by Brian McKnight
While looking over the newly revised
Earlham College Community Code
distributed by the Community Code
Review Committee, the section on Peace
and Justice jumped out at me. One
passage reads, "Friends also seek to
challenge institutional and social
structures that, while sometimes invisible
or taken for granted still do violence." I
tried to reconcile in my mind this idea of
Friends addressing structural violence
with the college's ongoing practice of
paying its hourly employees below a fair
wage, and could not.
Currently, there are 119 full-time hourly
staff at Earlham. These employees work
as housekeepers, secretaries, in
maintenance, as groundworkers, and as
security officers. Some of these
employees must make ends meet on an
hourly wage as low as $7.15 per hour.
Additional wage earners on campus
include those employed indirectly by
Sodexho-Marriott, the company Earlham
currently has under contract to provide
cafeteria food service. Wages for
Sodexho-Marriott employees are even
lower, often hovering just above the
minimum wage.
The tragic contradiction illuminated by a
look at wages at Earlham is that
unintentional structural violence is
perpetrated against the workers here.
Structural violence is a fundamental
abuse of power on the institutional level.
By paying poverty wages Earlham
perpetuates, albeit unintentionally,
abusive and unjust power. This unjust
power manifested in wages causes
workers to be victimized by a host of
economic insecurities associated with
poverty. These insecurities include, but
are not limited to, restricted access to
adequate health care, limited educational
opportunities, living in areas with lower
levels of social organization (and thus
higher crime rates, etc.), and social
immobility. The living wage study done
by former Earlham economics professor
David Wells concluded that the
prevalence of low wages and the need for
living wage jobs is the most pressing
economic development issue in the city of
Richmond.
When talking to Earlham's workers, and
reading the Fair Wage Report online, one
begins to understand the ways that
poverty wages affect members of our
community. One employee stated that,
"They have the choice of simplicity, we
are simplicity ... We don't have the
choice of simplicity because we are the
working poor. You know some of the
people who work here, they do have the
choice of the whether they want a simple
life or not, but when you are poor
everything has to be simple. You can't go
out and purchase what you want. You just
have to rig up what you have, paycheck
by paycheck, and it doesn't stretch to the
next payday."
Earlham's staff makes up the heart of the
people who interact with students
everyday. Unless, however, you inquired
about their personal lives you would
never know the economic situations of
workers at the college or even guess that
something is amiss. There are many times
when staff have inquired about my health
as well as how my classes are going. I
have also had many friends who have
said that the housekeepers here at
Earlham are very nice and take care of
them as students. This is surprising,
especially in light of the fact that they do
some of the hardest and most
backbreaking work that is involved in
running the college. This shows the
commitment of workers to the ideals of
our community. Many workers here have
said that the only high point in their day is
the positive interaction with the student
body.
One of the main reasons I, as well as
many other students, came to Earlham
College is because the institutional
philosophies implicit in the Community
Code of respect for persons, integrity,
peace and justice, and simplicity
coincided with our own personal
morality and upbringing. I still believe in
and enjoy participating in this community.
Yet, through my work with the Fair Wage
Campaign I have learned that the theory
of social justice sometimes falls short of
its practice in our intentional community.
I do not think these contradictions are
specific to Earlham. However, what is
specific to our college is how we deal
with these contradictions once they arise.
What needs to be answered by our
community as a whole is what choices
are we willing to make to rectify this
situation and resolve this contradiction in
our institutional and practical philosophy.
I urge my fellow students to try and talk
to the employees of the college who live
and work around you every day and hear
for yourself the stories that they have told
me. I also recommend you look over the
Fair Wage Report at
www.earlham.edu/~fairwage. You may
find, as I have, that the wage levels of
employees contradict the Community
Code. Lastly, we as a community should
continue to engage in a healthy discourse
on this issue. I would invite Doug to
devote one of his columns in The Word to
this important issue.
- Brian McKnight is a junior history
major.