Watch What We Say

When the Massachusetts Hall sit-in began, the living wage quickly became the dominant question of campus politics. But since the sit-in ended, the living wage campaign run by the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) has in many ways moved beyond its central issue and its namesake. In April, “$10.25” was ubiquitous, found on banners, signs and the walls of first-year dorms; in a recent newsletter door-dropped by the campaign, however, the standard set by the Cambridge living wage ordinance (now $10.68 per hour) is mentioned hardly at all. The call for a wage that allows workers to live in Cambridge, present in some of the movement’s early op-ed pieces and public statements, has shifted to a discussion of “the annual cost of living in metropolitan Boston.”

Rather than emphasizing a single issue and a single number as it did last spring, PSLM has now engaged in a far more general effort, focusing on the shift to “nonstandard” work (part-time and temporary work, often through independent contractors) that has been observed throughout the American economy in the last 20 years. Reversing this shift at Harvard—bringing outsourced service work back in-house, moving part-time work to full-time positions, and taking new measures to ease the process of union organizing —would take a far greater commitment from the University than simply imposing a wage floor. Regardless of what happens after the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies (HCECP) releases its report in a month’s time, the living wage campaign has already transformed its public presence from a single-issue lobbying group into a movement focused on perennial issues and engaged in a near-permanent effort to amend the University’s labor policies.

The central issue of the living wage campaign now appears to be the practice of outsourcing. The preliminary report released by HCECP was in many ways a primer on the history of outsourcing at Harvard. In the past ten years, Harvard has begun to use outside contractors in place of a directly-hired workforce in areas such as security and custodial services, a change that has normally been accompanied by a significant decrease in wages and benefits for the outsourced workers. Nearly half of the living wage campaign’s recent newsletter was devoted to the perils that outsourcing poses to Harvard’s labor force—a shift in emphasis made even more striking by the newsletter’s passing reference to $10.68.

But the elimination of outsourcing will not come easily. The University has argued that outsourcing (or at least the possibility of going to an outside contractor) is needed to maintain quality as well as to reduce costs. Harvard is an institution of teaching and research, and at a certain level it makes sense for the University to look to more specialized firms to provide its services—after all, Harvard is not in the security guard business. If it was reluctant to establish a wage floor, the University will be even more hesitant to tie its hands and to restrict itself to the direct hiring and oversight of workers. Until Harvard brings all of its security guards and janitors back in-house, the conflicts over campus labor policies will continue; by making outsourcing its enemy as well as low wages, the living wage campaign has signed up for a decades-long battle.

The same goes for PSLM’s call for a formal commitment to creating full-time rather than part-time jobs. According to Benjamin L. McKean ’02, a Crimson editor and prominent member of PSLM, some Harvard workers hold multiple part-time jobs on campus. These and other part-time positions could be combined into full-time jobs that carry increased benefits and a stronger role in collective bargaining. Yet even if Harvard agreed to such a commitment this afternoon, the changeover would take years, with full-time positions created through normal attrition as other part-time workers leave. Unlike a wage floor, which would become a non-issue as long as it is regularly adjusted for inflation, this plank of PSLM’s platform could stay on the front burner as long as there are part-time workers at Harvard.

At the same time that its approach becomes more long-term, the campaign’s proposals are getting more sophisticated. The recent newsletter reiterated the campaign’s call for “card-check neutrality,” a promise by the University that it will not interfere in attempts to organize and that it will recognize a new union as soon as half of the affected workers sign cards in the union’s favor. It would be difficult for a University that says it supports collective bargaining to defend its right to mount a campaign against unions, and promoting unionization makes a great deal of sense strategically—if it succeeds, workers will have far stronger institutional mechanisms to advance their interests than an unusually vocal campus student group.

Of course, the living wage has not been abandoned by the living wage campaign, and when the HCECP releases its report in late December the proposal of a wage floor will certainly return to the limelight. But the change in tone is visibly evident from the muted participation in the debate over the living wage, which by and large seems to have devolved into an occasional shouting match between PSLM and the Harvard Objectivist Club. A message board created a week ago by the HCECP, intended to allow public comment and discussion of wage issues, contains only four messages, one of which is an introductory statement from the HCECP staff.

Yet the most telling message was posted by Amy C. Offner ’01, who organized many of the protests outside Mass. Hall last spring. She wrote to the committee on Nov. 14 that it should not feel obliged to present “any elaborate justification for a wage floor,” portraying the search for such a justification as a “distraction” from their deliberations and hoping that HCECP “will spend no time” considering it.

If supporters of the living wage campaign no longer see the need to argue in detail for a living wage, the battle certainly lies elsewhere.

Stephen E. Sachs ’02 is a history concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.