Workers will suffer under Trump. Let’s implement a living wage.

The media, including both college newspapers and national outlets, is fixated on Trump’s attacks on higher education — particularly on the academics themselves, such as researchers. This is understandable: Trump presents a real and severe threat to universities. But amid praise for Harvard’s resistance against Trump, both by national news outlets and our own university president, there is an essential group of people on our campus who we’ve been ignoring: service workers.

Under the Trump administration, experts predict that the working class will suffer. Trump’s tariffs could cost the average American household up to $5,200 per year, with little upside. These tariffs will hit the lowest-income Americans the hardest, because any increase in prices would be a greater proportion of their disposable income.

It’s easy to forget that Princeton is responsible for 896 service workers, employing them across dining, facilities, and other hourly wage jobs.

The current starting wage for workers at the University in campus dining and custodial is $21.72 per hour. Meanwhile, the living wage in the Trenton-Princeton area to support a single adult without children is roughly $26 per hour, according to a calculation from MIT’s Living Wage Calculator. If we want to truly stand up against Trump, we need to protect the people he puts under greatest scrutiny and stress, which means we must increase the wage of our service workers most impacted by his fiscal policies.

Even prior to the second Trump administration, the standards of living for service workers at Princeton have been less than ideal. As one service worker for the University testified at a YDSA rally in the fall of 2023, he’s forced to choose between “breakfast or lunch most days” and often “can’t afford to eat both meals.” As a “single father with two kids,” he has been unable to afford “rent and utilities.”

This is unacceptable. Services workers do the jobs we take for granted, like cooking our food and cleaning our bathrooms. Remove all of our workers, and Princeton would collapse within a week. There is no justification for treating these folks as costs to be minimized. Our service workers are real people with the same fundamental needs as our student population. If we can afford to give our students hundreds of millions in aid, we can surely afford to pay our staff members — who are equally crucial to the Princeton community — a decent and fair wage.

Granted, Princeton and its peers are under unusual financial stress from the federal government. But when it comes to research, Princeton has supplemented funds for professors and graduate students in some cases. Service workers are just as important to Princeton's functioning, and deserve the same level of care and support.

But support for service workers goes beyond just wages. Our own publication’s reporting sections, such as News and Features, can investigate and publicize these people’s stories. We’ve covered the experiences of faculty after Trump’s cuts to research, which is good, but we haven’t recently interviewed staff. From the perspectives of both university administrators and student journalists, there’s more that could be done to support service workers amidst such political turbulence.

We need to prove — as an institution and as a community — that we will resist Trump’s rash, autocratic policies, which means counteracting his attacks against the working class. Most of all, we need to make sure that this institution not only survives these attacks, but becomes a better place over these next four years and beyond. Our “service of humanity” begins with fair wages on campus.

Raf Basas (he/him/his) is a first-year opinion columnist from Elk Grove, Calif. intending to major in English, Anthro, or Politics. He can be reached at rb4078[at]princeton.edu or @raf.basas on Instagram. His column, “Out of the Ivory Tower,” runs every two weeks on Tuesday. All of his columns can be read here.