A Fight for $15, Complete

COVID-19 ushered in an era of painful cuts for most colleges and universities. Layoffs, furloughs and lost raises have become common for staff and faculty members at many institutions.

But last month, the University of Memphis announced that it would be raising its staff wage floor in June, bringing the university’s lowest earners up to $15 per hour.

“We are very excited. It’s not something we expected to happen in the current climate, especially because of COVID,” said Meghan Cullen, an administrative coordinator at Memphis and vice president of the university’s United Campus Workers chapter, a union for faculty, staff and graduate students. “It is definitely way past due for the working poor to receive a living wage.”

The move from the administration follows a years-long campaign for $15 per hour from the UCW chapter. M. David Rudd, president of the university, said the administration had been working on raising the wage floor since he arrived and just recently felt things were finally in a place where the change could be made.

“It’s not only the right thing to do for the right reasons but also it’s about our ability to be competitive in employing people,” he said. “The real challenge for us was sustainability and not having to do it by increasing tuition costs to students. We’ve had no tuition increases here for four out of the last seven years. We simply didn’t want to cost-shift on the backs of students.”

Memphis has been able to maintain enrollment through the pandemic, Rudd said, and managed to make cuts through natural attrition and consolidation, without any furloughs or layoffs outside the athletics department.

Despite Tennessee’s minimum wage remaining flat for the past 12 years at $7.25 per hour, the university increased the wage floor four times since 2014, not counting this most recent increase. The university minimum is currently $12 per hour.

For the union, the university minimum wage was not just an economic issue, Cullen said, but a racial justice and gender equity one. The chapter’s most recent salary study, from 2019, estimated that about 335 people at the university were making below $15 per hour. Of those, 63 percent were women and 78 percent were Black. In contrast, the top earners at the university were majority white and male. (Rudd said that currently, because of recent salary increases, only about 100 people are now making less than $15 per hour.)

Such a situation -- people of color at the bottom and white people at the top -- isn’t uncommon at public universities. In the South, that low-wage workforce is especially likely to be majority Black.

“We’re paying certain people at the top 10 times the amount that we’re paying folks at the bottom,” said Cullen. “That income inequality is just not something that is sustainable.”

Memphis, Tenn., is among the poorest metropolitan areas in America. Margaret Cook, former vice president of the UCW chapter and current vice president for public, health care and education workers with the Communication Workers of America (UCW’s parent union), said the university, a major employer in the city, can have a hand in fixing that.

“No one should have to work for the state and get food stamps. That just doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “We had a lot of women who were working two jobs to make ends meet.”

Those women, she said, would sometimes see their children struggle in school.

Thelma Jean Rimmer, a former custodian at the university who helped found and organize the UCW chapter, said she too hopes that staff will get to spend more time with their families because of the increase. She retired after 14 years with the university making $12 an hour, the minimum. There were some things she and her family just couldn’t afford to do, she said.

“I didn’t want other people to have to say that to their children,” she said. “I always told them I would fight for everyone, even the people that come behind.”

United Campus Workers chapters are unions that cover all employees at their public universities, typically in right-to-work states. Because the institution has no legal mandate to bargain with a UCW chapter (and employees are under no obligation to join), they typically face uphill battles in changing conditions at the institution, relying on public pressure campaigns, protests and community support to try to force decisions.

The chapter won significant support for the $15 floor both inside and outside campus. Both the Faculty Senate and the Staff Senate at Memphis passed resolutions supporting the measure in 2018. The next year, the mayor of Shelby County vetoed a $1 million grant to the university, saying the administration needed to pay its workers a living wage. Other entities in Memphis, such as St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, raised their wage floors to $15 as well.

Workers also turned up pressure with protests and symbolic events. Rimmer said she and others would drive the three hours to Nashville to lobby state legislators about the wage floor. In 2018, campus custodians signed and delivered a card to Rudd that read, “All we want for Christmas is a living wage.” Cook said the union succeeded in attracting members with events like a Juneteenth celebration that made the union not only about work. The “wall-to-wall” model of United Campus Workers, encompassing all employees at an institution regardless of department, she said, builds solidarity between different campus constituencies.

In 2019, Rudd committed to lifting the floor to $15 in the next two years, although because there was not a publicized plan or hard deadline, some union members were wary. The university committed to a $13 per hour floor by July 2020 but then reneged on the plan after the pandemic hit.

“It’s hard to believe somebody at their word when you’re not given the details,” Cullen said. “The administration did keep their word and they are going to be pushing forward to $15, and we’re incredibly thankful that Dr. Rudd is taking this step to do it.” In the future, she said, UCW would like to be brought further into the process.

Next steps for the union will focus on limiting the effects of wage compression from the raise, Cullen said, expanding the minimum to university contractors and asking for health insurance for graduate students.

Cook said the University of Memphis administration could serve as a model and example for other universities across the South.

“I think the South is changing. UCW now has such a large voice in Tennessee that people are listening,” she said. “To see it happening in Memphis, I don’t think they will have any other choice but to do it in Knoxville, to do it in Chattanooga, to do it in Nashville.”