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Anna Singthonghack hates mopping up spilled soda. It takes too much time. Like the other night janitors in UC Berkeley’s Barrows Hall, Singthonghack has to keep on schedule so she can finish cleaning four auditorium-sized classrooms, 15 offices and three bathrooms between 5 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. 

When she finishes, she has an hour’s drive to Suisin City, near Fairfield. There, her day begins again at 7 a.m. Once her two children are out the door to school, she spends the rest of the day taking care of her husband, who is blind, until 4 p.m. Then she returns to work.  

She is the only one supporting the family. At $13.39 an hour, she just barely makes enough to get by, so any deviation from her schedule could spell disaster.  

“I don’t feel like there is any light,” Singthonghack said in broken English. The 39-year old woman fled Laos in 1988, and if life is less chaotic here, it’s still difficult.  

She earns $800 every two weeks after taxes which is barely enough to pay her family’s expenses.  

Like several other janitors cleaning the building Tuesday night, Singthonghack’s story is strikingly similar to those in a report released a week ago by several UC Berkeley sociology graduate students called “Berkeley’s Betrayal.”  

The report was co-authored by Barabara Ehrenreich, author of the best seller Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, and a former visiting lecturer at the university’s Graduate School of Journalism. It says the university “betrays” its low wage workers by paying substandard wages, overworking them, and failing to train them properly. It also says that there is a general lack of respect from the students, administration and faculty for the jobs they do.  

In a fact sheet released along with the report, the authors show UC Berkeley service worker wages lagging behind those in the private sector, public sector, and other area colleges. Custodians at Cal State-Hayward start at $13.33 per hour, compared to Berkeley’s $10.22, according to the report. The information was complied by AFSCME, the union that represents service workers on campus. The City of Berkeley starts custodial workers at $16.90, according to the same data.  

The state’s minimum wage is $6.75 an hour. 

The fact sheet also details how service and clerical workers have had their wages frozen since 2002. That year, inflation rose by 1.6 percent and in 2003 inflation jumped by 2.3 percent. 

For Singthonghack, and several of the workers interviewed in the study, low wages and no raises, along with rising costs, mean they’ve been pushed precariously close to the edge. Even as inflation has stayed relatively low, some basic necessities have nearly doubled in price since she started working at the university. 

Singthonghack pays almost double what she used to for gas. She estimates she fills her up Honda CRV twice a week at $26 a tank. It used to cost her $15 each time. She also crosses the Carquinez bridge and has to pay the extra dollar bridge toll. Parking at the campus recently rose from $32 to $35 per month. 

“Prices are going up, but the pay is the same,” she said. Her eyes were bloodshot from a lack of sleep.  

Recently, she said, she had to borrow money from a friend to buy her children new clothes for school. 

Paul Schwartz, spokesperson for UC’s office of the president, has dismissed the report, calling it “unbalanced and incomplete.” He said the report is written by “pro-labor” students who failed to take into account the other benefits the university offers, such as its health care and retirement packages. He also dismissed it for talking only to union employees, and said it failed to look at UC Berkeley in comparison to other top-notch universities.  

Schwartz said on top of a comprehensive benefits package for full-time employees, UC has tried to add certain perks in recent years as a way to mitigate the impact of the wage freeze. He said they have restructured the health care premium payments so workers who make less pay less. He said they’ve also put more money into retirement accounts and will give workers two extra paid days off. 

“We are not disputing that salaries are hurting, we are saying that it was an unbalanced report,” he said. 

But as the report outlines, some workers in Barrows Hall said wages are not their only concern. As Singthonghack cleans her section of the third floor, you can hear students in one of the lounges having a loud political debate. They come into the hall occasionally to go to the bathroom, gliding by Singthonghack but barely noticing her as she sweeps a part of the hall like a ghost.  

“It is the routine invisibility of workers in the eyes of the university that many experience as the most painful form of disrespect,” write the authors of the report. 

Singthonghack said no one has been explicitly rude, but when she enters a messy classroom, she said she considers it a sign of disrespect. In Singthonghack’s largest classroom, which seats 100 people, papers were strewn all over the desks and a super-sized Jamba Juice cup was on the professor’s desk. It took her several minutes to clean all this up before she got to her scheduled duties of mopping, sweeping, emptying the trash, and cleaning the blackboard. 

Down in the basement, Shirley Rew, 54, agreed that students fail to notice them. One night, she said, she was taking out garbage and said hello to a student escort waiting outside for two girls. 

“He didn’t even blink,” she said. “But I tried not to let it bother me, because I have a lot of respect for myself.”