Give Auburn Workers a Fair and Living Wage

Chief Financial Officer Kelli Shomaker and President Christopher Roberts

The United Campus Workers at Auburn University (UCW-AU) are committed to fairness and dignity for all who work at the university. We as undergraduate workers, graduate workers, staff workers, and faculty workers come together to call on Auburn University to pay its workers aliving wage. As employees of the university, we perform essential jobs that allow this university to function. Yet, we have seen our wages stagnate, our benefits stripped, rising costs of living, and the outsourcing of our coworkers’ positions. While we applaud the university for increasing compensation and benefits for some campus workers in recent years, we believe offering all employees a living wage benefits the university, its students, and the surrounding region. By investing further in its people, the University will fulfill its mission to improve lives through education, research, and service–tasks routinely accomplished by under-compensated workers.  The best way for the University to fulfill its mission and signal to its employees that they really matter is to provide us with a competitive and fair living wage.

Furthermore, providing a living wage makes the University more competitive with other SEC
schools; LSU has already increased its minimum stipends for PhD graduate assistants to
$23,000, and our membership has already reported losing potential graduate researchers based
on this pay difference.  Additionally, other SEC competitor schools such as the University of
Alabama have begun calls for a living wage, confirming that this is not an isolated issue. As
costs continue to rise, and wages stagnate, Auburn will lose out on the talent it has historically
produced.

Auburn University’s cost of attendance information estimates that students working, studying,
and living in Alabama will spend $11,401 per semester on housing, food, books, course
materials, supplies, equipment, transportation, and personal expenses. 2 On a 9-month
appointment (fall and spring), this comes out to $2,533.56 per month and on a 12-month
appointment (fall, summer, and spring), this comes out to $2,850.25 per month. On another
page, Auburn University estimates that for the 2024–2025 fall and spring semesters, graduate
students are expected to spend $22,802 on the costs described above; when divided across 9
months, this comes out to $2,533.56 per month. Some graduate students make as little as
$1,250 per month.  This does not account for the impact graduate student fees and healthcare
have on our take-home pay. Additionally, some graduate assistants under a 9-month payment
plan are ineligible for government assistance programs they could otherwise access under a 12-
month payment plan.  Without the essential research, teaching, grading, and support that graduate workers perform, Auburn University could not survive. For the good of this university, it’s time to pay graduate workers enough for us to live.

For too long, employees of the university have not earned a living wage. While Auburn
University has recently adopted a minimum wage of $15.00/hour, this does not apply to part-
time or student workers and, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator,5 a living wage for a
working adult with no children is just over $21 dollars per hour for the Auburn-Opelika area. For
an adult supporting another adult and three children, a living wage is just over $41 dollars per
hour.
Moreover, once an employee is hired into a staff position, paths to promotion and professional
development vary in availability from unit to unit and are not available with any certainty. Staff
are not evaluated for reclassification or promotion on a regular schedule, nor are they evaluated
by Auburn’s central HR division regularly. A unit that does not have the resources to pay
changes in compensation will not submit an employee for reclassification evaluation/review. As
a result, staff responsibilities and scope of work can grow over time without any corresponding
change in compensation.
Where Auburn University employees are not being correctly compensated and/or offered paths
to professional development or advancement because units are not equipped with funding or
properly trained HR liaisons, the university has an obligation to intervene, and we request that
they do so.
Each year Auburn breaks its record for undergraduate applications, a 14% increase in the last
year, while the University has seen an increase of 0.77% in part-time faculty and a drop of
0.55% in full-time faculty.6
According to Auburn’s data, President Roberts is paid approximately $65,500 per month which
is just above the lowest average annual salary for Instructors/Lecturers as of 2022-23.7,8
Instructors/Lecturers in some departments make considerably less than that average. On top of
this, contingent faculty are finding it harder and harder to transition to full-time faculty if they
ever do at all.

To: Chief Financial Officer Kelli Shomaker and President Christopher Roberts
From: [Your Name]

Grad Student Demands
● Raise all graduate assistantship base stipends to a minimum of $25,000 a year.
● Implement yearly cost of living adjustments for all graduate students.
● Eliminate graduate student fees.
● Offer graduate assistants the option of receiving their pay over the length of the
academic year (the 9-month pay plan) or a 12-month period (the 12-month pay
plan)

Staff Demands
● Raise minimum wage to $17.50
● Include part-time hourly workers and student workers in the minimum wage
increase
● Raise all salaries to equal 100% of regional peer institutions adjusted for local cost
of living
● Annual cost of living adjustment for all positions

Promotion:
● Commit to not working employees outside of their job descriptions
● Where employees need reclassification and increased compensation, but are
housed in units without the resources to meet new compensation requirements,
the central budget office should allocate the required funds
● Require a minimum wage increase of 5% for all promotions (including but not
limited to title changes and level changes such as Administrative Support I to
Administrative Support II)

Faculty Demands
● Institute a clear and solid pathway of promotion for faculty. As well as converting
applicable contingent positions immediately into full-time.
● Annual cost of living adjustment for all positions
● Address issues of pay compression & inversion
● Subsidies to offset rising costs of childcare and family