SA Labor Commission proposes $15 student minimum wage

By Hongtao Hu     10/8/24 11:33pm

The Student Association’s Labor Commission advocated for a $15 minimum wage for student workers during a Student Association meeting Sept. 30, based on results from a student wage survey. Currently collecting signatures for a petition, the Labor Commission said that raising the minimum wage for student workers would reduce financial burdens for students. 

The Labor Commission began last year in order to “raise awareness about the working conditions of Rice’s undergraduate employees and advocate for their needs,” according to their website. They are collecting signatures for a petition to Rice administration on Google Forms.

Oscar Vietor, chair of the Labor Commission, said that the increase was motivated by a desire for students to earn fair wages compared to other university employees.

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“[$15 an hour is] the lowest wage that Rice already pays to faculty and staff,” Vietor, a Wiess College sophomore, said. “Undergraduates are, as far as I know, the only employees that are paid lower than this $15 an hour mark that are employed by Rice. And so I think it’s only fair that Rice pays undergraduates the same way that they pay all of their other employees, because undergraduate workers also provide value to the university.”

The minimum wage for non-student Rice employees was raised to $15 an hour in 2023. According to a survey from the Labor Commission, the median hourly wage for student workers was $12 an hour. 

According to Caitlin Lindsay, the director of student center operations, Rice student-run business finances are not regulated by the Rice administration. A $15 student minimum wage could raise prices as the university does not currently subsidize SRBs.

“Feasibility [of a $15 minimum wage] will depend on the individual business, but may result in the need to increase costs for food or services,” Lindsay wrote in an email to the Thresher. “All three of the businesses are intentional to keep prices as low as possible for the Rice community, but that means their profit margins are slimmer.”

Matti Haacke, the Labor Commission Vice Chair, stated that their proposal intended for Rice to subsidize student wages to prevent an impact on prices. 

“Rice has a very significant endowment. They’re constantly spending money on things like the Ion project, in which they invested $100 million on developing buildings downtown. And they can already afford to pay all of their other employees $15 an hour,” Haacke, a Sid Richardson College senior, said. “If Rice recognized that like this is something that they need to do, that student workers really need that increase in wages, it’s something that they financially would be capable of doing.”

However, subsidizing SRBs may affect their independent nature, something that Nick Foglia, the financial manager of Rice Bikes, said he is concerned about. 

“If we started receiving money from Rice directly, then yes, we could afford to pay people more,” Foglia, a Will Rice College junior, said. “But I think at the same time, what makes the student-run businesses unique and gives us our freedom to operate in the way that we do is that we don’t receive any supplemental assistance from Rice.”

Foglia said that with current wages at Rice Bikes ($10 for new hires, $12 for shift managers, $13 for general managers), a $15 minimum wage would mean that all tiers of wage would be affected, impacting Rice Bikes’ financials.

While Rice Bikes has access to the RMC garage and makes tax-free purchases, Rice itself does not provide financial assistance to it and other SRBs.

“In our history as a business, we never have received supplemental aid on a yearly basis from Rice, and so I don’t know what that would look like moving forward,” Foglia said. “I’m not implying that Rice would alter our business in any way, but it is still something that we have to consider.”

For Vietor, the purpose of the Labor Board’s petition is to bring students’ desires to Rice Administration’s attention.

“Last year, throughout my research with the Houston Action Research team, I was in constant contact with HR and a lot of individuals who oversee undergraduate employment. The perspective I heard from them was not one of recognition that student workers rely on their income to live at Rice,” Vietor said. “Their perspective was that these jobs provide an experience or some sort of value to the students that’s not in the monetary income that they get…so I think it’d be important for us to change that perspective to show that Rice undergraduates really would benefit from a wage increase.”

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