Say you have a friend who lives in the worst residence hall on campus. Her room is absurdly tiny and poorly lit. This friend is important to you and has stuck by you on some particularly rough nights. You want to help her. Would it make more sense to take some specific actions, like helping her install space-saving shelves and some extra lamps, or to lobby the University administration to set a higher minimum number of square feet per student residence?
The second option seems desirable, but it’s also unlikely to come to fruition. The University might have the funding to restructure its budget in favor of better on-campus housing, but convincing it to do so would waste time and resources you could be using to help your friend. Additionally, if Northwestern did eventually acquiesce to your demands, on-campus housing would look more appealing to seniors, who would rank highly enough in the housing lottery to snap up the spacious new rooms.
You might have guessed by now that what I’m really getting at is the Northwestern Living Wage Campaign. Its concerns are more serious than University housing, but its methodology is illogically roundabout. The LWC has mobilized an impressive number of students in an effort set a higher minimum wage for Northwestern workers, but has let the pursuit of one solution with considerable drawbacks get in the way of the ultimate objective.
At the Living Wage Conference keynote address on Thursday, LWC leaders said their goal is to foster an environment of solidarity between workers and the rest of University community in an effort to lessen the difficulties low-wage workers face. I’ve taken the liberty of coming up with five initiatives that would achieve this end based on the specific hardships “Nickel and Dimed” author Barbara Ehrenreich cited in her address. If the LWC focused its considerable energy on enacting any of them (or coming up with better ones), I would happily participate.
1. Create a task force of students and faculty to consult with unions in preparation for wage negotiations. This would get to the heart of the LWC’s concerns while providing students an educational opportunity.
2. Create an on-campus, student-run daycare facility. This could operate on a sliding fee and serve workers, students, faculty and Evanston community members and eventually generate its own funding.
3. Create a hand-me-down collection service. When students gain the freshman fifteen, they could give their perfectly wearable pants to someone’s kid.
4. Recruit student volunteers to tutor workers’ children. This could range from elementary homework help to SAT/ACT prep.
5. Create a student-run resource that helps workers make sure they are maximizing whatever federal aid they qualify for. It could also assist in finding affordable housing. This would be another opportunity to simultaneously help and learn in a real-world situation.
Rather than pursue other solutions, the LWC has chosen to ignore the arguments against the solution it has chosen. In her speech, Ehrenreich cited some of the arguments she hears against the concept of the living wage. She said economists (uttering the word the way one might name a particularly vile insect) argue that adopting the living wage would be “bad for the economy.” I’m no economist, but I’m more inclined to believe they would argue that Northwestern’s implementing a higher minimum wage would eventually make jobs here harder to get. Just like making the dorms nicer would make sophomores with bad lottery numbers less likely to secure good on-campus housing, raising wages means increasing the number of people interested in the jobs in question. That means those jobs would become harder to get.
Ehrenreich and the LWC have most likely heard these and other arguments in the past, but the best counterpoint Ehrenreich could offer to her condensed version was, “Change the economy.” It’s kind of like lobbying for all overworked college students to be prescribed Adderall, then responding to doctors’ protests with, “Change brain chemistry.”
At the end of the keynote address, someone asked Ehrenreich what she thought it would take to change the situation at Northwestern. Her answer was something along the lines of protesting very loudly. Last year, I sat in an interview with President Morton Schapiro and listened to him answer the same question. His response: “Good arguments.” Pretending the economic drawbacks of prescriptive wage increases are irrelevant to the LWC’s cause will not create the changes we want to see. Coming up alternative ideas might.
The administration showed it was amenable to adopting these alternative ideas when it extended community benefits to subcontracted workers in 2010. If the LWC dedicated its laudable intentions and impressive resources to more victories like that one, I might have the opportunity to show my gratitude to the people who have kept me fed and my surroundings clean during my tenure at NU.
Ali Elkin is a Medill junior. She can be reached at [email protected].
