able to. However, in Virginia that would be deemed “collective bargaining,” an illegal practice in Virginia. Virginia workers have no say in the terms of their employment and no ability to form a strong labor union. The students on this campaign at U.Va. have worked for years to foster substantive negotiations with U.Va. administration and have been shut down in every attempt. This sit-in was a much-need escalation to draw more attention to the issue of full-time workers receiving poverty wages. Direct actions such as this have been used in movements from the civil right struggle to the anti-Vietnam War protests to force dialogue when those in power refuse it.

I would like to voice my support for the U.Va. students who staged a sit-in to demand a living wage for their university’s employees. I have many friends who are U.Va. students and my boyfriend was among those participating in the sit-in. These are amazingly dedicated students who are willing to risk their personal safety and give up days or possibly weeks of their lives to further an extremely worthy cause to establish social justice for people who are often so neglected in our society.

Universities should be in the business of promoting social justice, and now is the time for U.Va. to accept the moral obligation of paying university workers a living wage. Workers should be able to afford to live in the city in which they work. They should not have to work two and three full-time jobs in order to make ends meet. No one should be forced to choose between paying rent and being able to obtain health care or buy food to feed a family. Lastly, it is my hope that VCU President Eugene Trani will also consider this moral impetus as his university employees are paid much less than a living wage and receive poverty wages as a reward for their dedicated service to VCU.

– Jeremy Kidd

Dear Editor,

I feel compelled to point out a number of factual inaccuracies published in the April 24 opinion brief, which discussed the U.Va. living wage campaign. I’m from Charlottesville and although I’m not personally involved in this campaign, I am sufficiently aware of both the current and past campaigns to recognize that your editorial was more or less factually empty. The overriding point of the piece is the fruitlessness of this cause and the fact that these methods can never possibly work. In response to that, I think it’s worth pointing out that that it is entirely incorrect because these methods were inspired by effective protests at Georgetown last year that successfully compelled the administration to raise their base wage. In that case, the living wage coalition of that university launched protests and 25 students took part in a nine-day hunger strike. The result was an increase of the minimum wage to $13 an hour with plans to raise it to $14 an hour in 2007.

Additionally, I should note that past efforts at U.Va. to raise the minimum wage were also successful. In 1998, an organization called the Labor Action Group launched a similar effort known as the “$8 Campaign,” which sought to raise the minimum hourly pay for U.Va. workers to that level. The result was a substantial amount of bad publicity for the university that ultimately led to them raising their base pay to $8.19 an hour. Both protests lacked the Molotov cocktails and effigies you suggest there should be, but they were both successful.

In the future, I’d advise you to do a little bit more research on your topic before you publish an obviously uniformed editorial about it. If you had even typed in “U.Va. living wage campaign” on the Internet you probably could’ve found this information in five minutes.

Sincerely,
John Cannon

Editor’s reply: I’m sorry you missed the “overriding point of the piece.” The point of the brief was not to talk about the fruitlessness of the campaign but rather to question the reason why U.Va. students protested this cause.

Who’s calling whom ‘uninformed’?

I am sick and tired of hearing from the liberal, socialist, well-meaning but ill-informed students who think they know what is best for our American industry regarding the minimum wage.

A wage is the value of services provided and has nothing to do with what it costs to rent an apartment, purchase groceries or support a family. Any additional expense added to the value of services provided becomes a social expense and does not reflect the value of services provided. When I was young (many years ago), if we could not afford an apartment or related expenses we had two choices: get a second job or find a person to share our costs related to maintaining our living standards.

The responsibility of a businessman is to provide a service at the lowest possible cost to maintain a competitive service to our consumers. To add the additional cost of a “living wage” is to increase the cost to the consumer and results in a socialist agenda, which attempts to reallocate resources according to needs, not a value-based decision.

If you are not on board with me at this point, please face reality and accept the fact that money is not printed on demand. If we are to allocate additional funds to any so-called worthwhile project, the money must come from somewhere. If we are not willing to increase tuition, or if the taxpayers are not willing (God forbid) to pay ever-increasing taxes to support these narrow-minded, so-called “free thinkers” of academic logic, then the only solution for those advocates of a “living wage” is for them to personally sign a legally binding obligation to dedicate a portion of their wages for the duration of their working career to make up the deficit in the reality of a “working wage” and the foolish perception of a “living wage.”

All comments or arguments are welcome on this issue.

– Ernest A. Mooney, Jr.
President,
Virginia Book Company