One Year Later, A Sit-in’s Legacy

One year ago today, nearly 50 members of the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) rushed Mass. Hall armed with sleeping bags, cell phones, laptop computers and a promise to remain indefinitely until Harvard granted its employees a living wage of $10.25 per hour.

After 21 days—the longest building occupation in University history—the students emerged, unshaven, behind on their schoolwork and loudly proclaiming victory, with the guarantee of a new committee to reexamine the wages of Harvard’s lowest-paid workers.

Today, Harvard does not have a mandatory wage floor for its employees. But as a result of the committee’s recommendations, the school’s janitors now earn more than the Cambridge living wage—which is currently set at $11.11 per hour.

And all subcontracted workers will receive the same wages as Harvard employees who do equivalent work.

While PSLM members campaigning for a living wage say they now have achieved many of the goals they set before storming Mass. Hall one year ago, success has proven difficult for the living wage campaign—a group whose existence depends on the very labor practices they seek to eliminate.

Growing Pains

Many students who were previously active in the living wage campaign have decreased or even ended their involvement—saying that PSLM’s structure only allowed input by a select few.

For first-years, who were not a part of the events last spring, this made breaking into the PSLM’s living wage campaign particularly difficult.

Although the living wage campaign will lose many of its core members to graduation this spring, there are currently only a handful of first-years who are regularly involved in the campaign.

Orlando Segura ’05 says he had looked forward to joining PSLM after hearing about the sit-in in the news last year, but quit after feeling he was not being incorporated into the group.

“I felt like I was just sitting there at PSLM meetings,” Segura says. “There is an implicit hierarchical structure but they say there isn’t one, which makes it hard to get your opinions across.”

Segura eventually stopped going to planning meetings altogether.

“I still support them, I still believe in a lot of the things they champion,” Segura says. “Had the meetings been more efficient and been more open to listening to others, especially freshmen, I might have stayed.”

“We do have some problems,” says PSLM member Benjamin L. McKean ’02. “We operate by consensus so anone who disagrees with something can stop it, but the way power operates, a person may be uncomfortable speaking out.”

He says the PSLM members are working to make the group more inclusive.

“We’ve made a lot of serious efforts to hear from people—people organized a pretty comprehensive set of one-on-one conversations to make sure everybody was comfortable with PSLM, and the direction it was going in,” McKean says. “On balance people agree that PSLM should stay the way it is—a democratic organization.”

PSLM member Daniel DiMaggio ’04 says involvement requires a significant time commitment, which first-years might not have been ready for.

“Some people latched on and took ownership of part of the group, but that may have been a problem for people who weren’t ready to make a total commitment to the group,” DiMaggio says. “We were putting in a lot of hours, and it might have been intimidating.”

But he says members have not turned a deaf ear to the concerns of new members.

“We’ve definitely been trying to come up with new ways for retaining people and maintaining a better atmosphere and making sure everyone’s voice is heard,” DiMaggio says. “I’m not sure how far we’ve come on that lately, but we’ll be trying to work on that the rest of the year.”

Looking Forward

PSLM members are also uncertain about the focus of their group, particularly as the unions are now in negotiations.

Thanks in large part to PSLM’s efforts in the past four years, workers are better organized and more capable of dealing with the University on their own. But this places PSLM members in a supportive, rather than a leading role.

In late February, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) reached a contract settlement with Harvard that will pay all janitors at least $11.35 an hour—although PSLM members said they would have encouraged the union to hold out for a better contract.

Since then, PSLM members have organized protests claiming the University is stalling on implementation of parity wages for outsourced janitors, and that employees on the SEIU negotiating committee have been subject to intimidation.

But with only the contracts of security guards and Harvard University Dining Services’ restaurant employees left to be negotiated, PSLM members simply have less to do on the labor front.

“This year had been very hectic,” says DiMaggio, “at least until a month or two ago.”

This has led some to question whether PSLM’s living wage campaign still has reason to exist.

A year ago, PSLM members had routinely promised an end to the campaign if the University were to accept a living wage.

“We’re not a student group,” McKean said in February 2001. “We’re a campaign and campaigns end.”

But the University has yet to implement a mandatory wage floor, and McKean responds light-heartedly to critics’ calls for living wage campaign members to give up.

“I’ve got to tell you, there certainly aren’t any workers saying that,” McKean quips. “We are going to continue to fight for a policy where there is a living wage adjusted annually, where we don’t need to worry about the details of a bargaining clause or parity—this is something where we can finally go home.”

The Numbers Game

But PSLM members’ continued calls for a living wage—in the face of a contract that nets workers more than the current living wage figure—has resulted in criticism.

Matthew Milikowsky ’02, a member of the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies, says he questions why PSLM members have continued to protest, even after the committee’s report.

“They found an issue with a legitimate grievance. Harvard’s negotiating practices over the last decade were unfair. That’s why there was the [committee] report,” Milikowsky says.

And some students say campaign members have used a moving goal post, continually increasing the wage they deem appropriate for Harvard’s workers.

PSLM members now say hinging last spring’s campaign on Cambridge’s living wage figure—then $10.25, now $11.11— was a mistake.

Since then, PSLM members have backed away from the precise living wage figure.

“When the campaign started, workers were not organized and the idea was they should be treated at least as well as Cambridge [city employees],” says PSLM member Madeleine S. Elfenbein ’02. “Now, we see they should be treated as well as they deserve to be treated.”

Paradigm Shift

While PSLM members say they realize that the campaign for a living wage at Harvard will become less vocal, they say they will remain active—both on and off-campus.

At their most recent protest, PSLM was joined by about a dozen members of the Boston area’s chapter of the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP). PSLM members also worked with students around the region to help spawn similar movements at nearby colleges, such as Tufts and Boston College (BC).

According to Joseph Previtera, a BC first-year and SLAP member, PSLM was played a vital role in encouraging BC students to become active in labor issues.

He said he particularly remembers former PSLM member Lara Z. Jirmanus ’01.

“She came to our first meetings along with a union representative from SEIU 254 and a BC custodian to explain the custodians’ contract, but now has helped in so many other ways in suggesting guidelines on how to get a campaign going,” Previtera writes in an e-mail message.

On campus, PSLM members have extended their role beyond the living wage campaign to become involved in other progressive movements.

After Enron’s fall, HarvardWatch, a monitoring group revived last year by members of PSLM, began putting pressure on Herbert S. “Pug” Winokur ’64-’65, a member of the Harvard Corporation and the chair of Enron’s Finance Committee, to resign from his post at Harvard.

And while PSLM and the living wage issue have become nearly synonymous, PSLM originally encompassed both the living wage campaign and Harvard Students Against Sweatshops.

In fact, there were two central demands of last spring’s sit-in—for Harvard to adopt a living wage and also to join the Worker’s Rights Consortium (WRC), an apparel manufacturing monitoring agency.

While the living wage campaign took priority then, PSLM members may now have more time to spend on the unaddressed half of last spring’s demands.

Today, PSLM will stage what McKean described as a “protest/fashion show” in front of Mass. Hall, to call on the University to join WRC.

“PSLM started before the living wage campaign,” PSLM member Erik Beach ’02 says. “In the long term, not having to focus as much on the living wage allows us to broaden some of our focus.”

—Staff writer Joesph P. Flood can be reached at flood@fas.harvard.edu.