Almost every month, Crystal Wells, a housekeeper at Washington University in St. Louis, comes home after working a 14-hour day to an eviction warning on her door – because she can’t make the rent on time.
“For too many St. Louis working families, many of whom clean this campus, that’s reality,” Wells wrote in a November op-ed piece in Student Life, the university’s student newspaper. “I have worked at Washington University for nearly two decades. Even though I work full-time at a university with an $8 billion endowment, I’ve sometimes had to work three jobs to make ends meet.”
Sometimes Wells starts her day at 4:30 a.m. and works until 10 at night.
“A full-time job should be enough to support my family, but it’s not,” Wells wrote. “Working so much means that I can’t spend time with my kids. I’ve missed so many of their firsts, like their first steps, first plays and first dances.”
Wells is part of the Fight for $15 movement at Washington University, which includes graduate student workers, food service staff and those like Wells who keep the university clean. They are demanding a $15 minimum hourly wage on campus, a minimum $31,200 per year for salaried workers, and free child care.
According to the university, the minimum wage on campus is $12.20 an hour and will go up to $12.65 an hour on July 1. The average wage for housekeepers is $12.75, according to a spokesman for the movement, but other workers around campus make as little as $9 to $10 an hour.
On April 15, seven students and a member of the clergy were arrested when they occupied Chancellor-elect Andrew Martin’s office.
Aura Aguilar, a social work graduate student at the Brown School, was among those arrested and charged with trespassing. As a research assistant, Aguilar makes $10 an hour.
“For the chancellor-elect to keep saying that they are thinking about it, we can’t afford to keep waiting,” Aguilar said. “We are still paying bills, buying groceries, and paying for transportation.”
She said the chancellor-elect had the group arrested without even speaking to them. According to a statement from the university, several members of the university leadership have met with Fight for $15 leaders to listen to their concerns.
“In each of those conversations, including with Chancellor-elect Martin directly, administrators have shared that there is a process underway to develop an issue brief that includes an analysis of options,” it stated. “When that process is complete, the chancellor-elect will discuss the options with a variety of stakeholders. After that, a decision will be made and shared with the university community.”
Aguilar’s parents were both teachers when they immigrated to the United States from El Salvador in their 20s. She grew up with the idea of the American Dream, she said, but currently her mother is 71 and still working as a housekeeper to help put her through graduate school.
“Getting a minimum wage increase, it’s not just impacting campus workers,” Aguilar said. “It’s also impacting our families who are counting on us.”
Aguilar is among those who have been sleeping in the campus Quad in tents for the past week, and there about 10-20 tents any given night. Fight for $15 activists said they aren’t leaving until their demands are met.
“At this incredibly wealthy institution, we continue to have a large portion of the people who do the essential work of keeping the place running – whether its cleaning, making food for everybody, teaching lab classes – are all earning below what we consider a living wage in St. Louis,” said Grace Ward, a graduate worker. Other universities, including Harvard, Emory, Duke, and the University of Virginia, have already made the commitment to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and more universities are in the process of doing the same.
In the statement, Wash. U. administrators said that the university’s minimum wage for direct and contract employees is “well above” the state and federal mandates and is toward the top in the region.
“The university also provides a benefits package that strives to anticipate the broadest needs of our employees, especially employees with families who have to juggle the pressures of work and home,” according to the statement. “Nonetheless, we always are considering additional ways to support our employees.”
Aguilar said the Brown School faculty and dean have strongly supported her involvement in the movement. Much of what the school focuses on is wage inequalities and raising the minimum wage, she said.
“There’s so much research,” Aguilar said. “It felt ridiculous that we were learning all of this at a really great school but one that is not respecting its workers and not providing a living wage.”
However, housekeepers are often more hesitant to speak out than the graduate workers because the university has been “tougher on them,” movement representatives said.
“For me, $15 an hour and childcare means not having to struggle to pay the bills,” Wells said. “It means being able to support my children and put food on the table. I’m lucky to have a voice on the job with my union, but others campus workers do not.”
The workers in the movement are represented by Washington University Graduate Workers Union and SEIU Local 1.
