Nonsense on Stilts

To some members of the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM), the living wage is not a matter of charity—it is a matter of justice. To view the living wage as simply one among many good causes for which Harvard could write a check, to view Harvard’s workers as doe-eyed unfortunates and PSLM as their Sally Struthers, is both insulting and inaccurate. These students aren’t asking President Lawrence H. Summers to give higher wages merely as free alms for the good of his soul, but because the workers deserve them. The workers have a right to certain wages, a right that Harvard has routinely violated, and those violations must be redressed.

At least, such was the impression given by one of the concurring statements to the report of the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies (HCECP). The statement—signed by both of the committee’s PSLM members, among others—quotes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the effect that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family.”

There’s been a fair bit of debate in these pages on whether workers enjoy such a right or not. What I wonder is, if there were such a universal right, then what could it require for Harvard to pay “adequate” wages? How can we know if Harvard has done enough?

Some would say it’s a technical question, one that should be referred to the experts to solve with scientific studies. And indeed, measuring consumption patterns or pricing a given basket of goods are technical problems that a good study can solve. But the living wage isn’t supposed to be a biological minimum, representing the most grinding misery that human beings can physically sustain. Whether a given living standard is “adequate” is decidedly not a technical question, and treating it as one serves only to obscure the true nature of PSLM’s cause.

In its literature, PSLM cites a variety of studies, placing the adequate wage in the Boston area between $11 and $22 per hour. That range alone should give us pause—the highest figure is a full 100 percent above the lowest. The difficulties become even clearer when one considers the studies’ differing methodologies and mutually contradictory assumptions. Some studies state that rent should never require more than 30 percent of income, and that the cheapest 40 percent of housing will always be inadequate for families’ essential needs. Others assume that it is enough for workers to make a certain percentage of the median family income, regardless of how high or low that might be. Still more declare that wages should be high enough to prevent workers from needing government assistance—though never explaining why, if the goal is to keep families fed and clothed, available public aid should be ignored. And finally there are studies that rely on “expert budgets,” which in turn are based on individual, normative assessments of what constitutes deprivation. One such expert told the HCECP that a basic budget for a 4-person Boston family was $51,000 a year, an income greater than that of the median American family and well into the 99th percentile for the world’s population.

Which of these approaches is correct, and which of the wages actually adequate? Even if one finds the right to a decent wage to be obvious, there’s nothing obvious about what that wage should be, or what it should buy at Boston prices. If there were, wouldn’t the smart people who composed the studies PSLM cites have generated numbers in a somewhat narrower range?

We can all come up with our own ideas of what kind of wages are adequate and what kind of lives are decent and dignified. Perhaps all of us, or almost all, would agree that Harvard’s wages fall below that line. And perhaps it’s possible to aggregate the various opinions of community members and describe that figure as the prevailing community standard.

But universal rights aren’t set by poll data. They’re universal—they apply regardless of social conditions or prevailing cultural views. If the only standards for adequacy are the community’s prevailing views, how do we know if the community’s got it wrong? And how can the members of that community, who presumably contribute to the decision in some way, make meaningful individual judgments when the only source of authority is the will of the whole?

We’d like to think that universal rights are reasonably clear—that a well-informed, rational person (or at least a well-intentioned Harvard administrator) could know whether or not the University were in compliance. If there’s no method of resolving a dispute between experts, let alone average students, as to the meaning of the word “adequate,” then the existence of a universal right to adequate wages seems rather doubtful. It becomes an entirely mysterious matter how much money—how much food, how much sleep, how much medical care, how much time with children, how much security in old age, how much of every good that makes life pleasant—is guaranteed to Harvard’s workers by universal right.

When faced with this difficulty in a statement on its website, PSLM doesn’t pretend to know what the right wage actually is. In the end, PSLM’s only argument for the adequacy of a $12 wage is that it is more than $6.75—and the principled stand for a universal human right becomes a crude demand for more money.

This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with asking for more money. If a society believes it’s important to sacrifice some potential growth in order to have a minimum wage or progressive taxation, it’s free to do so. Harvard is just as free to make certain sacrifices in order to raise wages and make conditions a little less painful for some of its workers. But to couch the demand for higher wages in the language of universal rights—which does not lend itself to the comparison of potential costs and benefits—is at best a misunderstanding and at worst a political ploy.

If PSLM believes that the University could put its money to better use through higher wages, it can say so. But it can’t expect the University to respect workers’ rights when no one can say what those rights are.

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