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(04/27/23 10:05am)
The Middlebury campus is undeniably beautiful, as is the state of Vermont. As spring arrives, we find ourselves eagerly awaiting the emergence of bright buds on trees, the return of green grass and the chance to lay on the lawn basking in the sun. The sprawling quads in some ways feel synonymous with college life; a leftover design choice from a colonial archetype of universities in the western world. The allure of higher education depends on its marketing of students reading books out on the grass, kicking around a soccer ball, or just hanging out with friends. But, do we really need this much lawn to enjoy its recreational benefits? Whether it’s used or not, we mow every piece of this college landscape, mostly just out of habit.
(04/14/22 10:00am)
With luck, as a community we’re moving to an ‘endemic’ phase of Covid-19. As a community though, it’s time again to recognize the many endemic problems staff face at our institution, and talk about taking one or two off the plate before we add another.
(03/04/21 11:00am)
Tayler* started working full time at Middlebury right after high school, with a starting wage of just over $8 an hour. Twenty-one years later, through Middlebury's compensation program, they are making $14 an hour. A single parent, they find themselves in line at the local food bank several times a month to make ends meet, and HOPE Middlebury helps Christmas come together for their child. Many of Tayler’s fellow service workers at Middlebury also have second jobs, an option unavailable to those without childcare or other support mechanisms.
How did we get here as an institution, where over 20 years of service and dedication to Middlebury still merits only a poverty wage? Sure, endowment woes and a poor job market play a role, but one of the deeper problems is more insidious.
In the last 20 years, Middlebury has prioritized faculty wage increases over those of staff. Every year, when possible, a sum of money is added to the Middlebury budget for salary increases, which is then distributed to faculty and staff as a percentage increase of their current wage. By my calculations, in most years, rather than dividing wage increases equally between faculty and staff, faculty have gotten a larger percentage increase than staff. In a particularly egregious example from 2001, faculty received an average pay increase of 7.5%, while staff saw only 4.3%. Inflation that year as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) was about 3.4%, so faculty got over a 4% raise above inflation, staff less than 1%.
More recently, in both 2019 and 2020, faculty saw a 4% increase, while staff saw a mere 2%. However, inflation was greater than 2%, so the value of the staff raise was ultimately canceled out, while faculty wages increased over inflation.
Small changes in the CPI have proportionally larger impacts for lower-wage workers. The cost of items that factor into the CPI can vary by year, but a seemingly minor change in some items can tear a budget apart. For example, a 50-cent increase in the price of gas may barely affect more affluent families, but these same changes can be crippling for a service worker with little discretionary income within their budget.
On average, faculty have gotten a 1.4% greater yearly compensation increase compared to staff in the raise pool. Cumulatively, from 2000 until last year, faculty received a 113% increase in salary, while staff have only seen a 73% bump. Subtract inflation, and faculty net a 40% increase, staff only 13%.
So, for example, a staff member making $50,000 two decades ago is now making $86,500, while a faculty member at the same starting pay would now be making $106,725.
Middlebury pays staff by length of service — the longer you work here, the greater your wage. Had staff wages not been increased to $14, staff like Tayler who had been working at Middlebury for 20 years would now be making $13.84. If they had received compensation increases at the same rate faculty did, they would instead be earning $17.04. Adjusted for inflation, $14 in 2021 is the equivalent of $9 in 2001.
So, in our pay-by-tenure system, that's only an additional five cents a year over inflation for all of their experience, commitment and dedication. But the starting wage for a new employee at Middlebury is now $14 an hour, so we aren't valuing experience and commitment at all. Imagine working your whole life at an institution and getting the same pay as someone who just walked off the street. When Middlebury raised the starting wage for lower-paid service jobs, it caused this wage compression, where a range of pay for work is now non-existent and independent of the length of service.
How can we do better?
Middlebury has proven a strong commitment to staff, seen not only by wage continuity during the Covid-19 shutdowns but by the recent staff reductions during workforce planning without resorting to layoffs. We need to build upon and strengthen this commitment, by first fixing wage compression for affected staff. Long-time workers at Middlebury deserve to be paid more than new hires and should see a one-time increase in pay under our pay-by-tenure system. This needs to be the top priority for the next fiscal year when the Budget Advisory Committee prioritizes items in the budget.
All employees of Middlebury need to commit to the "ongoing alignment of staffing and budgets to the strategic goals of the enterprise," but staff cannot do this without our faculty and administrative partners. Faculty and the administration need to decide, post-Covid, where their values lie, and reflect those values in the budget. The solution is not to reduce the number of staff positions, allowing the excess work to roll onto those who remain. Will we go back to pre-pandemic travel and entertainment spending, where catered lunches for departments are prepared by workers who leave work and head to food shelf lines? Or do we build on our current successes some departments have seen in workforce planning and together determine what sacrifices need to be made to return to our student-centric mission?
