A friend of mine is underemployed and looking for work. The other day she pointed out a classified ad in which the Town of Buena Vista announced its wish to hire a recreation manager. This is not just day labor: An associate’s degree with outdoor recreation courses is required, plus three years of experience, and a bachelor’s degree is preferred. It is a supervisory position, too, but the pay is a whopping $13 per hour and, as the ad tersely stated, there are no benefits.
Good jobs that pay well are thin on the ground in the Upper Arkansas Valley, as in most rural areas, and this ad will certainly attract applicants. Perhaps the person who will be hired has a spouse with a job that offers some sort of medical insurance coverage for families.
They warn you the job requires working evenings, weekends and holidays during the summer. It is only a part-time job because there are just 1,200 paid hours per year, but it will average 35 hours per week for the busy summer months, so you cannot have another part-time job. They warn you, too, that you will have to attend government meetings (I shudder) and do whatever else needs doing around town hall in your spare time – although with those limited hours, I wonder how much spare time you will have. Unless he or she has some kind of self-employment, the person who takes this job will have to live on $15,600 per year. Especially harsh is the lack of benefits: no retirement plan, no overtime, no paid holidays and certainly no medical insurance.
I work with nonprofit organizations, which are similar to municipal governments in doing things society needs with minimum financial resources, unable to raise prices because they do not sell their services. In Internet discussions, we sometimes talk about a nonprofit organization’s moral duty to pay a living wage to its employees. That moral duty is shared by the volunteers and donors and board members of a nonprofit, too, and they recognize it. If the nonprofit is not able or willing to treat its employees decently, the consensus is, it should go out of business or its supporters should walk away. Providing community benefits in the mission area the nonprofit has chosen does not justify treating its employees like dirt.
I am not throwing rocks at officials in Buena Vista because I know they are hammered every day by people who think taxes are too high, or that there simply must be a great deal of “waste and abuse” in government budgets, although those budgets have been under a microscope every year for decades. Our elected officials are also pushed to provide recreation services. All of this pushing and pulling leads to towns’ trying to do too much with too little, and that means offering jobs that simply do not pay enough – that do not meet our moral duty to pay a living wage.
The Town of Buena Vista cannot go out of business, unlike a nonprofit organization, and its citizens cannot just walk away, unlike the board members of a nonprofit. What the voters can do is recognize their moral duty to provide decent pay for the jobs their towns offer. There are tough choices to be made, of course – if this is the most the budget will allow us to pay the recreation manager, then we either pay this much or we do without. But we should recognize that there is a choice to be made, and we voters should not ignore the problem and make our elected officials do our dirty work while we look the other way.
We are all ready to criticize the coal companies that pay too little for dangerous work, but we seldom recognize that we – all of us Colorado voters – are doing much the same thing as the shareholders of those coal companies: We are profiting from the misery of others. Like the people who live in coal country, the potential employees in our towns have nowhere else to go and they take the jobs that are offered. We should make sure those jobs pay a living wage.
Or, at the very least, offer health insurance coverage.
F.R. Pamp is a lawyer and consultant in Salida.
