Over twenty student members of Georgetown’s Living Wage Coalition entered the fourth day of their hunger strike today after a university committee rejected the coalition’s proposal onday to adopt a “living wage.”

The hunger strike is part of an aggressive campaign being waged by the organization in response to what members claim is the university’s failure to adopt a living wage policy and raise contracted workers’ wages to $14.93 per hour including benefits.

At the meeting of the Advisory Committee on Business Practices on Monday, university Senior Vice President Spiros Dimolitsas introduced a proposal to raise the wages of subcontracted employees that would phase in a total compensation package of $14 per hour, including benefits, over the next three years.

Coalition members said they would refuse to accept any agreement that did not guarantee increases in annual wages to account for rising living costs and inflation.

Protesting coalition members set up a large tent in Red Square Tuesday and declared they would not eat until the university agreed to their demands for higher worker wages. Twenty-three students are currently full-time participants in the hunger strike and have not eaten since Tuesday.

Living Wage Coalition member Liam Stack (COL ’05) said that Todd Olson, vice president for student affairs, visited students in Red Square yesterday and notified them that the university would be sending letters within the next 48 hours to the parents of students participating the hunger strike requesting that they intervene.

The coalition’s struggle to increase contracted workers’ wages has become increasingly prominent in recent weeks, as members have intensified their efforts to win a “living wage” for employees. Students of Georgetown, Inc., commonly known as The Corp, gave $2,758 to aid its efforts late last month.

The intensified conflict between the university and the Living Wage Coalition has received attention from off campus. The nation’s largest labor union, the AFL-CIO, issued a statement yesterday in support of the coalition.

“The students’ hunger strike symbolizes the hunger of workers everywhere to secure good benefits, a fair wage, health care and a say in their working conditions,” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said.

University administrators presented a proposal Monday that aimed to compromise between students, who say the university could find money to increase workers’ wages, and the university, which maintains that it is doing its part to offer fair wages to contracted workers.

Jeanne Lord, associate vice president for student affairs and ACBP member, said that “there is still work to be done to find a solution that is fair and sustainable.”

In a broadcast e-mail sent Tuesday, Dimolitsas notified the university of a proposal to increase compensation for contracted workers. The university currently pays subcontracted workers an hourly wage of $8.50 plus health care for a total compensation package that ranges between $11.33 and $13.42 per hour, he said.

Dimolitsas said that those rates compare favorably with local living wage rates – $10.25 per hour in the District of Columbia and $11.36 in Alexandria, Virginia.

But the figures Dimolitsas offered in his e-mail have themselves become a point of debate.

“He’s never explained where that range comes from,” coalition member Mike Wilson (COL ’05) said of the wages Dimolitsas said are being paid to subcontracted workers.

Gladys Cisneros (SFS ’05), a student member of the subcommittee considering the “living wage” proposal, said the $10.25 figure that the university has cited is currently a proposal before the D.C. City Council which is based on calculations for living in Maryland and does not reflect conditions in the District.

Coalition members maintain that the most accurate measure of the current living wage is a total compensation package of $14.93 per hour, which includes health care benefits. That figure was based on a study by the D.C.-based advocacy group Wider Opportunities for Women.

But according to Daniel Porterfield, vice president for public affairs and strategic development, who has held various informal meetings with coalition members in recent years, living wage is a “contested” term.

“If you look at the standard of norms in the D.C. area, Georgetown already has a living wage policy,” he said.

“If you assume a substantial increase in costs, and you ask how you pay, one scenario is that you increase tuition, the other is that you cut expenses, another is that you cut back services,” Porterfield said. “The problem is that these are all unintended consequences.”

University spokeswoman Julie Green Bataille also stressed caution in approaching the issue.

“In all of this discussion, we don’t want to hurt the employees that we’re trying to help,” she said.

Several custodial workers who spoke with THE HOYA on the condition of anonymity said that their current hourly wage of $9.05 per hour makes it very difficult to make ends meet in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Housing costs were noted as particularly difficult.

One woman who has worked for the university for five years and is married with one daughter said students from the Living Wage Coalition came and spoke with workers last week about the movement and the hunger strike. She expressed appreciation.

Another man said, “I have faith in what they are doing.”

While university officials have not signaled an intention to commit to a living wage policy, they said they share students’ concerns for the wages of all workers on campus.

“You can see over the last three years that there’s a very clear commitment to improving the lives of these workers,” Bataille said. “We need to come up with something that can be a serious and thoughtful approach to this.”

Dimolitsas’ proposal to raise wage to $14 per hour over three years would cost $542,308.

This figure does not account for the indirect costs of compression – if the lowest earning employee receives a wage increase, his or her supervisor must also have a comparable salary increase.

Student members of the subcommittee that has dealt with the living wage issue also expressed frustration that Dimolitsas had not consulted the group before making his proposal, which some students said gave the appearance of appeasement in the face of the threatened hunger strike.

“We were disrespected by that committee,” Cisneros said.