Despite misinformation and outright lies, you have a legal right to talk about how much you’re paid. Given Asheville’s catastrophically low wages, it’s time for this culture of silence to end
Above: Tupelo Honey’s downtown location. Last year, following wage cuts for support staff at the booming chain, workers launched a public campaign raising attention to the issue and reversing the cuts at several locations
Asheville, it’s time to clear something up.
You can talk about your pay.
I’m writing this because for a decade I’ve heard the opposite refrain around the city, from retail to restaurants, in businesses local and chain, while sweeping floors and stocking shelves to working in a “progressive” newsroom. I’m not alone in that, and if you’re around Asheville enough you’ll hear it from an array of local notables running the gamut from conservative corporate types who rant about lazy millenials to liberal gentry that won’t shut up about their Italian vacation while you’re wondering if you can make rent.
The warnings take many forms: it might be an official-sounding invocation of “company policy” or a hand on the shoulder, with a seemingly warm but warning smile, not to cause “drama” by discussing your paycheck with one’s colleagues.
Wherever it comes from, they all have one thing in common.
They’re lying.
You can talk about your pay.
To start with, all those warnings aren’t just wrong, they’re illegal. Generally they’re very, very illegal. They’re illegal whether it’s in an employee handbook or an in-person caution by a boss or supervisor. In fact, if you’re reading this and have heard or seen such where you work, here’s some people you can contact.
Your right to talk about pay with your co-workers is protected by federal law. You have a right to get together and ask for a raise (or a change to any other conditions in your workplace). You even have the right to take those concerns public. You have the right to talk to outside groups or agencies — whether it’s a union, a labor watchdog, an advocacy group or a non-profit — if you think that your pay’s too low or that there’s some issue that should be addressed. Yes, it applies even though North Carolina is a “right to work” state. Those laws are abhorrent on many fronts, but they don’t take that away.
And it’s important that this right be exercised, especially here and especially now.
Pay in the Asheville area is ridiculously low, even by North Carolina standards, and the tourism boom hasn’t changed that. While the reasons for that lack are multitude, this culture of silence sure as hell plays a major role. The fact is: if people are terrified or manipulated into not even discussing what’s going on, wages stay flat and there’s no pressure to increase them. After all, if they face being fired when they even talk about their pay what happens when they try to do something about it?
If our city’s going to progress in any meaningful sense, we’re going to have to embrace FDR’s old declaration that “no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.”
We’re a long way from that, not because there aren’t many good people and groups pushing businesses to adopt better practices but because there’s few consequences if they don’t.
Without honest discussion of pay, just to start, it’s nigh impossible for this to change.
It’s also impossible find out if, for example, your boss is paying some people less because of their gender or skin color or even outright stealing what you’re due. The example of the Waking Life owners should prove instructive here. While they might have been an unusually blatant case, rest assured that plenty of people who own or manage businesses here also have bigoted views.
What happens if their employees, for example, can’t compare notes and figure out that guys secretly writing misogynistic screeds are — not surprisingly — also paying women of color a lot less than their white or male counterparts? Our city’s dire segregation problem is particularly bad on the economic front, and the silence about pay only furthers that.
Fortunately, there are some strong counterexamples of what can happen when workers brave the culture of silence and intimidation.
When Tupelo Honey slashed its wages for support staff amid booming business, a petition effort highlighted this issue and local press (including a Blade investigation) delved deeper. Today, the Asheville Sustainable Restaurant Workforce, an advocacy group representing food service workers, announced that the company has reversed those wage cuts in three locations, including downtown Asheville. The workers who launched the petition are still employed.
On the fast food front, the Asheville branch of the Raise Up for 15 movement has pushed aggressively for wage hikes and the right to form a union.
Likewise, workers at the French Broad Food Co-op launched a union campaign in the early 2000s, talking frankly about pay and conditions. While it was a long fight, they won a union contract that started to deal with their grievances.
But there’s still a long haul ahead. When a civic center worker spoke up about the fact that the city of Asheville didn’t pay many of its workers there a living wage — something our city’s own Council later agreed to change — she was promptly fired for dubious reasons, despite protections on her right to speak out about a public issue.
But that’s where we are: when even the lackluster labor protections we have often aren’t known or respected, even by a government that’s reiterated its supposed commitment to a living wage time and again (some local businesses have their own bad history here as well). Perhaps, one day, thanks to the courage of workers like those at Tupelo and a growing feeling that bad pay is unacceptable, that will change.
In the meantime, we can start breaking the silence of a culture willing to put up with all kinds of misery as long as the people of this city plaster on a smile and pretend everything is ok.
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