Cal Student Workers Fight for Equal Pay
Submitted on Thu, 05/03/2007 - 3:02am
By Tristan Bunner, Bay Area IWW
(Tristan is an IWW member, a Cal student and a worker at Foothill Dining Commons. He is a founding member of Student Worker Action Group.)
At the University of California, Berkeley, student workers are fighting for equal pay. Cal students who work for the school's dining facilities, run by Cal Dining, get paid over $2/hr less than their coworkers who do the same work. The starting wage for Cal students under the classification "Student Food Service Worker" is $9.11/ hr, while the starting wage for "Food Service Workers", including high school and community college students working part time, is $11.25/hr, and another raise may be coming soon.
The difference began in August 2006, when a new union contract raised the wage of full time workers from $9.11/hr to the new rate. This raise was then applied to unrepresented part-time workers, but not to Cal students. When Cal student workers found out about the pay difference they got together and began to organize. In December 2006 they formed the Student Worker Action Group (SWAG), and began their fight for equal pay.
The University claims that the raise is not applicable to Cal students, because their main priority at the University is to learn, not to earn a living. The student workers point out that, generally, high school students' main priority is not to earn a living either, yet they still receive the higher wage. Other reasons that the University gives for the continued pay inequity is that students have less responsibilities than other workers and that they receive benefits that other workers do not in hiring priority and scheduling flexibility. SWAG disputes all of these points, saying that students have the same responsibilities as other workers, and sometimes hold supervisory positions. SWAG also claims that what the University calls benefits are not actually benefits at all: priority in hiring was originally meant to give Cal students a financial boost, but now it is in fact harmful because of the unequal pay. While there may be some flexibility to student workers' scheduling, SWAG says, they have to balance work with other important parts of their life, just like any other worker, and the needs of their workplace determines their work schedule in the end. Above all, SWAG questions how these excuses could be legitimate if less than a year ago all of the workers were paid the same rate. "We work just as hard as they do; we deserve the same wages," says SWAG member and worker at Foothill Dining Commons, Rachel Padnick.
Through March and April, students and supporters collected over 500+ comment cards of support during an event titled "Comment Card Flood" and gathered 97 signatures from non-student coworkers. After a fruitless meeting with University of California, Berkeley's Department of Labor Relations on April 17, 2007, SWAG decided that more needed to be done to win their demands.
All this week, they have been out on the University's campus, trying to spread the word of their struggle to their fellow students and community members. Actions have included informational pickets outside of Cal Dining facilities, a "20% strike" to make up for the 20% difference in pay, and a "sampling" of "UC Labor Relations' BS" (chocolate pudding standing in) on UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza. The week's events will culminate in a support rally this Friday at 2pm, also on Sproul Plaza.
The demands that SWAG makes and is fighting to win are:
Acknowledgement of student workers' equal responsibilities!! This includes:
- 1.Equal pay to Food Service Workers.
- 2.Retroactive from August 2006 (the time the wage difference began).
- 3.Bimonthly paychecks.
- 4.All of the above reflected by May 8th 2007.