General Discussion

xchrom

(108,903 posts) Sun Dec 2, 2012, 09:51 AM Dec 2012

How Students in San Jose Raised the Minimum Wage

http://www.thenation.com/article/171510/how-students-san-jose-raised-minimum-wage

Waitress Glenda Alvarenga picks up lunch plates at a cafe in California. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
?

In the spring of 2011, students in a sociology class at San Jose State University got together to brainstorm ways to make the world a better place. The course they were taking, Social Action, focused on theory and history while also encouraging students to “apply social change to the local community.” For Marisela Castro, a junior, the promise of action was precisely what she was looking for, and she already knew the issue she’d champion. She was on a mission to raise the minimum wage.

Like many students at San Jose State, Castro came from a household where low wages weren’t an abstract injustice. Her parents had labored in California’s fields, and Castro was putting in long hours at an after-school program to help pay for college. At work she kept seeing kids swipe extra snacks because food was running low at home. “Their parents were working nonstop but only making the minimum wage,” she tells me.

Castro knew that San Francisco had raised its minimum wage in 2003 and saw no reason San Jose couldn’t do the same. She pitched the idea, and two other students joined her group, mapping out a plan.

Professor Scott Myers-Lipton, who teaches the Social Action course, estimates that 80 percent of his students work at least thirty hours a week. “I’ve been struggling with paying rent and bills for years now,” says Leila McCabe, a student who joined Castro’s group and eventually became an organizer with the Campus Alliance for Economic Justice. “Something’s wrong when you work hard but can’t make a real living.” This is a common complaint in San Jose, home to Adobe, Cisco Systems and eBay, and recently named the sixth-most-expensive city in the country, with rents increasing at a faster pace than in any other metropolitan area.