“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.”
The first time I read four-term U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s statement, I was shocked by his audacity. As a union member from a union family, I thought, “Amen!” As someone who relies on a steady stream of paying customers to employ a small staff, I squirmed.
He wasn’t wrong. Our country’s record on workers’ wages leaves much to be desired. Since our founding, we have relied on stolen and exploited labor to entice consumers with low prices and drive up profits. Many working families remain in a perpetual state of poverty. More than 12% of people in Boulder County met official federal poverty guidelines in 2022, above the national rate. There seems to be no end to the suffering we are willing to inflict upon each other to ensure a steady supply of cheap labor.
The brain imaging research facility I have managed for over a decade is based at CU Boulder but operates as a nonprofit. Unlike many units at CU, we don’t receive funding from tuition dollars or indirect costs from research grants. Fees for our services cover the costs of staff salaries and benefits, equipment repairs and other basic expenses such as rent. More than for-profit service industries, staff salaries and benefits are our largest expense, accounting for 65% of our budget last year.
For the first seven years of my tenure, I followed the tried-and-true business model of keeping our rates as low as possible to benefit our customers. This meant keeping everyone’s salaries low, including my own. As the cost of housing, childcare and other living expenses in Boulder County crept up pre-pandemic, it became clear that this strategy was unsustainable. If our highly-specialized staff left in search of pay that covered their basic expenses, our turnover costs would be untenable.
In 2019, with support from our executive director, we collectively decided to increase our wages by almost 15% and plan for subsequent annual increases that would keep up with inflation.
The salary bump in the first year was easier to navigate due to an unexpectedly high sales year. The following year, the pandemic hit. Rather than cutting staff or furloughing employees, we worked with our customers to figure out how to conduct human research during a global pandemic. Our collaboration made us one of the first facilities of our kind in the country to reopen, and we had another unexpectedly high sales year.
As our sales have normalized over the last three years, our salaries have continued to increase. Because we sell a lot of units throughout the year, our salary increases were spread over many transactions. Our customers’ costs went up slightly but less than our wages.
Two years ago, an unfunded federal mandate related to data storage and sharing required that we hire more staff, to whom we also committed to paying a living wage. Consequently, we increased prices last year by 7.5%. This year, we faced another 11% price increase. It was beyond what we thought anyone would pay.
We weren’t willing to walk back the livable wages we’d spent five years creating. We began to have hard conversations about which positions to consider cutting to keep our facility going. And then, as we talked to our clients about the devastating choice we were facing between cutting staff and raising prices, something remarkable began to happen: Our clients refused to let us make that binary choice.
“You are worth it,” they said. “We will help.”
Over a couple of months, our customers rallied around us. They helped us figure out creative ways to balance our budget, not just by paying more for our new services but also by temporarily hiring some of our staff part-time for their own projects to reduce our overall costs, committing to helping us increase sales and generally joining us in the work of staying afloat.
What we hadn’t realized when we committed to raising our salaries five years ago was that we would be strengthening our connections to each other. We could spend time with our families and friends. Student employees were able to stop working multiple minimum wage jobs to pay their bills. We were better rested, less stressed and more focused on our work, which helped us guide our customers through unprecedented challenges like a global pandemic. We felt valued and became even more invested in our work, and our customers became even more invested in us.
On Aug. 22, Boulder’s City Council will consider options for raising our city’s minimum wage, including aligning with Boulder County to achieve a $25 per hour minimum by 2030. Longmont, Louisville, Lafayette and Erie will have similar discussions this fall.
I hope in these conversations we remember that supporting workers and local businesses is not mutually exclusive. As caring, compassionate communities, we all have a role to play in ensuring our workers can meet their basic needs.
Some of our small and micro-businesses may need our support to navigate this bold transition, especially the women- and minority-owned businesses that face systemic inequities. The beauty of committing to invest in and support our local businesses and our workers is that we won’t pit business owners against workers. As local small business owner and equity consultant Jovita Schiffer says, “Equity isn’t keeping one part of our population down to keep from harming another. Equity is making changes that work for everyone.”
Working together, our research facility arrived in a stable financial place this year. Despite our unexpected price increase, we kept every client. We also kept every employee except the student workers who graduated. Our incomes are still lower than we’d get in for-profit industries, but 80% of us now have base salaries that would allow us to support our varying household sizes at a minimum of 80% of the area median income, even if we were the only income earners in our families (which half of us are). Even our lowest-paid, entry-level student workers earn $18 an hour.
I still squirm when I read FDR’s words. But I know he was right. We should invest in a future where everyone has what they need, from the workers to the businesses that employ them. When consumers, workers and employers commit to each other’s wellbeing, we can finally interrupt our society’s pattern of worker exploitation and move closer to becoming the sustainable, equitable and resilient community we all deserve.
Dr. Nicole Speer is member of United Campus Workers Colorado — CWA Local 7799, a director of research services at CU Boulder, and mayor pro tem on Boulder’s city council. She is writing in her personal capacity.
This opinion does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly
Read more opinions on Boulder’s minimum wage from former two-time small business owner Susan Gibson and current restaurateur Kevin Daly, of Mountain Sun Pubs