Admin agrees to $10 min. wage

By Hongtao Hu     3/4/25 11:24pm

The Student Association’s Labor Commission received a verbal commitment from Dean of Undergraduates Bridget Gorman Feb. 10 to raise the student minimum wage from $7.25 to $10 an hour. This change will be applied in July 2025 for the start of the 2025-2026 fiscal year.

Gorman declined a request for comment.

Oscar Vietor, the Labor Commission’s chair, said that the commission reached out to Gorman with the petition towards the end of last year, after which she met with various members of administration. 

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“We ended up collecting over 400 signatures on our initial petition, and we’ve been meeting with the Senate and making sure that Dean Gorman is advocating on the behalf of undergraduates,” said Vietor, a Wiess College sophomore. “If we can continue this advocacy, it seems realistic that in the future we could achieve a $15 an hour minimum wage.”

According to the Labor Commission’s survey conducted last year, 13% of undergraduates with on-campus jobs currently make less than $10 an hour.

“Among those students, they’re going to be getting an average raise of $2.13 an hour,” said Matti Haacke, the Labor Commission’s vice chair. 

“The biggest wage changes in this are … mostly going to be Fondren workers or TAs or people that are paid much closer to the actual [federal] minimum wage of $7.25 an hour,” Vietor said.

The Labor Commission said administration will establish a timeline for raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. 

“Dean Gorman did commit to an end goal of $15 without providing a specific timeline, and that was due to the current crisis of higher ed funding,” said Haacke, a Sid Richardson College senior. “She did believe that by next year, she would have a set timeline for when the minimum wage would reach $15.”

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