In the past months, we’ve turned a critical eye to how Conn students, faculty and administration treat issues of justice. Although we’ve viewed the issue through a variety of lenses, we have failed to pay much attention to a specific group on campus: the staff.
Early this semester, I took on an article pitched to answer a seemingly simple question: “Does the staff at Connecticut College make a living wage?” At the time, this seemed like it would be a relatively simple task. I would do some research on what constitutes a living wage in Connecticut, get some average numbers from HR and interview a variety of staff members. These tasks got progressively more difficult.
According to an MIT Living Wage Calculator, the required hourly wage to support one adult with no dependents is $10.68, while the Connecticut minimum wage is $8.15. On an annual basis, a salary of $22,205 is required to maintain a living wage. These numbers increase as children and dependent spouses are added.
Frankly, it is unethical to ask an employer what their employees make without employee consent—even more so to publish those numbers in a newspaper. That being said, the employer should be aware of what constitutes a living wage and should, ideally, be able to state confidently that their employees are paid living wages.
This turned out to be easier said than done. I met with Staff Council Chair Josh Stoffel, and he explained how the College surveys wages for similar jobs in surrounding areas but was unable to give an official statement. He did, however, provide me with a list of contacts in the HR office who might have more information.
After emailing HR, it took me about two weeks to get an interview scheduled with Cheryl Miller, Assistant Vice President for Human Resources & Professional Development. She provided some information about employment benefits and the surveying process, but she made no comment about whether or not she believed staff members were paid enough. She did, however, make sure to mention that Conn was once listed in Connecticut Magazine’s “Best Places to Work.
Although HR provided some concrete information, the staff was the group whose input I really wanted. I knew I could not simply walk up and interrupt work for invasive and time-consuming interviews, so I chose to send out a mass email to all of the dining, custodial and facilities staff. I thought that this, of all tasks, would be the easiest, seeing as the email group staff@conncoll.edu exists. I wrote up an email detailing my project and ensuring staff members that anyone who wished to comment could remain anonymous if they so preferred, and I sent it out to the “staff” email group.
Unfortunately, I learned that students are not authorized to email the entire staff for reasons undefined. I then turned to the Connecticut College Staff Directory, which I thought would provide me with a list of emails that I could copy and paste. I was wrong about that too.
In order to find an email in the Staff Directory, the user has to click on the staff member’s hyperlinked name, which then opens a pop-up window. The window includes that staff member’s hyperlinked email, which opens directly to Outlook when clicked. In order to send an email to multiple recipients via Gmail, the user has to copy and paste the email address and close the new window. This is a simple enough task when contacting a single-digit number of people, but I did it over 200 times.
Of course, this trivial and time-consuming work would have seemed completely worthwhile had I gotten a significant staff response. However, after sending this email out in three sets and contacting more than 200 people, my grand total number of responses came to a whopping one.
Cesar Osuba, a custodian who agreed to be identified by name, was the only staff member who responded to my email. During his interview, he made generally positive comments about working for Conn with some qualms about staff representation and the lack of programs designed to incentivize labor, but he stated clearly: “Mine can’t be the only opinion that you get.”
I agree with Osuba, and that is why this project is far from finished. The truth is that I cannot write a conclusive article
without hearing from more staff members. When I asked Osuba why he thought I did not receive any other responses, he said “some of [the staff] don’t even know they have [Conn] emails.”
Why would our staff not be informed of their institutional email accounts? In the present technological age, email acts as an essential means of communication, and every member of our campus has a right to interact with the rest of the community. It concerns me that at a school that so heavily stresses shared governance, it becomes nearly impossible for populations on campus to talk to others.
The difficulty of answering the living wage question is a symptom of a greater problem: the disconnect between sectors of campus. Why, then, is the staff at Conn so isolated, and how are we going to change it? •
