Privilege and impotence

I am being paid to read, study, think, synthesize, regurgitate others’ ideas, and contribute to an academic conversation that may never have any practical application in the real world. If that isn’t the ultimate position of privilege, I don’t know what is. And people who complain about being busy and how hard this work is just boggles my mind.

I’m reading Richard Rodriguez, Victor Villanueva, and other “academics of color” on issues of education, literacy, language, power, and class. Much of their experiences are relatable to me only in terms of the privileged position I share with them in the academy and in a middle class background with all its opportunities and benefits.

What do I mean by this in a country where being “middle class” now seems to be a political distinction for “struggle.” (Seriously?)

Here’s what I mean.

In 2005, I decided to work in Yellowstone National Park for three months in the summer. The jobs I held were “hard” in comparison to what I do now – grill cook and dormitory manager. The day-to-day responsibilities of grill cook entailed standing for three to four hours at a time twice a day on a concrete floor in front of a superheated slab of metal, slinging burgers, chicken breasts, and gardenburgers (no separation between them on the grill, by the way), and listening to privileged tourists from home and abroad abuse the serving staff (*snap snap* go the fingers, “No ice!”, “Where’s my tuna fish?!”). Hard. The second job for the second half of the summer as the dorm manager entailed coping with privileged college students who were confused and angered by the tourists and older store employees who expected to sleep each night instead of listening to their loud and drunken parties, in addition to cleaning toilets, urinals, shower stalls, emptying garbage, and vacuuming/Windexing the public spaces of the dorm every day. Hard.

But all of this I did by CHOICE. You will see no one working at Yellowstone who isn’t there by choice. Who can’t afford to make $7/hour and not worry about paying the bills at home. Who isn’t from a privileged, middle class, well-educated, articulate background. Working physically demanding jobs for a few months in a stunning national park is a choice. Just as going to graduate school and getting a PhD is a choice. But there are custodians at my university who clean toilets, urinals, floors, and take out the residents’ garbage (with a smile and a friendly ‘hi’) every day for a salary of $16,100 per year. Is this a choice? I doubt it.

The salary information for any public state university is available to the public. A friend of mine shared this page of data about our university with me yesterday and I was stunned at the economic disparity laid out in those cold, black and white numbers. I agree with him – no one who works for this wealthy, privileged university that dumps MILLIONS into its athletic program – should make less than $20,000 a year. Not the custodians. Not campus security. Not lab technicians. To be working a hard job for less than $20,000 a year seems criminal. This is where a union would be beneficial.

I know this attitude opens me up to all sorts of attacks – Marxist! Communist! Re-distributing wealth is bad! Unions bad! And I’m not a huge fan of unions – I think generally they take money from the people they purport to help and represent, but then don’t necessarily deliver. And I also think unionization can allow for lax work ethics – hey, I’m making $25 an hour whether I break a sweat or not, so why break a sweat? (Sounds like tenure, doesn’t it?) We’ve all heard the arguments. But the more I read and the more I think and the more I realize what a privileged position of choice I am in now and have always been in and will always BE in…the more appalled I am at this economic disparity within one institutional structure.

What’s the answer? The old stand-by answer is that the system has to change. Ok. But how?

Well, would the professor making $165,000 a year really miss $500? No. And if the answer is yes, then this person is living far beyond his means and needs to cut back. And how about the argument that it is not the responsibility of the person raking in $165,000 for reading and thinking all day? He did SOMETHING to achieve that privileged position…why make HIM pay for the institutional disparity? Well, I suppose this is my inner-liberal-academic coming out, but perhaps it IS our responsibility. If not to contribute to the increase of salaries, but to put pressure on those who make those decisions to change the cruelly disparate work-to-money value ratio…yes, even in a year of budget cuts.

Frankly, if this (or any) university can afford to pay its coaching staff all six-figure salaries, then the least it can do is value its custodial and other hard-working employees who may not have a choice with “upward mobility” enough to provide an equitable salary for a more comfortable life. And for most of us, let’s be honest, $20,000 don’t come close to providing “a comfortable life.” When’s the last time you made $20 grand a year? My last time was as a freelance journalist in the last decade…but that was BY CHOICE.

This is not a new question. It is not a new problem. But having seen that sheet of paper with those numbers, I find myself truly disturbed at my own privileged place in this society and my utter impotence to change anything about it.