A Look Back at a Living Wage Campaign

New York State ESP leader Debbie Minnick looks back to the time her local affiliate boosted starting paraprofessional pay by 50 percent.

We paraprofessionals were the lowest paid in the Ithaca, New York, district. And you know what we do: We work with the most difficult kids in the whole school district. Sometimes, we have more of a connection with the students than the classroom teachers. I’m talking about special ed students; we’re with them more, directly teaching them more.

Respect was such an issue throughout our whole living wage campaign. Not only did we want the pay, but we wanted the respect that went along with that.I had three different women in my local come to me and say they went to the Salvation Army for dinner. They didn’t have any more food at home and they didn’t have any more money to make it through to their pay day. Three of them happened to run into one another eating at the Salvation Army.

You just get pushed into a campaign like this. What’s right is right, and what’s just is just, and you have to take on this kind of commitment—all of you.

It’s a Ton of Work
We started negotiating with the district in January 2001. We took several months before that preparing for negotiations with staff from the NEA state affiliate. We were very lucky to have a local living wage coalition.We asked for $11.50 per hour, which I think was a 73 percent raise. When we told him, the assistant superintendent had his own calculator out. He put his glasses down, looked at us incredulously and said, “You do know that’s a 73 percent raise, don’t you?”Not to fool you—it’s a ton of work. And it was key to have all members on board before we started. We had meeting after meeting, before the campaign, during the campaign, all the time.Written communications were going out, telling members what we were asking for, telling them what we were getting ourselves into. We told them we could not do this without everybody’s support. If you don’t have your own members on board, it’s going to fail.

Reaching Out to the Community
Our next step was to get the community involved. Throughout the year and a half of this living wage campaign, we escalated our outreach activities—we held candlelight vigils, rallies, panels with well-known community members, and testimony of paraprofessionals. We told the community who we were, what we did, and what we earned for all of that.We made a video (Video Part I; Video Part II) and we screened it at the local library, and at the same time, invited a panel of seven religious leaders—including a priest, a rabbi, a minister, and a Tibetan monk--who all read scriptures about the indecency of paying people poverty wages, which is what we were earning.As the campaign escalated, we had a "Parade for Paras." We ended having 500 people in the parade itself, not counting the people who were watching the parade. We had stilt walkers and jugglers, kids from the schools, kids on bikes with signs that said, “Tykes on bikes for pay hikes.” It was a huge family and community event.

We also sent out petitions, that were very easy to create and get signatures for. We just asked: Would you pay more in your taxes to support paraprofessionals in the district so they can earn a living wage? People were signing left and right. At first, they didn’t know who paraprofessionals were. When we explained what we did and what we were payed, they were appalled.In just a couple of days, 3,000 people signed -- a tenth of the population. We turned the petitions over to the board members.

You Have to Go For It
Just before we settled, one of our last activities was taking over the school board meeting completely. . . We had about 50 people signed up to speak. The board said, “We’ll take the first couple of people and then we’ll adjourn for executive session,”which they knew would last a couple of hours. “The rest of you can wait until we get back,” they said. Well, the announcement sent everybody over the edge. We all stormed the microphone, chanting, “Let us speak! Les us speak!”They were so embarrassed, that the whole nine-member board, the superintendent, and all the school administrators huddled for about ten minutes, and finally said, “OK.” And then they listened to all 50 of us individually.

You'll Get What you Bargain For
Remember, if you’re asking for 50 percent or 20 percent, who cares what you end up with? It’s better than the 3 percent that you normally get. So you can’t think of any of it as a failure, because you’re going to get more than what you normally bargain for. And, in June 2002, we won a 50 percent raise in the starting salary at the end of the third year of the contract, and no givebacks!

—From an interview with Dave Winans, NEA Today