May 2001

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Living Wage Sit-in Galvanizes Students, Community

Since April 17, some 40 Harvard University students have been occupying the first floor of Massachusetts Hall where Harvard President Neil Rudenstine has his office. Allegra Churchill sent this dispatch from inside on Sunday, April 29.

As I write this article inside Massachusetts Hall at the Living Wage Sit-In, I can hear janitors rallying outside. Inside, the ringing of a dozen cell phones echoes up and down the hallway we occupy. We sit at a unique confluence of power and place, a stage set for us by Harvard's prestige and brought into dramatic play by the concerted organizing effort of a dedicated coalition of students, workers, and faculty members. This action has succeeded as well as it has because the issue of a Living Wage explodes the tensions of the national labor policies and corporate globalization at a highly visible location, while being rooted by specific problems and solutions of a local community.

One of the posters available at the Peacework Silent Auction and Sale, May 17 (see Contents)

The Living Wage Campaign began in the fall of 1998. Over the last three years, student members began regular outreach to workers and student groups and repeatedly held both private meetings with administrators and public rallies. The sit-in was an action that we felt pushed to take after the administration closed all other avenues of dialogue, and we had repeatedly heard that the Mills Report by the Ad Hoc Committee on Employee Policies was the final word. This committee had been handpicked by President Rudenstine and did not include any workers, union representatives, or students--ºnor were its suggestions implemented.

The Harvard Living Wage Campaign exists because Harvard pays poverty wages to its workers. We have personally seen the effects of these poverty wages on the people who serve us food, clean our halls and offices, and guard our lives and property. We could no longer be complicit with university policy that furthered economic injustice and social inequality on our campus. It is absurd that an institution with an endowment of 19.2 billion dollars has workers eating at soup kitchens. The highest estimate of a cost of a full living wage with benefits is $10 million. Given last year's 30% return on Harvard's endowment, implementing a full living wage with benefits would cost no more than 1/5 of one percent of the interest on the endowment. Perhaps even more outrageous, implementation of a full living wage would cost no more than 1/12 of last year's record $120 million operating surplus.

As students we have slowly seen Harvard shift away from its intellectual and educational roots towards being an institution concerned only with the bottom line. The Living Wage Campaign became our way to address the concerns brought on by the corporatization of universities across the nation and the globalization of economies worldwide. A graduate student standing outside, who is the best teacher I have had at this university, told me of her struggle to find a permanent position to teach next year anywhere in the US. "Universities are becoming corporate," she said matter-of-factly. "They don't want to hire any more professors because they can get graduate students to teach the courses for much, much less money." As I edit this I am drawn to the window by a woman who was fired from the job at the Peabody Museum after organizing for higher wages. "Thank you for doing this" she told me. "They've been treating people badly for 300 years. That attitude has got to be changed." These types of conversations speak to how the living wage relates directly to a range of other problems with labor on campus. We're seeing connections among parts of the community formerly divided by race and class--graduate students, workers, and faculty--that have made our community stronger. It is significant though that initial contact was often greeted with fear on the part of the workers. One of the factors that needs to change at Harvard is this climate in which workers, many of them non-English speaking, fear that talking about the conditions they face at work may threaten their job security, as was proven at the Peabody.

The lack of job security is due to an upsurge in reclassification of workers into lower-paying job categories, and the University's subcontracting jobs to outside companies that pay lower wages and often make getting health insurance difficult. During the summer of 1999, the Harvard Union of Security, Parking and Museum Guards, which had 120 union members, was reduced to 18 union members through a coercive negotiation session in which all but those 18 positions were outsourced. David Hogan (a pseudonym), one of the few remaining union members, highlighted the moral hypocrisy that compelled many of us to join this campaign. "Harvard constantly tells you about humanistic views, the truth, morals. You all have to take a required class called Moral Reasoning. Now I believe that Harvard is about those things. Those are fundamentally important concepts, but they're set aside for economic convenience--a group of people at Harvard are trying to set aside all of those very profound, philosophical and moral principles that they are constantly telling everybody that they stand for and which they negate and turn into a lot of hypocrisy by the way they treat us." (Please see more worker interviews at www.livingwagenow.com)

While inside we have been sustained by the workers and other supporters outside. Thursday, our outside team was holding its nightly vigil outside of Massachusetts Hall. Just as Bernie Steinberg, Director of Harvard Hillel, finished his rabbinical justification for a living wage, the sound of chanting could be heard on the evening breeze. Then, with the thud and rattle of people on the move, HERE Dining Services Union Local 26 came marching in through the wrought iron gates of Harvard Yard. "2,4,6,8--A Living Wage Just Can't Wait!" A crowd of 300 workers were outside our door. These were the workers we have seen day in and day out in our dining halls and know by name. For an hour at least they stood, peacefully but noisily, outside our door. We crowded into the half opened windows to cheer and wave back, and the people who couldn't fit out the windows jumped up and down and hugged each other at the sheer energy of that mass of red T-shirts and the voices of solidarity that were unleashed outside. This is what we are fighting for. We on the inside are placeholders. We are opening the space for voices to be heard that are either not heard at all on this campus, or are weakened by the prevailing paradigms of power. Proof of our power to change this situation came when the University agreed to withdraw their plan to reclassify 100 dining hall workers at Harvard Business School.

