The University Budget Committee is currently in the process of reviewing the wages of workers at Brandeis in order to assess University policies on paying workers a living wage.

The review comes after members of the Brandeis Fair Pay Coalition and faculty members including Profs. Bernadette Brooten (NEJS) and Gordan Fellman (SOC) initiated a campaign to ensure that all workers at the University are making a living wage, which the group states to be at about $15 per hour in Middlesex County based on calculations by the Crittenton Women's Union for one individual with no children or dependents.

The committee could not confirm how many full-time, part-time or temporary employees are making less than $15 per hour, stating that the committee is still in the process of obtaining them. Neither Prof. Carol Osler (IBS), chair of the University Budget Committee, nor Assistant Provost for Academic Affairs Kim Godsoe responded to requests for comment on the specifics of the process that the committee is undergoing by press time.

Osler wrote that the committee was waiting for a report from one member, although she did not specify what information would be in these reports. "[T]he committee meets infrequently and progress is necessarily slow," Olser wrote in an email to the Justice.

According to Brooten, Provost Steve Goldstein '78 assigned Osler to look into the issue of campus wage policy. Godsoe is in the process of collecting the information on behalf of the committee on how many temporary, part-time and full-time employees of the University and sub-contracted companies hired by the University are currently making less than $15 per hour.

Although the committee has yet to release information on hourly wages, Andrew Nguyen '15, who is involved with the Brandeis Fair Pay Coalition, said in an interview with the Justice that the group does suspect that there are employees making less than $15 per hour "because of the nature of why you hire temporary work or part-time work or why you outsource is to pay people less money, so we expect that there would be more people paid under living wage who are part-time who are temporary who are outsourced." Although Nguyen is a member that has been assisting the club in organizing, he said that the group is currently "non-hierarchal."

According to Brooten's report from the Nov. 1 Faculty Senate meeting, Brooten met with Sodexo regional manager Jason LaPrade, Sodexo Resident Manager for Brandeis Jay DeGioia, Vice President of Corporate Communications at Sodexo Nancy Judy, Vice President of Global Labor Relations at Sodexo Tom Mackall and Director of Strategic Procurement John Storti along with Profs. Sue Lanser (ENG) and Jeff Prottas (Heller), on Oct. 18 to discuss several matters, including workers' wages.

According to the report, newly-hired counter workers earn $12.51 per hour and do not reach the union negotiated-rate of $16.68 per hour until they have worked with Sodexo for five years.

In an email to the Justice, DeGioia wrote that when Sodexo arrived at Brandeis, "we immediately established a great working relationship with the union and all our employees.

"We offered positions to all employees and honored the present contract in its entirety, and will continue to do so until it expires," he wrote. DeGioia was unable to respond to requests for comment on the contract's expiration date or whether or not Sodexo would be willing to comply with a $15 minimum wage policy by press time.

However, the report stated that, as of the Oct. 18 meeting, Sodexo was not willing to bring the lowest paid workers' hourly rates up to a living wage.

"The main theme of Sodexo's responses was that it has just negotiated a contract with the workers' union and will not do anything over and above what that contract requires," Brooten's report to the Faculty Senate reads.

Brooten wrote in a Feb. 4 email to the Brandeis Fair Pay Coalition listserv that she hopes to persuade Brandeis to set a $15 minimum for all Brandeis employees, "although we need to remain vigilant." Brooten wrote that if Brandeis implements a $15 minimum, Sodexo would be an outlier. "On that basis, we can work to get Brandeis to make up the difference for the Sodexo workers," she wrote.

When asked about the potential financial implications of adopting such a policy at the University, Senior Vice President for Finance and Chief Financial Officer Marianne Cwalina wrote in an email to the Justice that she could not comment until the committee provides data and information "in order to perform a full analysis."

According to Nguyen, Brooten, Fellman and other professors contacted him and several other students who they knew were interested in workers' rights over the winter break. The professors told them that they wanted to get a fair pay campaign started on campus "to ensure that every single worker gets paid at least living wage," he said.

"But right now what's happening really is that we ... simply don't have enough data and we don't have enough knowledge about what the repercussions would be of instituting a living wage," Nguyen said regarding the logistics of taking on such a campaign.

"For example, if it was instituted and Sodexo had to pay the workers $15 an hour, that might be more incentive for them to hire more student workers that they could be at ... a lesser rate," Nguyen continued.

The Brandeis Fair Pay Coalition is currently an unrecognized and loose group of students on campus, according to Nguyen. However, Nguyen said the group is leaning toward taking over and reviving the Brandeis Labor Coalition, which Nguyen said has been defunct and has not been active since the last academic year.

"It's kind of ... sad to see at a place like Brandeis, where we're supposed to be like a social justice organization, that ... there's no significant labor presence on campus," Nguyen said. "So I think the group is heading towards reviving [the] Brandeis Labor Coalition ... and having a labor presence on campus that does work, whether it's fair pay or ... whatever issues that workers do have on campus, just not limiting ourselves to fair pay."

The minimum wage is currently eight dollars an hour in the state of Massachusetts.