By the Numbers: Compass Group contracts in context

Daily file illustration by Carly Schulman

Last month, Northwestern dining hall workers signed a new five-year contract with Compass Group.

Brian Han, Assistant Data Visualizations Editor

June 2, 2025

Last month, Compass Group and the union UNITE HERE Local 1 reached an agreement for a new four-year contract for roughly 500 contracted workers across dining, retail and hospitality on Northwestern’s Evanston campus.

The Daily took a closer look at the salary trends for NU dining workers contracted through Compass Group and how they compare to overall trends.

Compared to the minimum starting salary for dining hall workers in 2024, the new 2025 contract supports the annual living wage for families in Cook County that have two working adults and one child. This salary is based on 2,080 hours worked per year — 40 hours of work a week for all 52 weeks in a year. Previously, the starting salary for workers failed to cover the same living wage in 2024. Annual living wages are calculated from MIT’s living wage calculator, which estimates the employment earnings a worker needs to make in order to cover their family’s cost of living. This includes geography-specific costs for child care, food, housing, transportation, taxes and other basic needs.

Notably, the wages in 2021, which was also a contract year, share a similar trend of being high enough to cover Cook County’s annual living wage for the same family structure. Despite this, the annual starting salaries are far lower than the annual living wage for families with one working parent and one child.

In years with new contracts such as 2021 and 2025, NU dining hall workers receive much higher minimum wage increases compared to wage increases in other years. These minimum wages have also remained around the median individual income for Cook County.

The data underscores a clear pattern: Meaningful wage increases tend to coincide with contract negotiations rather than accumulate steadily over time. While recent gains bring starting salaries closer to meeting living wage benchmarks for some families, gaps remain, particularly for single-parent households.

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