Ohio University Senate Has No Idea How to Implement $15 Minimum Wage They Voted For
Well, what a surprise. They voted for a $15 minimum wage on campus but they don’t know how to make it happen.
It doesn’t sound like they thought this through very thoroughly.
Alisa Warren of The Post reports.
OU Student Senate lacks plan for $15 minimum wage
Ohio University Student Senate still wants the university to make drastic institutional changes, such as a $15 minimum wage for student workers, but senate members don’t know how university officials would make that happen.
Senate Vice President Caitlyn McDaniel said she is trying to find someone who understands the university’s budget and is not willing to keep “administrators’ wages high and student worker wages low.”
Top university budget coordinators John Day, associate provost for Academic Budget and Planning, and Chad Mitchell, OU’s budget director, said they have not been contacted by senate members to explain how the university’s budgeting process works.
McDaniel called comments from Stephen Golding, OU’s vice president for Finance and Administration, in a previous Post article, “misleading” when he said increasing student wages to $15 “could have a budgetary impact and require a tuition increase to cover the cost of the wage increase.”
Comments
Ready…Fire…Aim
1) The Univ can pay administrators $40-120k a year.
2) Raising the wages for a few thousand students by $5-7 an hour will not even come close to breaking the bank. It WILL, however, mean that maybe the school has to reign in admin costs.
3) The Universities, IMO, have long considered the students an annoying, but necessary evil. They treat them as minds to be indoctrinated, but not, NOT, to be listened to or taken seriously.
Hence
4) The idea that the university staff “tightening their belts” to accomadate the MAIN REASON (the students) and main benefactors (the students and their parents money), to the university staff is laughable to those in charge.
Never going to happen.
5) As an added bonus – these student idealists are now getting a front row ticket to real market reactions to their idealistic and unrealistic expectations and ideology: You cannot simply “order everyone to get more money” and then have it magically appear.
There is no “free” money to give out – either Party A gets it or Party B gets it. It’s not like their navel gazing mental academic exercises in class where the proffessor can sneer at the idea that “their is not more money in the budget”.
WHY? Because now, oh, NOW, it’s the professors budget/pay that might be cut to give a “living wage” … and that’s not going to happen – ever.
Sooner or later, all large organizations come to serve the interests of those who control them. Hence, as our society increases in complexity and develops more large organizations, we are well and truly screwed.
I have a different idea.
As it was the STUDENT Senate that voted for the increase, have the money come out of the STUDENT activity funding; a Real-world life-lesson in budgeting and finance that they obviously have not learned to date.
Hmm, does student government have a budget? Maybe they just voted themselves out of existence. Or better yet, all student workers are now laid off due to illegal wages.