Sharing the Wealth

This September, returning students were confronted with an odd juxtaposition of facts: Harvard administrators were settling into the comfort of an unprecedented economic boom while other members of our community, the security guards, were told to face "harsh economic realities" and were de facto forced out. While the University endowment has ballooned to over $14 billion, while the Capital Campaign has exceeded its $2.1 billion goal by $225 million and while University President Neil L. Rudenstine has informed every Crimson reader that Harvard has achieved "a goal greater than any other institution of higher learning in the history of the human race," the University continues to pay an estimated 2,000 workers poverty wages.

The janitors who clean our houses, for instance, are paid only $8.15 to $9.05 per hour, wages that correspond to incomes of $16,300 to $18,100 per year. Because Harvard pays so little, few janitors can afford to live in the community in which they work. Many have difficulty paying rent and buying food for their families. It's almost impossible to find a single janitor at Harvard who does not depend on a second source of income. Most, if not all, Harvard janitors work two and even three jobs--as many as 80 hours per week--and still struggle to support their families.

Janitors are now beginning contract negotiations with the University and aim to secure a living wage of at least $10 per hour. Boston University, which has an endowment less than one-twentieth the size of Harvard's, already pays its janitors over $10 per hour. The city of Cambridge passed a living wage ordinance in May, establishing $10 per hour as the minimum wage for all city workers. Harvard will fight the janitors' reasonable demand, and fight hard.

Harvard's resistance to paying a living wage is part of a larger effort by Harvard administrators to subject directly hired, unionized workers to terrible and demoralizing working conditions in order to replace them with cheaper, subcontracted labor--pushing wages down as the endowment goes up. For example, Harvard forced its security guards to work for nearly five years without a contract, by refusing to negotiate in good faith. Harvard's disrespectful treatment degraded the jobs of its unionized security guards so thoroughly that, this fall, roughly half of them decided that they would rather accept a buy-out than remain at Harvard.

Today, janitors face these same conditions and they risk meeting the same fate as the guards. Anyone who has spoken to janitors recently can attest to the fact that they are as demoralized as our guards last spring, just before the University broke their union and drove them out of our community. Janitors who have worked in our houses for as many as 20 years have told us that their wages have become so inadequate and their treatment so disrespectful that if Harvard offered them buy-out packages, they would take them.

Harvard's abuse of workers must stop. Our community can no longer permit the impoverishment of its members--janitors, security guards or whoever. We must refuse to permit the purging of workers who have devoted their lives to this University. Today, the janitors begin their contract negotiations. Students, faculty and workers must now publicly make clear that we will not accept the degradation and abuse of any member of our community. We need to publicly make clear that we stand in solidarity with our janitors.

Jonah G. Westerman is a first-year living in Wigglesworth Hall. Benjamin L. McKean '02 is a social studies concentrator in Cabot House. The writers are members of the Progressive Student Labor Movement and the Living Wage Campaign.