Melanie Chan/Staff

Right now, the city of Berkeley is considering an increase in its minimum wage. A higher minimum wage would help thousands of residents afford the city’s high costs of basic living necessities, like food and rent. It would also give our university’s students a fighting chance to pay for college.

I am fortunate enough not to be in a situation where I need to depend on a minimum-wage job to support myself during school. But as a Cal student and a former restaurant worker, I know how difficult it is to maintain such a job while taking a full course load. Living on those wages while paying for tuition would be nearly impossible. Unfortunately, for many of my classmates, surviving on low-wage jobs is a reality.

A lot of people don’t realize that putting yourself through college is much more difficult now than it was 20 years ago. Today, tuition prices are higher than ever, and students are struggling to survive on a severely outdated minimum wage.

A couple decades ago, the total amount of fees due for the 1994-95 academic year at UC Berkeley was $4,346.50 for an in-state student, as reported in the fee schedule archive on UC Berkeley’s Office of the Registrar website. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI inflation calculator, that amount of money has the same buying power as $6,848.35 in 2013. That’s half of the $12,864 an in-state UC Berkeley student is going to have to pay this year. This hefty price tag doesn’t even include textbooks or housing.

In 1994, California’s minimum wage was $4.25 an hour, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations website. That would be would be worth $6.70 today, as measured by the CPI inflation calculator. If the 1994 minimum wage worth $6.70 doubled in constant dollars like UC Berkeley’s tuition costs, students today would be paid more than $12 an hour. It’s absurd that the minimum wage has only increased from what would be worth $6.70 today to just $8 — or $1.30 in constant dollars over the last two decades.

In an ideal world, a full-time student would be able to work 25 hours a week, every week, earning $10,400 for the entire year. However, a more realistic picture would take into consideration all of a student’s responsibilities outside of class: doing homework, studying for midterms and finals, writing research papers and participating in extracurricular activities and internships. These overwhelming priorities are vital for a successful career after graduation, but they often make sleeping, eating and sometimes even maintaining personal hygiene difficult to attain for most college kids.

Furthermore, anyone who has ever worked a minimum-wage job knows it isn’t easy, especially in a restaurant. Contrary to popular belief, this type of job can be incredibly fast-paced, intense and exhausting. Customers don’t often realize that their server has been running around like crazy, constantly rushing to get the next order out for the last five hours. They don’t know their server’s friendly smile could be masking the aching of tired feet as well as anxiety about an upcoming midterm.

That smile is bright and cheerful because getting decent tips could mean the ability to afford groceries that week. Still, there’s never any real certainty or stability in tips, especially for servers at casual restaurants. Tipped workers depend on the noncompulsory generosity of strangers, which can vary greatly among restaurants. At least tipped workers in California can rely on the guarantee of the minimum wage; tipped workers in some other states are paid as little as $2.13 an hour.

However, here in Berkeley, we have an opportunity to do better. Adding a couple of dollars to the minimum wage isn’t a lofty or outrageous goal; it is a small but vital change that would better the lives of our poorest workers.

Raising the minimum wage for everyone isn’t an attempt to run beloved local businesses out of town either. A higher minimum wage would increase the spending power of tens of thousands of people, including Berkeley’s students — one of the city’s largest consumer demographics. It’s a hard fact that operating costs are getting higher and harder for business owners to maintain. But that also means rent and food costs are increasing for their employees as well.

Our college students and minimum-wage workers need higher wages, especially here in Berkeley. We desperately need a higher city minimum wage for everybody, including tipped workers. The cost of living in Berkeley is much higher than it is in the rest of California. It is far too much to ask of anyone to survive on $8 an hour. It’s completely unrealistic to expect a stagnant wage to adequately provide for the constantly rising costs of going to college and living a decent life.

Shannon Lin is a second year student at UC Berkeley.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

The post All we need is a fighting chance appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Twelve of the warmest years on record have come in the last 15 years, and while 97 percent of climate scientists agree that this trend is a direct result of human activities, progress on comprehensive national climate legislation has long been stalled. In a speech at Georgetown University in June, Barack Obama unveiled his administration’s long-awaited climate plan, which has been lauded as a step in the right direction, and criticized for its support of nuclear and natural gas, among other shortcomings. One sentence toward the end of the president’s speech, however, stood out to thousands of student activists across the nation: “Invest. Divest. Remind folks there’s no contradiction between a sound environment and strong economic growth.” While many Americans did not recognize the sentence as a reference to an expansive climate justice movement growing in the United States and abroad, students at more than 300 campuses took Obama’s words as an acknowledgment of the now two-year-old campaign to pressure their institutions to drop stocks from the fossil fuel industry.

The campaign originated at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 2010 when students visited communities in Appalachia decimated by mountaintop removal coal mining. Infuriated by systemic inaction at the federal and state level, students decided to target their board of trustees, arguing that it is morally wrong to invest money in companies that destroy mountains and pollute the air, water and land. Since 2011, thousands of students, religious leaders and elected city officials across the country have taken up the same logic, leveraging divestiture as a tactic to target the reputation of the fossil fuel industry, whose business model relies on mining and burning five times more carbon than scientists agree is safe to burn to avert runaway climate change.

In ridding a portfolio of fossil fuel stocks, institutional investors have an opportunity to make a moral statement as well as an economically wise decision that is in line with their fiduciary responsibilities. Many institutions and municipalities that have already voted to divest have done so because it is also prudent to avoid unnecessary risks associated with the existing international market for carbon. According to recent UC Berkeley graduate Katie Hoffman, “The economic research coming out of this movement makes it clear that there exists a carbon bubble, and if governments take any steps to regulate carbon in the ways necessary to avert certain climate catastrophe, more than half of the industry’s assets are at risk of becoming stranded.” Beyond focus on divestment, some students are also proposing that institutions reallocate divested funds into areas of the economy that are productive in climate-change adaptation and mitigation, thereby contributing to tangible climate and energy solutions.

Perhaps this logic spurred the recent commitment from the city of Berkeley to divest its asset holdings from the fossil fuel industry. Inspired by the work of UC students across the state, particularly the Fossil Free Cal campaign at UC Berkeley, the city became one of the first to move forward on climate by making fossil fuel divestment official city policy. It is likely that the Fossil Free UC campaign will have to remain vigilant to sway the regents toward full divestment, given the complicated nature of the UC investment portfolio structure, but students leading the effort are prepared to do just that. This Wednesday, student leaders from across the UC system will address the Regents for the third time to propose a five-year plan to put the University of California system on a similar path to the city of Berkeley.

College campuses have long served as wellsprings for widespread social and political change, and the city of Berkeley’s decision to divest alongside other municipalities like Seattle and Cambridge, Mass., illustrates that the movement is transcending its collegiate origins. More importantly, it is sparking the kind of national conversation needed to force climate change and the future of energy onto the U.S. political agenda. While Obama’s speech and climate action plan may have little bearing on the trajectory of federal climate policy during his term, the movement to address the climate crisis will continue to play out on and off campuses at the state and local level as the case for fossil fuel divestment continues to gain political and economic legitimacy.

Ophir Bruck is a fourth-year student at UC Berkeley and a fossil free summer fellow with 350.org.Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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