Don't pay for IUSA

When I was a kid, I used to mow lawns for money. I was the tousle-haired manifestation in 2004 of that television trope circa 1960.

I was the little boy with a farmer’s tan who reeked of gasoline wrestling a lawnmower across a postage stamp of grass.

I made my first independent dollars as an entrepreneur cutting lawns by undercutting my competition. He was charging $25, so I charged $20.

I learned a valuable lesson that day. Eight years later it was formalized in an economics class.

In a homogeneous labor market — like prepubescent lawn mowers — with a fixed amount of labor demanded, the wage is the least amount necessary to entice the marginal worker demanded to do the job.

On April 2-3, the student body of IU will hire a new slate of executive representatives. Three teams want the job. We only have room for one.

Hoosiers 4 Solutions and SPARC for IU are willing to do the job for free.  YOUniversity wants a stipend. Currently, that stipend stands at $18,000 total.

You don’t have to be an economics student to figure this one out.

Some say there is significant opportunity cost associated with being involved with student government at such a high level, and therefore these students deserve compensation.

They’re absolutely right, but that doesn’t mean compensation has to be in the form of dollar bills.

It’s pretty clear the résumé entry “student body president” and the many networking opportunities it offers have significant value of their own.

If someone is willing to do the job for only this non-pecuniary type of compensation, why pay someone who isn’t?

“Well,” you say, “because you might get a better product from the people you pay than from those you don’t.”

This is exactly what YOUniversity claims. It’s been involved in previous administrations, it’ll be more effective in office than any of its competitors, it’s worth $18,000.

YOUniversity claims this salary keeps the executives honest and makes them work harder for students because if they don’t perform, if they don’t follow through, this salary can be taken away by the organization’s supervisors.

YOUniversity claims it’s worth your money because it knows how the system works. But that’s exactly the problem. The system — the one that five of the ticket’s six candidates are directly involved in — doesn’t work.

Movement for IUSA has moved next to nothing in return for their collective $18,000 salary. Instead it was blindsided by a merger of one of IU’s most prestigious schools and a bill to disenfranchise out-of-state students.

It has practically ignored movements representing significant student activity. It has invested thousands in touch screens few care about while budgeting a meager $500 to Lifeline Law awareness, a lifesaving law that, according to the administration’s own Vision of the Ideal College Environment report, only 60 percent of students are aware of. Meanwhile, for every sexual assault you see covered in this paper, there is one more no one will ever report. 

Movement for IUSA was dead on arrival.

One of the most effective IUSA administrations, the Big Six ticket of 2010-11, accomplished everything it did without finding it necessary to draw a salary.

YOUniversity claims its proposed salaries are the lowest in the Big Ten and, through some clever budgetary sleight of hand, that they make up only 0.6 percent of IUSA’s total budget per executive, for a total of 3.6 percent.

But $0 is still the least in the Big Ten. And as a percentage of the executive budget, out of which comes spending for initiatives such as the Hoosier Info Kiosks and Lifeline, these salaries make up almost 20 percent.

Your money, a whole lot of it in fact, could be freed up in this upcoming election. $18,000 can do a lot of good.

Don’t pay for an inferior product when you can get a superior one for free.

­— drlreed@indiana.edu