Hannah Soyer
[email protected]
On Sunday, the minimum wage in Johnson County was raised to $9.15 per hour, as part of the plan to have it up to $10.10 by Jan. 1, 2017. However, the University of Iowa has decided that it is exempt from the ordinance, claiming that because it is a state agency, it does not need to abide. This means that approximately 2,700 University of Iowa employees have not received a raise from the previous minimum wage.
This decision was made last week at a state Board of Regents meeting, in which Rob Lehnertz, the UI senior vice president for Finance and Operations, said “We do not and are not following the Johnson County [minimum wage] but rather our own market needs to fill any position on campus related to the minimum wage,” as quoted in an Iowa City Press-Citizen article. This quote seems a bit convoluted and muddled to me, but I get the sense from the word “market” that Lehnertz is viewing the university as a business, not as a place for higher education. If that’s not so, and if Lehnertz is merely commenting on wanting to be able to make sure the minimum-wage jobs on campus are filled, then it seems like keeping the minimum wage at the statewide $7.25 seems a sure way to not do this. Fewer people will jump at the bit for these types of jobs, and the ones who will work those jobs surely won’t be as satisfied as they could be.
Jeneane Beck, the UI assistant vice president for External Relations, was quoted in the same article saying that all but 39 of the employees who won’t receive a pay raise are students. The overarching mentality may be that because the majority of these employees are students, it doesn’t matter, and that the money they are making from these jobs is just extra booze money.
In fact, that seems to be the underlying argument against raising the minimum wage across the country; it’s just young adults making minimum wage, and therefore it doesn’t matter that if they work minimum-wage jobs full-time and don’t receive any outside support from anyone else or need to support anyone besides themselves. They still just barely skirt above the Iowa poverty line.
However, according to a recent study done by Economic Policy Institute, the average age of those working minimum-wage jobs is 36, and 89 percent are 20 or older; 37 percent are 40 or older, 56 percent are women, 28 percent have children, 57 percent work full-time, and on average, minimum-wage workers earn more than half of their family’s total income.
Obviously, these statistics do not apply to the situation here at the university, as those employed through the university are overwhelmingly students. However, the same mentality of not jumping to conclusions about the population that receives minimum wage should still apply. It may be that some of these students working minimum-wage jobs through the university are just using the money they earn as extra spending money. But it may also be true that these students are working to pay their tuition, or their rent, or buy their groceries. Just because some students may be using their paychecks for extra, unneeded amenities, doesn’t mean that all of them are.
And with this in mind, let’s return to the statement by Lehnertz. The UI should cultivate student employment, so as to keep the academia as full circle as possible. But how does it plan to do that when its minimum-wage employees can easily get a different job in Iowa City that pays a higher wage?
