Legal Interpreter Mentors Demand Better Wages

conversation to increase wages for mentors, as when he returned to the program as a graduate student, the pay was still the same. At first, HR agreed to increase the mentors’ pay from $10 to $12.50 an hour, but then froze all wage increases and sent out a survey to assess student wages across campus instead. After all of this, dining services was granted higher wages, but not the mentors.

The situation escalated when the mentors met with Bo Connell, Associate Dean for Finance, Administration & Strategy at the law school.

“That meeting was really discouraging, and I think we all left feeling defeated and disrespected because the least that was insinuated was that we were doing our job because of the money,” Rozas-Rivera said. “Considering that all but one of [the mentors] are either children of immigrants or immigrants ourselves, it’s just an incredible thing to insinuate. We’re all extremely connected to these cases and that does not mean that we don’t have a right to still demand to be paid fairly.”

“I know, for me at least, that was a big slap in the face because I had chosen to spend my two years in grad school doing my research assistantship and also working at the law school,” Rosado said. “I chose that, I wanted to do that because I had a connection [there]. I had been in the clinics for a long time, and a lot of the clients I’ve known since 2019.”

Rosado further detailed not only the technical skills involved in interpreting—being fluent in two languages (including the many dialects of Spanish), maintaining the flow of conversation between clients and student lawyers and overseeing the internship—but also the emotional toil that comes from doing this work.

“Even though you know that it’s not your story, it’s very hard for your subconscious to differentiate that when you’re repeating it in the first person over and over again,” Rosado said. “It was very frustrating to try and get that message across [to Connell], and it felt like we were being completely iced out and woefully misunderstood.”

“The hardest [part of our job] is how to deal with the emotional weight of the cases and translating in the first person while doing it professionally,” Gonzalez added. “It’s not only about your professional skills, but you as a person and how you are treating another human being when you have to translate their traumatic story. We are all from different backgrounds and we can relate to what some immigrants go through—some of us are immigrants ourselves, some of us have immigrant parents—so it’s [also] something that is particularly touching to our own stories.”

April 3rd was the first day the mentors did not report to work. It took more than a week for HR to schedule a meeting with them, giving them less than 24-hour notice. This time, the mentors spoke with Connell, Ray Duffy (Associate Vice President of Human Resources and Affirmative Action Officer) and Rabbia Evans (Senior Director, Compensation & HR Strategy).

“I did feel a little bit more seen this time around,” Rosado said. “Ray Duffy was the lead for this meeting, and I think he did a way better job of making us feel like human beings that were being wronged.”

Rozas-Rivera agreed, noting that administration took accountability for their actions.

“I think one big difference and one of the things that really reassured us from this meeting was that for the first time, we saw somebody admitting wrong from everything that had happened,” Rozas-Rivera said.

During the meeting, it was explained that there are different tiers of pay for student workers: the first tier is $10, the second is $11.50, the third, which involves advanced technical jobs, is $13 and the fourth, which involves managerial positions, is $15. The mentors spent the meeting proving that, at the very least, they fall into the managerial positions tier, as there is always at least one mentor in the clinic from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and they are the people that both interns and student lawyers turn to consistently for assistance.

From the meeting, HR committed to increasing the mentors’ wages to $15 an hour, effective April 17th, which is when they returned to work. HR also committed to continue deliberations about further increasing that wage to $17 an hour and meeting again with the mentors in two weeks.

The mentors also learned that, at the law school, research assistants will be receiving $15 an hour wages, and after a certain number of hours accumulated in this role, they can increase to up to $18. The mentors, who have spent well over the 130 hours accumulated in just the internship, would like to see the same process implemented for them.

“With a little bit of training, the interpreters can be research assistants, but with a lot of training, research assistants cannot be interpreters,” Rozas-Rivera said, quoting a professor who works with both research assistants and mentors.

It is especially important to keep the conversation about wages going, as the mentors hope to grow the internship program and attract more students to replace those who will be graduating.

Overall, throughout this process, the mentors felt supported by their peers, faculty and the student lawyers especially. However, as Rozas-Rivera reiterated, there is plenty of room for improvement, given that the stalling over wages targeted a specific community on campus.

“We did feel very supported, but we know that Villanova has a commitment to help immigrants and [promote] justice and equity,” Rozas-Rivera said. “Most of our staff are from Latino backgrounds, so we are very much an equity issue because often we’re all going here either on scholarship or financial aid, and we need the money. One way to get that is to be fairly compensated for the skills that we are already bringing in, [which] is an issue beyond Villanova. People often get asked to do their jobs in two different languages and they do not get compensated for that, and they should, so this is not just us.”

Rosado had parting words for other student workers who are feeling neglected, encouraging them to not be afraid to exercise their right to organize.

“I’m sure that there’s a lot of jobs on campus that feel equally as disrespected and disregarded for the work that they do,” Rosado said. “I would just remind them to not lose hope and to advocate for yourself, because if you never start the conversation, it’s never going to be had.”