4C | Monday, October 29, 2012
The Daily Illini | www.DailyIllini.com
STRUGGLING AT THE BOTTOM BY TAYLOR GOLDENSTEIN NEWS EDITOR
Meet Jeremiah Buchanan. He makes $18,824 a year, just over minimum wage. That’s about 1 percent of the $1.6 million that football head coach Tim Beckman receives and only covers a fraction of what he needs to cover rent, car payments and child support for his 3-year-old daughter. He is a veteran and a high school graduate, and as of this summer, he had the lowest salary of any paid full-time employee at the University. Buchanan, 22, is one of 751 such employees who make $30,000 or less per year. He works as a laboratory helper in the Division of Animal Resources. Like the rest of the more than 104,000 fulltime employees who hold civil service positions, his salary is set through a collective bargaining agreement with the University and union representatives. For Buchanan, though, his union is nothing more than a name on his pay stub. No one from the union has ever contacted him, he said, and even after about a year on the job, he feels detached from the collective bargaining process. Buchanan said he wishes he could have more of a say in what his salary should be. “I would just like to know why I make what I do and why they don’t really see the need to increase it,” he said. As football and basketball coaches rack in salaries in the millions and top University administrators reliably pull six-figure salaries — even former president B. Joseph White, who resigned during the 2009 clout scandal, still makes nearly $300,000 — on the other end of the spectrum, civil service and other University staff like Buchanan face a daily struggle. The State Universities Civil Service System is led by an 11-member Merit Board, made up of representatives from every Illinois public universities’ board of trustees, which approves salary ranges. All other universities have one representative, but, as the largest employer in the system, the University of Illinois has three. “These are tough times,” executive director Tom Morelock said. “Salaries have taken a hit in every classification of our system in the last four or five years.” The low laboratory helper salary, though, seems to be deterring employees from
remaining in the position for the long term, Buchanan said. It isn’t enough for him either. Only six months into his University employment, Buchanan began looking for another job, eventually filling in as a medical request logger at Carle Foundation Hospital’s Information Management Center in Champaign. “I really don’t take home a lot from the U of I job,” he said. “I guess (this salary) could (support) a normal person, but I have other things I have to pay for, so that’s why I had to go out and get this second job.” But despite the insufficient pay, he said there is one thing keeping him on the job. “The only reason I still have it, for the most part, is for the benefits, the insurance,” Buchanan said. University employees receive both state and University benefits. State benefits include health, dental and vision care and life insurance, and the University benefits include some of the same benefits along with retirement plans. The benefits are a large part of what is keeping child development associate Lisa Pannbacker, another civil service employee, at the University. Pannbacker, 48, had worked for six years at the Rantoul Head Start preschool, a part of Champaign County Head Start. The federally funded program offers free services to low-income families with young children. “I wanted better benefits, and the University provided better benefits, better retirement, and that was probably the biggest incentive to leave (Head Start),” she said. Like Buchanan, the low salary of a child development associate has put a financial strain on her and her family. Both of Pannbacker’s sons work in civil service jobs at the University, one a grounds worker and the other building service worker, and they, respectively, make about $9,000 and $14,000 more than she does with her annual salary of $21,370.05. “When I look at what dollar amount is paid, is my value any less than a BSW or a grounds crew member?” she said. “It’s hard to look at (the numbers). Parents trust their children’s lives with us, and you start out making $9 and some odd cents an hour, and it’s kind of sad.” Two years ago, her husband lost the job he had held for 33 years as an automobile radiator repairman. He’s still looking for work. Meanwhile, he has been focusing on corn and soybean farming at home. It’s “hit or
NATHANIEL LASH THE DAILY ILLINI
Jeremiah Buchanan, a 22-year-old laboratory helper, earns $18,824 a year working full time for the Division of Animal Research. Until he received a 38-cents-per-hour raise in September, he was the lowest earning full-time employee on the Urbana campus. Now he’s tied for second-lowest earner. miss,” she said, especially with this summer’s drought. “For once, I am the sole bread winner,” Pannbacker said. Pannbacker said there is a misconception that what she does is day care, but being a child development associate, with the certificate that took her four years of training to acquire, requires a lot more work than people think. “A lot has changed in early childhood education. Children are expected to learn so much more, earlier than what they did before,” she said. “Kindergarten isn’t for playing blocks and coloring anymore. … I’m really challenged to do more of the teaching part now.” Pannbacker said she thinks that if parents of her students ever found out how much she is making, they would be really shocked. “Probably what is most difficult thing to accept is that what I do during the day is not rewarded at all through monetary means — it truly has to be that you enjoy working with children,” she said.
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And she does. Pannbacker said she wants to do this until she can’t anymore. “Even at my age, I love it. I really do,” she said. “Today we were digging in our garden from the spring, and I’m like, how many people get to look at the world every day as a 4- or 5-year-old would? It’s incredible. Everything is new to them. To find a grub worm is exciting. You may not think so and a lot of the people around may not think so, but it’s exciting when you can see a child and say: ‘Ooh! I found one, too! Here, let’s look at it!’ That’s why I do it.” Not everyone has that personal connection to their work as Pannbacker does, though, which makes the low salary easier to come to terms with. Buchanan recently received a 38-cents-anhour raise. For now, he will search for higher-paying University jobs. It’s the system that he clutches onto for the protections it ensures for himself and his daughter, but it’s also the system that clutches onto him, insisting on the incessant washing, sorting and filing that has become his everyday life, at least for 12 hours a day.
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