This weekend, the Old Gold & Black published an article detailing the efforts of Wake Forward, a progressive-minded faculty group, to ensure fairer and better working conditions for contract-based employees on this campus. Our Editorial Board now writes to lend our voice to this important issue.

As the only paid student newspaper in the Atlantic Coast Conference, we at the Old Gold & Black understand how crucial it is to compensate people for the labor they provide — to an organization, to a community, to a campus as a whole. The contract employees that work in our residence halls, our dining establishments and our academic buildings are integral to the day-to-day operations of this university, and they deserve to be paid as such. In a single-income home with more than two children, what the Budd Group pays its employees is a poverty wage, according to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator.

Assuming the $10.50 wage cited in Wake Forward’s letter is universal (though some Budd Group listings are as low as $10 or as high as $16 in Winston-Salem), contract workers at Wake Forest would make $21,840 a year (calculated based off a 40-hour workweek for 52 weeks with no bonuses or paid time off). This yearly income is below the federal poverty line regardless of family size, though for a single-income family of three, it is below the poverty line by over $20,000. 

As Wake Forward’s letter also points out, issues of equity are at play here. A Bloomberg Law article written during the height of COVID-19 pointed out that university employees who work in the most high-risk jobs for virus spread (and also the positions Wake Forest generally outsources to contracting firms) are disproportionately people of color. Especially given Wake Forest’s history, it is imperative that the university not further contribute to racial wealth gaps by refusing to pay contract workers a living wage.

Wake Forest is not the wealthiest school in the nation, but it does still have considerable financial power. A 2021 financial disclosure report revealed that the university has about $4 billion in assets. Wake Forest, per its motto, has a responsibility to use that money to be “Pro Humanitate”. That starts with making sure no one on this campus — no student, no contract worker, no faculty member and no staff member — has to live in poverty. 

Correction: An earlier version of this editorial misstated the amount of assets the university has as $4 million, based on a financial disclosure report. That report was scaled to 1,000, so the actual total is $4 billion. The error has been corrected.