The Cost of a Living Wage

Perhaps it was the euphoria still trickling in from Harvard-Yale, perhaps it was the unseasonably high temperatures, or perhaps it was the purple t-shirts, but something about last Friday’s Justice for Janitors rally reminded me more of a cheerleading routine than a showcase of solidarity on behalf of the call for a living wage. Justice for Janitors, rah, rah, rah.

Don’t get me wrong. I think the Living Wage Campaign has been an incredible feat of organization, and I deeply respect some of the students who have devoted so much of their time and energy to the cause, so I don’t mean to diminish the import of what it is they are trying to do. What I do mean is that the rally failed to move me, to strike effectively and powerfully at the heart of the problem—that a group of people who so diligently serve this university are denied full membership in its community.

Instead, effigies of Corporation members were displayed as Puri-tyrannical mascots while workers shouted for more money above the cacophony of drums and various assorted noisemakers. It was inspired casting: Scrooge hovering over the oppressed masses, with students as Robin Hoods—take from the rich, give to the poor. The sheer spectacle of the rally was enough to efface its animating principle, merely reducing the need for a living wage to a clash between Big, Bad, Corporate Harvard and its revolutionary peasantry.

Perhaps that’s simply the nature of a rally. Or perhaps there’s something more deeply troubling about the campaign itself.

Much of the criticism of Harvard’s failure to provide a living wage for its workers is couched in the idea of community. If we are truly to be a community of people who live, work and study in a common space, then the marginalization of one group means the undermining of the community as a whole. This begs the question—what is the nature of our community? Are we more of a community when one group organizes in order to demand that a second pay higher wages to a third?

The problem with this kind of activism is that it breeds passivity. Even if we do achieve a living wage, we are still left with a much more insidious problem—a service-oriented attitude. We expect that our dishes will be clean, that the puddle of vomit that appeared on the stairwell Saturday night will be gone by Monday morning, that getting five glasses of water is more efficient than refilling one. The dishwasher, chef and janitor may be getting a few dollars more on their checks, but has our community become more inclusive, its membership more complete?

A true community depends on a common enterprise. I think the nature of the rally on Friday shows just how much we lack it. To effigize the Corporation is one thing, to begin to feel responsibility for our community—by cleaning our own bathrooms, scrubbing down our own tables, even cooking our own brunches—is something quite different. How would our habits change if groups of students, on a rotating basis, were responsible for the upkeep of the dining hall? Or if we honored the workers by giving them a day off, figuring out for ourselves where the garbage disappears to, or how to quick-freeze Tuesday’s clam chowder?

Unrealistic, you cry. Utterly pointless, a waste of precious response-paper writing time. But why? Why, when we farm ourselves out to Habitats for Humanity and soup kitchens in Roxbury, can we not turn the philosophy of community service onto our own, where it is so conspicuously absent? Only in this way can we become full-fledged members of a community, and not just advocates of one. Only in this way does our rhetoric become something quite useful, and only in this way can we turn a debate mired in the Bushism of good versus evil to one that’s inward-looking and self evaluative. B.J. Greenleaf, in yesterday’s column, “Network Aversion,” identified the Harvard approach to social connections as Rolodex building. It’s much more difficult to see someone as a rung on the ladder to greatness after you’ve taken out thirty bags of garbage together.

Movements for social change that effect true and lasting reform are as much about the communities that make them necessary as they are about the particular groups that impede their progress. They may begin as a clash between a David and a monstrous, all-powerful Goliath, but they must end with a collective renewal. Finger-pointing gets old after awhile, particularly when those doing the pointing may easily, 50 years later, become those who are pointed at.

Sue Meng ’03 is a history and literature concentrator in Adams House. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.