Despite the cold weather, members of United Campus Workers of Georgia united in front of the University of Georgia Arch this morning. Students and faculty members of UCWGA gathered to protest for free parking for UGA workers and higher salaries for graduate students.
UGA workers pay up to $480 a year to park on campus, according to flyers being passed out at the protest. As a member of UCWGA, Patricia Evans, a building services worker at the Mary Frances Early College of Education, has been a prominent figure in the fight for free parking for UGA employees.
“We are here to perform our job duties, and there is money coming out of our paycheck,” Evans said. “All employees have different levels of pay, but the farther you out, you pay less.”
Along with others, Evans helped create the UCWGA’s free parking petition. The petition is directed toward UGA President Jere W. Morehead, who just got a $57,000 raise, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“I have always heard about paying to come to work, but that’s ridiculous to me,” Evans said. “It needs to come to a halt.”
The protest also included graduate students fighting for a living wage. The base pay for graduate workers at UGA is $18,892 for master’s students and $20,427 for doctoral students, according to fliers UCWGA was handing out. In hopes to raise awareness for the need for higher wages, Alejandro De Santiago, a bioinformatics graduate student originally from Los Angeles, participated in the protest.
“I think over the past few years the cost of living has been increasing drastically,” De Santiago said. “The wages that UGA pays just [have] not been keeping up with that, and then that along with other costs like the fact that we need to pay for parking to go to work, it just seems like it’s exploiting their own workers.”
De Santiago, like many other…
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