In recent years, discussions surrounding wealth inequality in the United States have grown louder as working people cry out that, although they work full-time, they do not earn enough money to meet their basic needs. In their cries, they say that the minimum wage salary is not enough; they need a living wage. This term — “living wage” — tends to cause confusion.
Many of us wonder what exactly constitutes a living wage. Since the cost of living depends on the region in which you live, there is not an exact number. However, regardless of region, a living wage can be defined as a salary that enables a full-time employee to cover the cost of all of his/her basic living expenses, or, to put it simply, his/her basic needs. This begs the question, what exactly are a person’s basic needs? Your basic needs are what you need in order to live as a fully functioning member of society. In order to live, you need food, you need clothing and you need shelter. You need transportation: a car to take you to work and gas to keep your car running. You also need car insurance and you need to be able to afford your car payments. You need to pay your phone bills, your energy bills and your water bills. If you live in a city, you need fare for the bus or the subway. If your job requires a uniform, you also need money to pay for the uniform. You need basic living supplies as well: pots and pans and dishes and silverware, sheets and blankets and towels, soap and shampoo and other personal hygiene products. If you’re a woman, you need money for tampons and pads and possibly birth control and probably makeup, because studies have shown that wearing makeup increases people’s perceptions of a woman’s likeability, competence and trustworthiness, and thereby impacts her employability.
When life is going well, these are your basic living expenses. But what about when life is not going well? What do you do when you need a haircut and simply cannot afford it on your low-wage salary? What do you do when you get sick but you do not have the money for the copay at your doctor’s appointment? What do you do when your husband gets laid off and suddenly your income is the sole income for your family of four? What do you do when a family member dies and you cannot afford the costs of the burial and the headstone and the funeral service? What do you do when no one else in your family can afford these costs either because you were all born into poverty and, in this country that boasts of economic mobility and the American dream, the greatest indicator of your socioeconomic status as an adult is the socioeconomic status into which you were born?
Let us think deeply for a moment about whose work we value on this campus and whose work we do not. Let us first consider the various facets of our college community: we have faculty, students, and staff. While all three of these facets are essential to the College’s functioning, we traditionally recognize two — faculty and students — as fundamental to the operation of this institution and disregard the third — staff — namely, our hourly workers. But what would we do if the grounds crew did not come to work the morning after a snowstorm? How would we get to class without our sidewalks having been plowed for us? How would we eat if the dining services staff did not come to work one day? What would we do if all of custodial services took a day of leave, or — heaven forbid—a month of leave? The College could not function.
We are entirely reliant on these members of our community. They are essential members of our community, the people on whom we all depend, the people who make our lives here possible. Yet they are often ignored and unappreciated, disrespected in both overt and inadvertent ways, and in most cases, they are overworked and underpaid. And most of us are oblivious to our complete dependence on their labor.
As a student in Professor of Religious Studies Charles Kammer’s Just Work class, I spent last semester working alongside our custodians for four hours every week — vacuuming hallways, cleaning windows in the lounges of residence halls, taking out the trash and mopping and sweeping the stairwells. During this experience, I was consistently amazed by how invisible I was to the students around me, the very people for whom I was doing this tiresome, laborious work.
One morning, a student stepped on my vacuum cord while I was vacuuming his hallway, literally unplugging my cord from the wall. He did not notice what he had done. He did not apologize, let alone acknowledge me or thank me for keeping his hallway clean. He continued to walk down the hallway as I walked back to the outlet to replug my vacuum. Minutes later, it happened again. A different student stepped on my vacuum cord, unplugging it from the wall. As my vacuum stopped, I stood dumbfounded. This student, too, walked past me, without having noticed what he had done. He, too, did not acknowledge me in the slightest. I was invisible to them. Despite how hard I worked on their behalf, I was not valued for my labor nor my personhood.
This is a call to action. This is a call for change. This is a call for radical empathy on the part of every member of the College of Wooster community: every student, every faculty member, every staff member and every alum. Throughout our lives, we have all learned that, in order to understand the experience of another human being, we must walk a mile in their shoes. Faculty and students, I challenge you to take this adage literally. Spend one day, or even just a few hours, working alongside a staff member on campus. Work with the groundskeepers, work with the custodians, work with those in Dining Services. I suspect that if you do, your perspectives will begin to shift, as mine has. You will see that there is no such thing as unskilled labor, and that the work they do is hard work, significant work — essential work. You will see what it’s like to be invisible. I should clarify that you still will not really understand how it feels to do tiring, manual labor that is deemed to be lowly by the people around you — people who hardly notice you, so invisible are you to them — for 40 hours per week, Monday through Friday, day in and day out, all the while struggling to make ends meet because it is simply impossible to support yourself on your low-wage salary no matter how cautiously you budget. But, you will have slightly greater insight than you did before about how that might feel, just by spending a few hours or an entire day in their shoes. Perhaps, above all, this is a call to bravery. To assume a new role. To go from that of student or professor or president to that of custodian demands great courage. It demands the willingness to experience discomfort and the humility to learn from someone whose wisdom and insight you may have never thought to seek before.
Take this chance. I swear to you, you will be better for it. Walking a day in the shoes of a staff member is the first step to realizing how immediate the need is for us, the College of Wooster community, to implement a living wage. We must accept this call to action, this call to change, to radical empathy and to bravery. In both the way in which we treat staff and the wages with which we compensate them, we must value the work of the people who make our lives possible. All people deserve to be treated with dignity and to be paid wages that allow them to live in dignity. This is a call for the implementation of a living wage. It’s time.
Kristen Estabrook, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment kestabrook16@wooster.edu