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The Daily Tar Heel

Employee-Faculty Committee To Address Low Staff Salaries

Estroff shared their discontent and has proposed forming a joint committee with the Employee Forum to address low staff salaries at UNC.

Employee Forum Chairman Tommy Griffin said Monday that there are several employees who make less than $20,000 and that at least 50 percent of the staff work two jobs to make ends meet.

"It's unacceptable to have an institution that doesn't pay its employees a living wage," Estroff said.

Estroff and Griffin have not yet made concrete plans for the composition of the committee or the start date.

Griffin said the Employee Forum's Personnel Issues Committee has been looking into this problem for a few years now, and he said the committee could step up its efforts with the help of the Faculty Council.

The new committee will address the underlying causes of low UNC employee salaries and will work on raising those salaries across the board.

"It will be a fairly short-lived but intensely focused group that will take a careful look at people who are just not making a living wage, and we'll see what we can do about it," Estroff said. "We want to have very focused discussions with the Employee Forum."

The effort, however, is being made to raise staff, not faculty, salaries, she said.

Estroff said that feeling of shock that the council members had needs to be sustained to come up with viable ways to remedy the situation.

"We need to think outside the box," she said.

With recent discussions about fair labor practices in factories that make UNC apparel, the University needs to turn that discerning eye on the way it treats its own employees, Estroff said.

Paying employees a living wage is a fundamental condition the University needs to fulfill to be a humane workplace, she added.

Estroff said this effort by the Faculty Council and the Employee Forum is different from that of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where faculty members are trying to raise money for bonuses for the school's staff.

The joint committee would focus on raising staff salaries permanently, not adding a bonus just this year.

"I applaud the interest in doing a one-time thing, but that's not going to fix it," Estroff said.

"It's like plugging a hole in the wall with bubble gum. It's a nice gesture, but it isn't going to last."

Griffin said creating a committee to address low employee wages is crucial because people are struggling to make a living.

"If I was rating it (in importance) on a scale of one to 10, it would be 100," Griffin said. "If we work on this issue together, we can accomplish something."

The University Editor can be reached at udesk@unc.edu.

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