As a group, we have been very concerned with the structures of power within the Living Wage Campaign as well. There has been a conscious effort from the beginning to make decisions by consensus and to act in a non-hierarchical manner. Nonviolence is important to us. Our relationship with the Harvard Police who guard us has been very positive, and we thank them immensely for the respect and care they have shown to us. We organized ourselves into three affinity groups of approximately 15 people each, which functioned for the first few days as our decision-making bodies, coordinated by rotating spokespeople. Now, by Day 12, we have shifted primarily to big group meetings, with re-organized affinity groups serving more for discussing issues in a "safe space" that ensures that all of our voices are heard. We also have a number of committees to make sure that concrete tasks get done and that everyone has a role. It is important to note that our structures changed over time in response to the types of decisions we have had to make, our group size, and our concerns over voice. This flexibility is crucial although the "process" discussions involved in making these changes were often more arduous than the substantive decisions themselves. However, decisions happened better once proper meeting guidelines were established. There has been a tendency for the people with the most information to be the most vocal, and for people to give them "executive" powers--which they may not even want to take on--in the name of efficiency and time pressure. Therefore knowledge differentials continue to be a necessary, but positive, topic of conversation.

An increased awareness of labor issues on campus among students, faculty, and administration has been an important long range effect of our campaign. However, this cannot take the place of substantive gains for workers. Hopefully, permanent oversight committees and other structures will be put in place, and the Workers Center at the Harvard Law School will take on increased importance, in order to enforce improvements and keep Harvard accountable. The campaign has also had a galvanizing effect on the unions here at Harvard, namely HERE Local 26 Food Services, and SEIU Local 254 Janitorial. We have been working with them for a number of years, but recent negotiations with the university had not been favorable. They should be able to come out of this process with a living wage.

"How did this movement begin?" asked ABC News in an interview. Initially surprised at being called a "movement," we can only hope that we truly are. The eroding conditions for working families and immigrants in this nation are undeniable, and demand direct action. The AFL-CIO, the Massachusetts Democratic Party, and some Democratic Senators have put their names behind this action because they see it as comment on, and solution for, a national range of problems in the labor arena. The term "movement," for me, means national awareness and action on a number of fronts, both on grassroots and other levels. For those of us inside, the ability to stand on a national stage and shape a "movement," even for a moment, is a testament to the solidarity of prestige and power put into play for those who need it most. We are here, cell phones in hand, to stop poverty wages at Harvard. "Living Wage NOW!

The Harvard Living Wage Campaign Responds to Harvard

Harvard says: "A very small fraction of Harvard employees (about 400...) are paid less than $10 per hour."

The truth is: The University's own figures reveal at least 1000--perhaps 2000--workers at Harvard getting less than a living wage. Harvard obscures the truth by talking about "Harvard employees" and ignoring the many people who work at Harvard for Harvard through a contracting firm. In many cases, subcontract employees have simply replaced direct employees, or Harvard has converted direct employees to subcontracted ones, slashing their wages and benefits in the process.

Harvard says: "The 1999-2000 review ... recommended innovative programs to enhance the status and opportunities of service employees. These recommendations have been adopted by the University."

The truth is: By its own admission, Harvard is not close to implementing the recommendations that it said last May it was adopting. Harvard has not even written the "code of conduct" that it promised to impose on subcontracting firms. Workers who were eligible for benefits were still not receiving them, and didn't even know that they should be receiving them. President Rudenstine told us that if workers didn't know that they were entitled to benefits, it was their unions' fault for not passing the news along. But, as noted above, the truth is that many subcontracted and casual workers are not unionized.

Harvard says: "These recommendations [from the Ad Hoc Committee] ... include expanded availability of health benefits for part-time workers."

The truth is: If it is ever implemented, the Committee's proposal may well reduce health care for Harvard workers.When Harvard promised health insurance to part-timers working 20 hours per week, a lot of them were suddenly cut back to 19 hours. We suggested independent monitoring to protect workers against such cutbacks; Harvard refused.

Harvard says: "[T]he University meets and exceeds its stated goal of providing fair ... compensation and benefits packages for its employees."

The truth is: The National Low-income Housing Commission estimates that a wage of over $15 per hour is necessary to afford a two-bedroom apartment in the Boston area. Minimal wages are why workers at Harvard are taking second and even third jobs elsewhere, working 70 and 80 hours per week. Minimal wages are why some Harvard custodians regularly eat in soup kitchens.

In fiscal year 1999, Harvard paid $10 million to one fund manager--about as much as it would have cost to give a living wage to 2000 other employees. Does Harvard think that this is fair?

Learn more at www.livingwagenow.com

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