An Interview with Patrick Phillips

Andy Gately speaks with filmmaker Patrick Phillips, director of the Austin Underground Film Fest audience choice award winner Where There’s a Will, There Will Be a Living Wage.

AUFF: How did you first learn of the wage conditions at Texas A&M?

PATRICK: Well, I was temporarily living in College Station, in the community, I grew up there.

AUFF: I just worked with an author from there, Irwin Tang. Heard of him?

PATRICK: Yes, I have heard of him. I haven’t read his latest book, although several people have recommended it to me. I would definitely be interested to read what he has to say about growing up in good ol’ College Station. I lived there, went away, then came back and met some people who were working on this campaign, a living wage campaign, that was looking at some of the lowest-paid workers at Texas A&M. The reason they looked at the university was because it is by far the largest employer of the Brazos Valley area, so they had a tendency to set the standard, they’re sort of the model employer. The idea was that, if you could implement change to one of the largest institutions in the area, other smaller ones will, in theory, follow suit. And many people say, well, you know, there’s already a federal minimum wage. But if you start to look at that, and really break down the numbers at what it requires for a person to get the basic necessities in life, you start to find out that the minimum wage doesn’t go too terribly far. So what a living wage is, it looks at the bare necessities that an individual needs to have- food, transportation, health costs, child care, basic things. This is not, you know, has nothing to do with entertainment, frivolous items that a person may want. And so what we found was that the people at the university, some who’ve been there for 18, 20 years, were still earning 7-8 dollars an hour, really not much at all, especially if you’re trying to support a family. And what was interesting, what really struck me, was that not only were these people that worked at the university for a long period of time, these were the people who had been commended by the university. I mean, one individual, Manuel, who is featured in the film, has been there 18 years, missed only 2 days his entire time, received an honor for worker of the year, is looked on very favorably by his employer, and still only made a little over $7/hour. And that’s the problem, when you have people working full time, sometimes more than one job, and still have to receive government assistance. And so our coalition of individuals of the community, composed of professors, students, and workers of the university, we brought this issue up, and the university finally starts to listen a bit, the administration, and what we found, though, is that they look exclusively at the economic aspect of the issue, which is very, very abstract, so they formed this task force to look at where A&M stood in relation to other universities, area employers-

AUFF: Was this done prior to the making of your film?

PATRICK: Correct, this is done prior to, and some simultaneously. So they looked at these numbers, but what they missed were the people’s stories. They never went to the workers, they never talked to them and asked what it was like to live, working full time, and making, you know, $7/hour. And they didn’t, they continued to ignore their stories, and they would not look an employee in the eyes, President Gates wouldn’t ask one to his face, ‘What is this like?’ And so we said, ‘If we can’t get him to talk to the worker, face to face, the next best thing we can do is to capture these stories on film, and give it to him, to the administration, to people around the community, and let them see the way these people are living, and in the process dispel a lot of myths. There’s a lot of myths that these people are lazy, or they spend their money frivolously, and the list goes on and on, and all these stereotypes we found to be completely untrue.

AUFF: Do you know if President Gates has actually seen the film? Has it screened on campus or anything?

PATRICK: We’ve been showing it in the community, on campus, and he saw a rough version, maybe 5-7 minutes of a few workers’ stories.

AUFF: Were you present?

PATRICK: I was not, it was a select group of individuals, and I was not able to attend. But we got a mixed response from the task force, which was people from the administration, some higher level workers from the university, and some professors. Some people literally just paid no attention, just put their heads down and refused to listen, while others appeared to be very moved by it, and became very concerned after they saw it.

AUFF: Some refused to watch it?

PATRICK: Yeah, well, I can’t say they refused to watch it, as I wasn’t there, but the information that was relayed to me was that were not ‘too attentive.’

AUFF: Did you have any problems getting the workers to relate their stories, or did any of them refuse to talk to you at all?

