Mills says members rejected an increase in wages because they did not want to interfere with the collective bargaining process of the unions, they did not want to alter the pay scales for workers across the University--a change that would be very hard to implement--and they did not want to establish a single base wage that could become obsolete over time.
Zeckhauser says she feels boosting benefits would improve workers' lives more than a pay raise.
She says discussion of wage increases only reached "preliminary" stages.
"The mindset of the committee was that we were better off teaching [workers]to fish--we can give them a fish today, but what next year and the year after that," Zeckhauser says. "We didn't see it as a wage problem, and we didn't think an extra $2 an hour would address it."
"The University was committed to solving the problem [but] we felt the way to do that was different than what students were advocating," she adds.
McKean calls the committee's reasoning "a smokescreen."
"It's entirely evasive," he says. "They rejected [a living wage] on the flimsiest of grounds."
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