Commissioners debate: Should ACC Gov pay living wages by default?

Most people believe that full-time workers should be able to live on the wages they receive. While the concept of living wages sounds straightforward enough, for large and small institutions alike, it’s not always so simple in reality even when the funding is available.

In recent years, the ACC Commission has placed a priority on paying all local government workers a living wage, which is a wage high enough to allow workers to pay their bills without having to rely on outside assistance. In 2021, they raised the local government’s wage floor for new hires in the lowest-paid positions to $15 an hour and bumped it again to $15.60 in 2022.

MIT researchers track the cost of living in all 50 states and publish their findings in an online living wage calculator. According to their research, a single person working full time in Athens would need at least $16.29 per hour to make ends meet, which is a bit above the local government’s current wage floor.

Last year, the commission did not raise the wage floor and instead boosted their employees’ wages by 7% or more to help them adjust for inflation. That means all workers who have been with the ACC government for at least seven months are currently making a living wage, but a very small number of recent hires may be stuck at $15.60.

The straightforward answer to bring all workers’ pay back in line with the cost of living would be to raise the wage floor during the commission’s next round of budget negotiations this spring.

But is it actually that easy?

Wage compression and other complications

When the commission raised the wage floor in 2021 and 2022, they boosted the wages of the lowest-paid employees without raising their supervisors’ pay by an equal amount. That’s created compression in the local government’s wage structure. For example, some new hires have been brought on at the same hourly rate as workers with more seniority. Some ACC employees even made almost as much as their supervisors in the 2022 wage structure.

Wage compression is a problem that causes irritation for more senior staff and could lower their morale. ACC management takes this issue very seriously and is taking steps to address it.

Furthermore, human resources specialists are trained to view the market as the primary authority in determining who should be paid how much for their labor. When some workers (on the lower end of the pay scale) are raised above what the market determines while other workers (in the middle or on the higher end) are being paid at the market rate or even below, that’s an issue HR also wants to correct.

Correcting the imbalance may be at odds with paying a living wage for all workers, unless the highest-paid workers are also paid above market rates.

ACC Human Resources tries their best to keep workers’ pay in line with the dictates of the market as conditions change. To that end, they are proposing a new compensation and classification study.

The local government proposes a new pay study

First, some history.

ACC Manager Blaine Williams proposed a comprehensive pay and classification study shortly after being promoted from assistant manager in 2016. That study, completed in 2019, was the first such study done across the entire ACC government in over 20 years. It changed the pay or job descriptions of nearly every worker in the organization, bringing them more in-line with market rates. 

William’s intention was to improve employee recruitment and retention, not to pay living wages necessarily, but the local government’s wage floor for full-time workers was raised to $11.60 during this process. At the time, MIT calculated a living wage in Athens to be $10.82 hourly for a full-time worker with no children. 

There was no way of knowing back then that an enormous increase in housing costs was about to strike Athens, forcing the living wage to $15 an hour and beyond. Williams resolved to prevent his organization from ever falling too far behind again, and that’s why he is now asking the commission to approve another wage study at the cost of about $350,000. He has said that he’d like to do studies like this every five years.

The new wage study will help keep the local government’s wage structure in line with the market, and it will also address the compression that the commission introduced when they raised the wage floor in 2021 and 2022.

HR sent out a request-for-proposals last year and has already received bids from various contractors who are well-suited to do the study. They are asking the commission to approve the Segal Company for the contract, and this would have been granted at the commission’s last meeting if not for concerns about the living wage floor.

As it stands now, the commission delayed approval of the study by a month. To explain why, we’ll have to dig into a very long discussion between commissioners and ACC management.

The commission debate: Should they pay living wages by default?

Commissioners spent almost an hour discussing the proposed pay study and how it relates to living wages within the ACC government at their voting meeting on Tuesday.

As the discussion began, Commissioner Patrick Davenport expressed his support for the new pay study and asked his colleagues to approve the contract with Segal.

“We have some hard-working people here who need their pay to be re-evaluated. I’m looking forward to getting this approved,” Davenport said.

As a commissioner, Davenport has consistently supported living wages, but he feels that the decision to raise the wage floor should be made yearly during budget negotiations. Davenport sees wage compression within the ACC government as an important reason to carry out a new pay study as soon as possible.

“[Paying a living wage is] a commission-by-commission decision to make,” Commissioner Mike Hamby said in agreement with Davenport. “This commission has decided to pay a living wage, and I would hope future commissions would. At least this study is going to tell us how to fix the compression issues we have now. That’s the whole point of getting moving with this.”

Commissioner Jesse Houle disagreed and motioned to delay contract approval for a month out of concern that living wages would not be included in the study. Houle wants ACC staff to ask the Segal Company if they include living wages in their analysis by default already, or if it could be included with a minimum of effort.

ACC Human Resources did not include living wages as a factor they wanted the contractor to consider in their request-for-proposals announcement.

“I really don’t understand why this wasn’t part of the RFP process in the first place,” Houle said, displaying a bit of frustration with ACC staff. “[Living wages] has been a part of our conversation day-in, week-out, every budget cycle.”

Houle wants living wages to be included as a factor in every pay study from now on, arguing that raising the wage floor on a yearly basis during budget season is not a viable path forward.

“I’m hearing from colleagues ‘we can just raise the wages again.’ Well that’s what we did twice in a row, to raise it to $15 and $15.60,” Houle said. “That irritated staff quite a lot because we just bumped up the floor without addressing compression. So we can’t actually just raise the wage floor in the budget season without repeating that same mistake. We have to build it into this process.” 

Commissioner Melissa Link agreed and supported Houle’s motion to delay a month.

“In my mind, it’s always been clear that the whole purpose of doing the study is to ensure that our employees’ pay keeps up with the cost of living as time goes on,” Link said. “Let’s hold this and get a clear answer from this vendor if they have that capability.”

When it came time to vote, Houle and Link’s motion passed 6-4 with Hamby and Commissioners John Culpepper, Ovita Thornton and Allison Wright voting no.

Next Steps

Towards the end of the discussion, Commissioner Dexter Fisher doubted whether Segal, or any contractor, would meaningfully change the language of a proposal this far along in the process. According to ACC Attorney Judd Drake, it may even be illegal for them to do so because it might be unfair to the other contractors.

If that’s the case, the commission would have a choice to make. If they decide that living wages are central to their concept of the pay study, they would need to reissue the RFP with new language making that clear to the contractors. Doing so would delay the study by two or three months, something which Davenport and others want to avoid.

The commission could also approve Segal for the contract and decide to negotiate the wage floor every year during budget season. That would cause compression which would need to be addressed in a never-ending cycle of annoyance for workers and ACC HR staff alike. In practice, it may mean the commission would be hesitant to raise the wage floor at all.

We’ll find out what the commission decides at their voting meeting next month.

Check out what happened during the rest of last week’s meeting here.

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