Opposed:
The university’s endowment already supports several integral parts of the Emory community, including our staff’s wages and financial aid.
Even with the latter category growing by 10 percent in 2012, many Emory students and their families are struggling to bear the brunt of the rising cost of education, housing and meal plans, which have risen by 49 percent between 2000 and 2010 for private institutions across the country.
In fact, the amount of loans taken on by students has tripled in the past eight years, a third of which end up in delinquency.
As these students are burdened with more debt, stress from working several hours a week in addition to class, and facing difficulties in finishing their education, we must take into account the opportunity costs of the hardship fund.
In fact, lower amounts of financial aid could even deter prospective students, thereby reducing the diversity and wealth of opinions at our university. We must ask ourselves, is it worth taking from one pocket to pay another?
Moreover, the onus of fulfilling the lost insurance should be on the state of Georgia, not the private institutions and employees it punishes.
Should the university create a permanent hardship fund for all of its employees, the proposal strengthens the state’s argument that this is a cost that should be borne solely by the employers themselves without any assistance from the state’s coffers.
As Georgia’s third-largest employer, Emory holds a unique position by which it can exert influence over the state’s policies, or if the proposition to create a hardship fund were to pass, encourage further state cuts. Rather, the university should lobby Georgia by showing the difficulties and tradeoffs it faces in filling the holes the state has created by cutting this unemployment insurance.
The broader issue of state insurance reform affects not only those who are contracted at Emory, but also, as described by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “bus drivers, cafeteria workers, private school teachers and others.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics has identified 64,702 Georgians who would fall under the category that the insurance affects. In this way, the decision to create a hardship fund could have ripple effects throughout the state.
Instead of focusing on Sodexo, Emory should use its economic and political clout to encourage the Georgia Legislator and Labor Commissioner Butler to rethink its decision to deny seasonal workers unemployment insurance.
While this issue is clearly larger than Emory, we can all agree that the University can and should play a role in resolving it. That just should not be through the creation of a hardship fund.
Finally, this hardship fund could adversely affect job security for much of the on-campus staff.
Though the fund’s intent would be to ensure more stability for workers, the fund could increase competition for limited positions at Emory and thereby increase workforce turnover.
This could have the unintended consequence of increasing the difficulties employees face with making yearlong decisions, or worse yet, result in unemployment of current workers.
Given that even before the cuts all publicly employed seasonal workers, like teachers who do not work over the summer, have never received these insurance payments, the marginal benefit of additional wages might have a lower utility to employees than the pro-column asserts.
In fact, when faced with the choice of job security in this economic environment for years to come or higher wages, some, if not most, would choose the former over the latter.
A recent study corroborates this idea, as it found that public sector workers would rather have job security than receive a 17 percent wage hike.
In that vein, although the pro-column does raise several well-intentioned arguments, we must remember that intent is irrelevant when assessing the consequences of this proposal.
For the opposing viewpoint, click here
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