If you aren’t convinced student wages are unnecessarily low on campus, let me give you one more thing to think about: Many campus jobs are funded not by tuition or state government, but through profit.

According to its Web site, the duty of Auxiliary Services at the University is to supply “services and merchandise on a fee-for-service basis without government funding.”

What does that mean for you, University employees?

If you work for Food Services, the Bookstore, the UGA Golf Course, Parking Services, Printing, Campus Transit, Bulldog Bucks or Vending Services, it means student tuition has nothing to do with how much you are paid.

In other words, the argument that the wages of University employees should not be increased because it would cause tuition to go up does not apply to many of the most grueling jobs on campus.

Consider this example: Food Services generates enormous revenue from students who purchase the meal plan and usually has a budget surplus.

The extra money goes toward adding on to and improving Food Services’ facilities.

Couldn’t a portion of these profits be invested in the well-being of employees?

On its Web site, Director of University Food Services Michael Floyd says “students are our number one asset, and our continuing investment in them assures our mutual success.”

Well, my advice to Food Services and other campus employers is this: Pay your employees what they deserve. You have the money and they have earned it.

Consider campus transit. Student bus drivers make $7.58 an hour, less than what I have made monitoring a computer lab.

“How can things like this be?” you ask. Apparently it’s straight economics.

Since The Red & Black published my column (“Campus jobs shortchange employees,” Sept. 19) advocating an increase in wages for University employees, I have received a couple of responses that revolved around the basic idea that the large number of students available for campus jobs causes pay to be low.

In his column, (“Economics, not greed, set wages,” Sept. 22) M. Andrew Goodman wrote that increased wages would be “cancelled out” by the higher tuition students would have to pay. This does not account for those workers who are not students.

But more important was Goodman’s point that I was “trying to fight proven principles of economics,” chiefly supply and demand.

Supply and demand in the case of student employment basically means the more students on campus, the less you you will be paid.

But an economic theory does not justify pay rates that put full time workers into the poverty category, especially when their employer is sitting on a budget surplus.

Supply and demand? Null and void.

I’ve said it once: Stand up for yourselves, students.

Saying that we’ll all be making money soon enough is meaningless to the average University employee who busts his butt to earn minimum wage.

- J. Brandon Lowe is a senior majoring in magazines and history.