After UF President Kent Fuchs raised the university’s minimum wage from $10 to $12 an hour, the Alachua County Labor Coalition is still contending with other actors in the community to do the same.
The ACLC’s Living Wage Campaign is a nearly five-year plan urging the 10 largest employers in the county to pay a living wage of $14.57 by 2021, said ACLC board member Sheila Payne.
"President Fuchs knew UF was part of the big 10 and did the right thing to move these workers from $10 to $12," she said. "It’s an acknowledgment that something needed to be done."
After the coalition’s success with getting the Wage Theft Protection Ordinance passed in 2013, Payne said coalition members are optimistic about passing the Living Wage Ordinance. It would benefit under-paid Alachua County workers like janitors, custodians and security guards.
The top five largest employers include UF, UF Health, Malcolm Randall Veterans Affairs Medical Center, the Alachua County School Board and the City of Gainesville.
The Living Wage Ordinance could affect some UF students, like graduate student Fred Byrd, who attended the ACLC meeting Thursday night.
Byrd works as a graduate assistant at UF’s Teaching Center. He said he sees tutors there who are not valued or adequately compensated for their work, which he said is integral to the basic mission of the university: to educate.
"Sometimes I’ll see 40 students to four tutors, and then they’ll have to give up a whole paycheck to university fees," the 25-year-old said. "The university needs to increase funding for all programs."
Other students are involved in the campaign from UF and Santa Fe College. Leah Robbins, a 22-year-old UF Jewish studies and women’s studies senior with the UF Student Radical Alliance, attended the meeting and said the group will host a teach-in at the university to familiarize students with the Living Wage Campaign and the poverty-wage situation in Alachua County. The teach-in would most likely feature a speaker such as board member Payne or Paul Ortiz, a UF professor who is also part of the campaign, Robbins said.
"I think it’s kind of a student issue as well, and the fight for basic integrity should be on everyone’s radar," she said. "We need to raise awareness of labor issues and build solidarity around that."
The ACLC’s next meeting will be on Sept. 29. state Rep. Clovis Watson will speak about Medicaid expansion in Florida.
Contact Brooke Baitinger at bbaitinger@alligator.org and follow her on Twitter @BaitingerBrooke
