CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – The UVA Living Wage Campaign, the organization working to get University of Virginia staff, including administrative assistants and graduate student workers, a more adequate salary for the times, will join two events Friday to make their message heard.

On Friday at noon, a coalition of UVA workers, students, and alumni will hold a March for Collective Bargaining on the Lawn at UVA, starting at Bryan Hall and marching up to the Rotunda.

Then, at 12:45, charter busses will take the group to the UVA Board of Visitors meeting at the Boar’s Head resort, where Living Wage’s Pack the BOV event will call on the BOV to pause the search for the university’s next president, call for the resignation of rector Rachel Sheridan and vice rector Porter Wilkinson, and call for collective bargaining for the university staff.

“Our main goal is to fight for a living wage which in Charlottesville, Va., is currently close to $52,000 a year as a UVA employee living in the city of Charlottesville,” said Stef Gunst, of the UVA Living Wage Campaign, during an interview this week on The Corner. “Not everyone makes that wage. If you find that you’ve been struggling pretty recently, there are very concrete reasons for why that is.”

Gunst said collective bargaining would allow University workers and their union to negotiate a living wage.

“We have a union which is really exciting but the unio doesn’t have all the tools that it needs to be really effective coming to the negotiating table, and one of those is collective bargaining,” Gunst said. “We have that opportunity with our incoming Governor to get that ability back.”

UVA raised its base wage, or living wage, to $15 per hour in 2020. At that point, the university also announced that “several major contractors who work with the University are following suit and plan to raise the base wage for their employees who are working at UVA,” according to the school’s human resources website.

Gunst said the union wants to see that number move closer to $24 per hour.

She said that other issues beyond pay are on the group’s mind as well.

“People are understandably nervous and mistrustful of the current leadership,” Gunst said. “The Pack the BOV will be a call to make sure that we do not install a new president right now, that the current rector and vice rector resign, and then of course to push for these changes to recognize our union.”

According to a statement from United Campus Workers Virginia, the group’s union, “The march is a culmination of the events of the past six months. The forced resignation of Jim Ryan and the recently-signed agreement with the federal administration demonstrate that UVA’s Board of Visitors is willing to act without holding itself accountable to the University’s workers and students. As a result, the Board’s actions have been disastrous for UVA. The past six months illustrate that workers and students are best equipped to make decisions about their own working and learning conditions. The path to a stronger, more democratic university; a living wage; and better conditions for workers and students begins with collective bargaining.”