A Fair Resolution

Harvard’s janitors drove a hard bargain. Last spring, Harvard’s unions rallied around the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) in its push to get the University to adopt a living wage of $10.25 per hour. When negotiations concluded late last night, the janitors got even more—a starting wage of $11.35, which will increase to $13.50 in October, 2005. We are happy to see the negotiations conclude with workers obtaining a living wage, at least for now. These new wages give due respect to the important work done by Harvard’s janitors.

Nevertheless, we are disappointed by PSLM’s coercive tactics. On Tuesday afternoon, nine protesters, including two undergraduates, were arrested when they sat down in Harvard Square and disrupted traffic for a few minutes. The whole affair was minutely choreographed—and the police and the protesters performed flawlessly. Although we support the collective bargaining process and believe that the union had every right to ask for increased wages, PSLM’s continued antics detracted from the workers’ claims.

Tuesday’s event can hardly be called civil disobedience. The former mayor of Cambridge, Anthony D. Gallucio, and Cambridge Democratic State Rep. Jarrett T. Barrios ’90 were on hand to encourage the protesters. The police briefed the protesters before their arrest on the procedures they would follow. Like the Mass. Hall student sit-in last spring, the event had the air of a worker’s carnival, not a grim display of resolve in the face of the law.

In the past civil disobedience has been used to protest government policies that tread on the most basic civil and political rights. In this case, the protesters used a coercive method to get wage negotiators to make concessions during a collective bargaining process. As with the sit-in last spring—although this event was not on nearly the same scale—there continues to be a disconnect between the magnitude of the issues at hand and the tactics that PSLM and the union employ.

Such a show for the cameras was coercive and therefore unjustified while bargaining was ongoing. Although many in the Harvard community rightly demanded fair wages for workers, the continued coercive tactics and ever-changing demands of PSLM only weakened student support for their cause.

We continue to be baffled by the way PSLM used the same rhetoric to justify ever-increasing wages. Back when it demanded a living wage of $10.25 per hour, the group used the moral argument that workers were being forced to live in poverty. For the sake of justice, they argued, wages had to be raised. Those same arguments were later used to justify the union’s $14 per hour demand. There is a limit to the wages that PSLM can justify on moral grounds, and that limit has passed—Harvard initially offered a starting wage of $10.85 an hour, which surpassed PSLM’s living wage standard. It would have been far better for PSLM to tone down its rhetoric about morality and concentrate on comparisons to other area schools to convince the University to raise its wages. Doing so might have brought workers even greater success.

The union had every right to ask for better pay, and we congratulate them on finally reaching a settlement. We hope Harvard’s upcoming negotiations with other workers will be resolved without PSLM resorting to its coercive tactics; it should rely on the collective bargaining process instead.