There have been victories, too. First at $8, then higher. They just haven't been enough. The latest one, as well, is not yet enough, though there is reason to believe it might turn out to be.
The idea that demanding over and over again for decades something that could easily be done in a matter of hours by someone with a basic sense of decency, that such an absurd effort can fail and fail and fail and then succeed ought to give people some encouragement to demand other changes in the world.
This first lesson may be encouraging, for example, to advocates of removing war statues in Charlottesville. Events here in 2017 led to the removal of Confederate statues in other places, and helped move the national culture in that direction. Perhaps someday, even in Charlottesville, the statues will come down.
A second lesson may be this. The living wage campaign has had a success at a moment when there was an active visible living wage campaign at UVA, and there was also a much larger than before living wage campaign on the national stage.
Just as the demand to take down statues drew on the Black Lives Matter movement that was much larger than Charlottesville, this latest wage policy at UVA has drawn on the Fight For $15 movement. It's good that these movements are widespread, and it's good that local changes can result.
A third and related lesson is that politicians do not always lie. I hesitate to call UVA's new president a politician for fear he might take it as an insult. That fact is indicative of the regard in which most people hold most politicians in the United States today. UVA's new president, Jim Ryan, came in talking about morality and the public interest and all sorts of sweet-smelling platitudes. I even had a mutual friend of his and mine assure me he was really a great guy.
But his predecessor had claimed to be quite the humanitarian while insisting on poverty wages. Ryan's promises were vague enough to avoid meaning anything. If you have, like I have, lived through Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump and not grown a wee bit skeptical, I don't know what to say except that you must be so sick of all the "winning" since Trump took over that you don't need any cheering up from me.
While I was still at UVA, I attended a living wage conference at Yale, where there has been a living wage campaign ever since. Ryan came to UVA from Yale.
A fourth lesson, and this is a good thing, is that eternal vigilance will be needed from now until, well, eternity. The devil is in a couple of key details.
First, the new policy does not explicitly index the new wage to increase with the cost of living. Almost all minimum wage and living wage efforts everywhere are attempts to restore lost value, even though they are always described as demands for minimum wage "increases." If there is some reason not to make the wage level permanent (other than that the living wage activists have demanded $16.84, not $15.00), it is not provided in UVA's webpage on the subject, which merely says: "The method for ongoing adjustments to UVA's base wage is still being determined." I recommend contacting UVA and helping them determine it.
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