Unlike most of you, I’m not from New Jersey. I’m from good ol’ conservative Tennessee, where we believe in Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior, the right to bear firearms, blues music and seriously good barbeque.
Coming to Georgetown, I came to a place where I found people building the kingdom of God. I began to define my Georgetown home as a place where we believe in Jack the bulldog as inspiration for sports seasons, overpriced Corp smoothies, the glory of chicken madness and, above all, social justice.
The Jesuits, along with my other professors, pushed me to fiercely engage questions of justice. I fell in with the Solidarity Committee, the kids who helped me apply my knowledge and taught me how to make a mean vegan chocolate pie. I made a C-minus on my first paper for Church and the Poor. Then I got involved with the Georgetown Living Wage Campaign.
The living wage issue strikes at my identity; my dad came home dirty, wearing a shirt with his name sewn on the patch. I see my family’s struggle magnified in the working poor here at Georgetown, a class our Catholic rhetoric extols as blessed and our business practices maintain as poor.
Georgetown will always be the place where I fell in love with a woman who vacuumed in Lauinger and reminds me of my mom. I began to learn that chatting with the people who take out our trash is a sacrament which connects us to God and enhances relationship as humans with innate dignity. Such conversations are just like adoration in our beloved stone chapel; they mean our faith is a living practice rather than a stale idea. I found that Christ lives with the poor, and the poor clean our toilets.
Studying and working abroad, I went to a place where Catholicism means liberation and where the role of students like us is to empower the poor to solve their own problems. I studied with the Jesuits in the Dominican Republic. The tabernacle in the Jesuit Residence there is made of wood and scraps. The little house that holds what we Catholics call the “risen body of Christ” looks just like a shack in the surrounding barrio.
For them, Jesus suffers, struggles and celebrates with the resilient poor. Embarrassed, I admitted that Georgetown creates rather than challenges poverty.
We started to change this and promised publicly to pay workers a raise as a step towards an annually indexed wage of $14 an hour. After three years of work together and a nine-day hunger strike last semester, we as Georgetown committed to challenge poverty and adopted the Just Employment Policy. Yet somehow, worker pay stubs don’t reflect our promise. This makes us as Georgetown look like we’re lying.
The workers’ demand is reasonable: Use the Advisory Committee on Business Practices to implement the Just Employment Policy. The ACBP could and should disclose a specific breakdown of the components of each contractor’s total compensation package to all committee members by March 14.
As agreed, our living wage should account for the specific costs of living outlined in the Just Employment Policy: housing, healthcare, child care, transportation, taxes, food and other basic necessities. We must implement the promised raise from $11.33 hourly to a $13.00 hourly rate as a floor. Additionally, we should pay workers the proper back pay dating from July 1, 2005. And we must work towards the $14 minimum rate promised to begin July 2007.
We must also support workers in their desire to have a union by actively fostering an environment where freedom to organize and bargain collectively is respected. The best way to do this is voluntary recognition of their union through a process called majority sign-up or card check — a process which the subcontractor P&R has accepted as valid in other workplaces. We can and should empower janitors to represent themselves through a unified body, and we should trust that they are intelligent enough to know what they themselves need in their workplace.
I’ve been lots of places before and during my time at Georgetown. Now I’m at a place where I realize that the best way to thank Georgetown is to use what Georgetown has taught me academically and spiritually. We as students come to Georgetown to be challenged. It’s our responsibility to challenge Georgetown as well.
Georgetown workers challenge us to make policy a reality — let’s do that. If we don’t ensure that workers on this campus actually receive a dignified wage, we aren’t doing what we said we would and we aren’t who we say we are. If we are the Georgetown I love, we’ll not only learn about the kingdom of God; we’ll build it together here and now inside these gray stone gates.
Megan Murphy is a senior and a member of the Georgetown Solidarity Committee.