Let’s approximate (and let’s go high) that the University of Virginia in Charlottesville has 2,000 direct and contracted (it won’t say how many contracted, so we have to guess) employees working for under $13 per hour as demanded by the Living Wage campaign. And let’s imagine they work on average 40 hours per week and 50 weeks a year, and let’s imagine they earn the bare legal mimimum of $7.25 per hour. That would mean that it would take $23 million to make things right, to allow fulltime workers to pay their bills, quit their second jobs, see their families, and take care of their health.
Who has $23 million?
It turns out that UVA has got $4.76 BILLION.
I hate to have to point this out, but $23 million is less than a half a percent of $4.76 billion. (If my math is off that’s UVA’s fault too! 🙂
If you earn $50,000 a year, do you ever give $200 or so to good causes? UVA isn’t being asked to do that. It’s being asked to pay people a decent humane wage for their hard work.
There’s little less honorable than greed. Doesn’t UVA have an honor code?