Enjoying a Paul Bunyan Burger at Memorial Union: $4. Providing students with a living wage: $823,000. Watching Student Labor Action Coalition squirm as it fails to find funding to foot the Living Wage bill: Priceless.
As predicted, the funding required to finance the $823,000, which raises student salaries to $10.23, has yet to be found.
On one front, administration leaders have questioned whether students have the right to determine nonallocable-segregated fees. The central dispute involves shared governance, and whether the student government has the right to set wage policy or employee requirements.
Either way, university administration has the leverage to permanently table the referendum, and should do exactly that.
Granted the Living Wage referendum did pass in three separate elections, this in no way acts as a student mandate. Both this referendum and the Student Union Initiative passed with low voter turnout, but SUI waged a responsible campaign, making it worthy of administrative support.
SLAC, on the other hand, ran an irresponsible campaign of sound bites culminating in a referendum whose language completely failed to address the consequences of passage.
Lest the referendum tricked voters into thinking the money for the wage increase would magically mint from thin air, here's a clarification: SLAC had no clue and no plan for how to procure the funding.
If swiped from the segregated fee coffer, the money would essentially empty the pockets of all students and pad the wallets of a handful of gainfully employed ice cream scoopers.
It is even more counterintuitive and short-sighted to raise the price of Paul Bunyan Burgers or Union food in general (as proposed by SLAC member Ashok Kumar) to fund such an exhorbitant salary increase.
Shared governance should mean that student election results help guide administrative decison-making, but it is impossible for administrators to peg long-term decisions to the short-term whims of the latest 6 percent of students that turn out to vote.
In this situation, the UW-Madison administration has a right and obligation to deny funding initiatives for Living Wage.
