Income inequality in the United States has reached levels previously thought unimaginable. The top 20 percent of the population owns more than 72 percent of the wealth, while the top 0.01 percent of the population took home an average compensation of $23,846,950. And 14.5 percent of the population – more than 45 million people – languish in poverty.
But while Occupy and Upworthy have made us aware of these statistics on a national level, it’s also important to analyze the role than income inequality plays in our own communities. Massachusetts is the third-most unequal state in the union, against the backdrop of our neighbors to the north (Vermont is 31st, Maine is 38th and New Hampshire is 46th).
North Amherst’s poverty rate is at 46.3 percent while the center of town’s poverty rate is at 30.5 percent. This is significantly higher than the national average and twice the rate of Northampton’s. (The poverty rate in Amherst is overwhelmingly composed of students, as only 7.2 percent of families in Amherst live below the poverty line.) A visit to the Amherst Survival Center or a walk through downtown will quickly reveal some of the sites of exclusion in the brave new global economy.
A similar dynamic exists at the University of Massachusetts. The average student debt for a UMass graduate is $29,406 – a crushing load that cannot be excised by bankruptcy. Thousands of student workers work jobs paying under $11 an hour. A full assistantship nets grad students just over $460 per week before taxes for only a part of the year – barely enough to cover the steadily increasing costs of rent in the Pioneer Valley.
UMass spent more than $836,000 in 2014 to buy out the contract of former football coach Charley Molnar, who was fired Dec. 26. There are 224 employees of the University who make over $200,000 per year.
UMass men’s basketball coach Derek Kellogg makes $719,663, biology professor Derek Lovley makes $703,164 and the president of the University, Robert Caret, makes $653,472.
The salaries of top administrators at UMass have gone far above the rate of inflation and there are more and more of them doing God knows what at the expense of both undergrad and graduate students’ ever-expanding debt. Meanwhile, UMass cut health benefits for workers, meaning that some graduate student workers have been stuck with thousands in medical costs despite working for UMass full time.
In spite of the rhetoric about UMass being a bubble, the social inequities that characterize American society are strongly present – with the division between UMass’ 99 percent and 1 percent becoming starker every day.
How can we fight back? All of UMass’ unions are in contract negotiations this year, and there needs to be a united front to both eliminate poverty wages – largely among blue collar members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees – and to preserve job security, good health care and living wages for the other unions on campus.
Undergraduate workers need to organize themselves too. The wages currently earned by workers at Auxiliary Services, for example, are significantly below the kind of wage needed to survive, with rents in the Pioneer Valley frequently topping $700 per month. Unions have been the key tool historically for working people in the United States to come together and win their rights.
In the next month, all of the unions will be organizing to win a better contract from the administration. Everyone at UMass has a stake in their outcome. Is UMass for a tiny, high-paid elite cabal? Or is it a public good working for the Commonwealth? Is it a site for and poverty wage jobs? Or is it an equalizer in our society, providing low-cost education and living-wage jobs? The answer is up to us, and how we organize ourselves.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook is a Collegian contributor and can be reached at [email protected].
