Against a "Living Wage"

The wily tacticians behind the ongoing living wage campaign protest have once again replaced substantive debate over real issues with sensationalistic antics.

When the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) rounded up the parents of a few students to wave signs during a speech by Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68, The Crimson responded with a staff editorial praising these heroic efforts. But nobody even questioned the underlying motivation for all that parental obnoxiousness. And the current sit-in at Massachusetts Hall, while certainly a first-rate spectator event for prospective students visiting Harvard, has proved equally worthless in generating meaningful dialogue. Instead, we have limited ourselves to debating the appropriateness and efficacy of PSLM’s protests.

Such narrow engagement of the issue is unfortunate. Noise from PSLM notwithstanding, people need to ask whether raising the hourly wage of Harvard’s lowest earners to $10.25 is a good idea. When they do, they’ll encounter at least two reasons why the answer is no.

The first reason is a criticism of minimum wages in general: There is no compelling argument for paying people more than they voluntarily agree to accept. Nobody is being forced to work at Harvard against his or her will. If the employees who would benefit from PSLM’s proposal feel slighted, they are perfectly free to go elsewhere in search of more lucrative employment.

A PSLM activist would likely respond that Harvard’s low-level employees lack the skills necessary to get better jobs, meaning that their choice to work for Harvard isn’t really voluntary. But the problem with this response is that it offers a positively dismal assessment of people’s ability to improve themselves. To uphold PSLM’s position, it isn’t enough to say that low-level employees are currently unable to command higher wages. Instead, we have to say that they will never be able to do so—that there is something so fundamentally inferior about them that they are helpless to acquire the knowledge that would make their labor more valuable.

Admittedly, the situations of unskilled workers often present difficulties to seeking education. But the administration’s efforts to improve worker training and provide literacy instruction are far better solutions than simply throwing wads of money at the problem, which is what PSLM wants. The very idea of a wage floor suggests that its beneficiaries are powerless without our indiscriminate pity. Isn’t that selling them just a little bit short?

The second reason for opposing a living wage is that it fundamentally misinterprets the proper role of universities, which is to promote learning and increase knowledge. Harvard does not exist to be an agent for social change, and it never has. While it is appropriate for students to question University policies that are obviously unjust, Harvard’s present wage structure does not fall into that category. Assuming that Harvard meets the requirements of legality and basic fairness, the administration’s highest priority should be to advance the academic ends for which Harvard was created.

The PSLM wants to ignore this fact and let extreme social reforms trammel Harvard’s academic mission. PSLM’s own estimate puts the total cost of implementing the living wage at $10 million per year. This is $10 million that, if PSLM has its way, won’t be available to hire professors, fund research and provide scholarships for students.

With characteristic sensationalism, PSLM points out that some of Harvard’s money managers earn annual salaries of over $10 million. But this argument misses the point. While it would be wonderful if Harvard could pay its financial gurus less, doing so wouldn’t give them an adequate incentive to render their services here—services that are vital to Harvard’s academic aims in a way that the labors of individual less-skilled workers are not.

Equally unconvincing is PSLM’s insistence that $10 million is a small fraction of Harvard’s annual budget. While this sum may seem insignificant when viewed as a portion of the University’s overall expenditures, the absolute value of $10 million is nevertheless enormous—especially when one considers the academic work these dollars support. Are we really to think that Harvard serves society best by devoting $10 million to create marginal improvements for a couple thousand employees instead of, say, using that money to fund cancer research?

The answer should be obvious. But people can’t hear themselves think over the hysterical shriek of PSLM protesters long enough to arrive at it. And it doesn’t help that the PSLM articulates the living wage issue in such biased terms that dissenters are in risk of being branded lunatics, Nazis or—worst of all—Republicans. Even the term “living wage” is so loaded that it eliminates any hope for sane discussion. Who could be against giving people a “living wage”? Does that mean PSLM’s opponents advocate a “death wage” instead? They must be pretty rotten people, those anti-PSLM folks: they don’t even want to let the little guys at Harvard keep on living!

People who have thought through the living wage issue should know better. But then again, one questions whether the protesters have considered all sides of the issue. It would be nice if they reconsidered the merits of their case next time they decide to subject Harvard to a highly publicized embarrassment.

Jason L. Steorts ’03 is a philosophy concentrator in Cabot House.