PATRICK: Absolutely, that was a big thing, that a lot of workers - this issue concerns them, and directly affected them - but many, many, many, probably the vast majority, were afraid to speak out about it, if you talked to anyone outside their tight knit community of workers, because there is both a combination of a real and perceived threat that they could lose their job, or that it could make their job more difficult. And so there was a lot of fear, and doing this project, we had to spend a lot of time with the workers, before we even turned on the camera, just developing a relationship, getting to know them, and working with them so that we could reach a level that they would be comfortable with, and as you see in the film, none of the workers’ faces are completely shown, we had to conceal their identities, because of that fear. It was an interesting situation, because you know, on a nightly news program, usually when they try to hide someone’s identity, they’re blurred, you know, black silhouette-

AUFF: Their voice is all distorted.

PATRICK: Right, but that was too impersonal. I thought that if a person is going to be watching this film, how can you connect with a black blob? And you can understand a lot, I feel, about these people, by looking at just portions of their face, their hands, I think it reflects some of their personality, even through those cropped off images of their faces and whatnot, so that’s how we countered it. And, one of the, I don’t know how unique of a thing this is, but we’d shoot with them, and then we’d watch the footage together, and if there was anything that they felt uncomfortable with, that they felt could hurt their job, we totally respected their opinions on that, and would cut that out, so that made the editing sort of a unique, longer process, one which we worked closely with the workers themselves.

AUFF: At the end you had the title card saying that A&M raised their minimum pay like a dollar. Was that a partial result of the film?

PATRICK: Yes, well, while we were shooting the film, President Gates created this task force, the one we spoke of earlier, composed of a variety of people from the university to come together and initially they were supposed to look at the idea of imposing a living wage, at how this can be done, and myself and the others involved with the living wage coalition and the employees aren’t naïve, they realized its not this easy thing, like, ‘Okay, we’re going to start paying you X amount of dollars more,” I mean there are true legitimate concerns with that, so they expected it to be a process of negotiation. And this is a university, with a rather prominent business school, so bringing these minds together to figure it out might be difficult, but how can it be done? It might take a couple of years, but how can we implement this? So they were to look at that. Now these were mostly, I wouldn’t say ‘closed meetings,’ but they definitely weren’t accessible to the general public, and I’m not sure exactly what went on, but I spoke to an individual who shared this task force afterwards, or tried to speak to him, since he refused to speak to me but for maybe a minute, and he told me that the task force was not looking at a living wage, or how the university could implement it, but that it was strictly looking at A&M’s wages in relation to other comparable institutions in the area. So that’s essentially what they did, they decided that the wanted to be the ‘employer of choice’ in the greater Brazos Valley area, and so what they did was raise their starting wage by a few cents to $7.77, which is a great improvement, since any money helps, but it certainly didn’t alleviate the problem, since its still not a livable wage.

AUFF: So really, what they basically did was raise their wage so it was no longer the lowest in the area, to deflect the blame to the others, because they can now say, ‘Well, we pay more than these places and schools, go talk to them!’

PATRICK: Right. A lot of work still needs to be done.

AUFF: Well, as you know, we had the audience vote for their favorite film of the festival, and we’ve counted the ballots and your film placed first.

PATRICK: Oh, really? Great!

AUFF: I have for you an equipment gift certificate -

PATRICK: Thanks. Wow, this is for a lot!

AUFF: Courtesy of our friends June and Kevin over at Mopac Media. And we also have a prize package donated by Pro Tape Media. We wanted to throw in a handle of Vodka donated by Tito’s, but all ten were polished off at the after-party. But hopefully this will keep your New Spark productions outfitted for a while longer.

PATRICK: Yeah, thanks so much.

AUFF: Thanks for submitting you film, and letting us screen it. We here at AUFF look forward to seeing your next project.

(Patrick informed us that his next film would be a documentary about an AWOL American soldier.)

-conducted by Andy Gately and Caitlin Leach on May 28th, 2006