Staff also need a voice in this process and should have representation on the appropriate faculty committees, including Faculty Resources. Staff representation on the Budget Advisory Committee has been a welcome step, but it is not enough. After a recent Board of Trustee financial decision, the Middlebury AAUP chapter stated the decision was made "without any input from either Faculty Council or the Resources Committee so that also brings up serious concerns about 'faculty governance' if none of the relevant faculty bodies were consulted." The last 20 years of faculty wage increases show that staff need their own voice, without relying on faculty governance.
Lastly, let's think of the hundreds of invisible staff cooking meals, cleaning buildings, and doing countless other tasks that keep our institution running. Someone at Middlebury considerably smarter than I once told me if we were brave as an institution, we'd make our starting pay $20/hour, rather than the $14 we pay now. As Karen Miller said, Middlebury needs to become an "employer of choice for the next generation." If faculty and the administration want to achieve this distinction, they need to ensure everyone at Middlebury is fairly compensated.
*Editor’s note: “Tayler” is a pseudonym used to protect the identity of a staff member.
Tim Parsons is the college’s landscape horticulturist.
(05/14/20 10:29am)
In times of either crisis or laziness, it’s easy to fall back on cliches. I try and avoid them, but sometimes they apply perfectly, and one I’ve been using lately is “punching above your weight class.” Thanks to Covid-19, I’ve seen example after example of this from across the Middlebury community. This shows our resilience — we’ve always been tough. Our well-kept facilities, or faculty, our sports teams, everything we do can just seem miraculous for a small liberal arts college in Vermont. But really, the best example has been happening for several years now, and it’s The Middlebury Campus newspaper.
Twenty-five hundred-ish students, with a weekly campus newspaper written as if there were for 10,000. I recall a day in early March this year when the news was breaking that students may go home, and there were members of the editorial board sitting around a table in Atwater brainstorming not only stories, but the future plans for the paper. And what plans they turned out to be. The dedication and willingness to put the community before self is inspiring.
In the last several years, I've watched The Campus grow and transform, now not merely for students but as essential reading for the entire community. Staff, in particular, have felt we have been listened to, heard, written about with grace and compassion, and The Campus has helped enact positive change on campus for us. You’ve helped bring a stronger sense of community to all of us, and we’re ever grateful.
So to the graduating journalists, go out and give ‘em hell, we deserve it. To the rest of you, thanks for carrying on this remarkable tradition. You’ve been handed a wonderful gift.
Tim Parsons is the college’s landscape horticulturist and president of Staff Council.
(11/21/19 10:58am)
While I don’t dare speak for all staff in my role as Staff Council president, I personally want to speak up and thank The Campus for excellent recent coverage, editorials and overall support for staff here at Middlebury. These have been trying times for many of us.
Positions that the administration referred to as “entry level” in a recent open staff meeting — even though many have held those jobs for a decade or more — are paid a little more than $12 an hour. And pay rate increases over the last several years have barely kept up with the consumer price index, which is nearly meaningless anyways at lower salaries. For example, what is a minor increase in the price of food or fuel for those better compensated? This can throw an already stretched budget in chaos when employees have no true discretionary income to absorb problems. The past several years of only cost of living increases in salary only widens the gap in income between the lower and upper pay bands, so our workers financially are going backwards, and we aren’t keeping up. Some staff need to rely on the Chaplain’s Fund, an emergency fund available to staff from leftover FSA funds, for heating expenses; others must hold multiple jobs just to make ends meet. Yet we call our institution “financially sustainable.”
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Go anywhere on this campus and you’ll feel an overwhelming sense of pride in the institution.[/pullquote]
Go anywhere on this campus, though, and you’ll feel an overwhelming sense of pride in the institution. The last faculty/staff survey reflected this. Seventy-five percent of all faculty and staff are “proud to be part of this institution,” and 70% agreed that “All things considered, this is a great place to work.” And I see and hear this every day. Working at an elite institution means everything is better, from educators and students, to the dining halls, rooms, floors and landscape that make Middlebury what it is. Here, staff are equally as invested in the drive for excellence as faculty and students.
We are also starting to feel like we’re being heard. Recent meetings and communications from Senior Leadership Group reflect a new openness, a willingness to acknowledge and discuss difficulties. For instance, the administration has acknowledged the pay gap between the market and our rates in the lower pay bands. At the same time, however, the administration has not committed to implementing any salary increases regardless of the outcome of the still-in-process compensation review. And we still struggle as an institution with opportunities to give feedback, which I acknowledge is as much a failure of mine in my role on Staff Council as it is a failure on the part of the administration.
Vandalism is a particular blight on our community, in part because our “entry level” workers take great pride in making our institution clean, safe and attractive, both inside and out. We need to show the people that do the day to day work here we appreciate them. We can do better at this, all of us, faculty, staff, and students. (The pet dogs of the CCI can just keep on doing their thing.) Staff across all our campuses are deeply committed to the educational mission of Middlebury. True sustainability is for everyone, and we should acknowledge and reward this commitment with one of our own: a living wage for all of our employees.
Tim Parsons is the college’s Landscape Horticulturalist and president of Staff Council.