Over 200 University students, faculty and employees attended the Workers' Rights Organizing Committee rally yesterday to advocate fair wage increases for the University's lowest-paid workers.
Last year, WROC was successful in lobbying the University to allocate $1.5 million to raise salaries of these workers to 101 percent of market rates, reduce outsourcing of labor to independent companies and reduce hiring of temporary workers.
This year, WROC has new goals.
According to Vincent Lloyd '03, an organizer of WROC, yesterday's rally was held to support a cost of living adjustment to protect worker salaries from inflation and protest the University's system of allocating raises through what WROC calls biased pay-for-performance reviews. In addition, WROC leaders demanded that the University conduct an open market survey to calculate worker pay instead of conducting a confidential one.
WROC representatives said they support COLA because they believe that the cost of living has outpaced worker salary increases in recent years.
This has caused many employees to accept multiple jobs to manage their households, they said.
"If you have to work three jobs on a market wage then that's not fair," Lloyd said.
Members of WROC also complained that the University's use of PFP reviews are unjust. Through these tests, managers rate workers in various categories, and only high scorers receive raises.
"PFP is crazy because there's a fixed pool of money. So the more workers who do well, the less the size of the pay increases for the strong performers," master of ceremonies Nicholas Guyatt GS said in an e-mail.
"Managers have made it quite clear that they're under instructions not to give top scores to a worker year after year, because this would take that worker's salary far beyond those of other workers," Guyatt added. "This has a negative effect on morale even for the small minority of workers who've gotten more money under PFP."
WROC also wants the University to stop calculating market wage levels in secret. Currently, salaries are determined by private employee surveys, but workers are not told how the University arrives at its figures.
Rich Wilder, a representative of Service Employees International Union said, "These surveys are an insult to us."
Most participants said they felt the rally was a success because they were able to make their views known to University officials.
Princeton Union of Library Assistants member Samira Cisson said, "Princeton is a better place when we stick to our convictions of what is right."
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