Alita Bentley works in food service at Cornell University. She’s been there for over a decade. Bentley dreams of owning a home that she could pass down to her children.
Instead, she said she’s barely making ends meet.
“Everything is doubled, except our salary, except our wages, that's something that's not doubled,” Bentley said. “How am I supposed to survive?”
That’s why Bentley and other members of United Auto Workers Local 2300 rallied on campus this week. The union represents service and maintenance workers at Cornell and is calling for a new contract that would, among other things, increase pay and adjust for inflation. Their old contract expired last month.
Bentley said essential workers like her have had to work through a multitude of challenges, including understaffing and the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We put our lives on the line for Cornell, when we were working during the pandemic,” she said. “We pulled through and I think we deserve a living wage.”
Bentley said she has to rely on housing vouchers to live in the city of Ithaca and still work at the university.
She said the university can afford to pay higher wages. A cost-of-living adjustment, she said, would make a huge difference.
“We're not asking a lot. Cornell is a billion dollar corporation.”
The university has an endowment valued at over $10 billion and is a tax-exempt institution.
Tompkins County, where Cornell is located, has a particularly high cost of living.
MIT’s Living Wage Calculator identifies a living wage for a single person in the area as $24.64 an hour. A study from Cornell's ILR School identified the living wage for Tompkins County at $18.45 an hour for a single person.
The union said the average hourly wage for members is currently $22 an hour.
UAW Local 2300 chapter president Christine Johnson said despite doing the work that keeps the campus operational, many workers are barely scraping by financially.
“We're trying to get Cornell to understand that our workers shouldn't be working two jobs. They shouldn't be living in 50-year-old mobile homes. They shouldn't be applying for things like Section 8.”
The union is also calling for longevity bonuses, an end to wage tiers, free parking for employees and safer working conditions.
UAW International representative Lonnie Everett said raising wages and making other improvements for workers won’t make a significant dent in Cornell’s finances. On top of that, he believes improving conditions for workers is in line with the university’s values.
“They should want to live that and embody that for the folks who work for them,” he said. “Not just at the management level and teachers and everybody else, but also the people who provide those very vital services for them to be able to do what they do every single day.”
Everett said negotiations between the university and the union are ongoing and a strike is still possible if they don’t reach a contract.
A Cornell University spokesperson said there are dates for discussion scheduled for August, adding that the university would "continue to bargain in good faith" and is "committed to reaching a fair and reasonable contract.”
The UAW isn’t the only union meeting Cornell at the bargaining table this summer. Cornell Graduate Students United is also negotiating its first contract with the university.
The academic term starts on August 26.
