Students Rage for a Living Wage

The few remaining members of the group that spearheaded the 2001 sit-in—which prompted Harvard to institute a living wage—have formed a new group aimed at reinvigorating the labor movement on campus and are demanding a $20-per-hour living wage for all University janitors.In the midst of a contract renegotiation for Harvard’s janitors, the new Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) succeeds the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM)—which successfully led the campaign that brought Harvard workers a guaranteed $10.25 hourly living wage and a number of other improvements in compensation. SLAM has an active membership of about 50 students, according to group organizer Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky ’07, and its Facebook group claimed 141 members last week.

Although many current SLAM members were formerly involved with PSLM, the new activist group appears to be taking tougher stances than its predecessor. For the most part, SLAM’s demands far exceed the terms to which the University agreed in 2001.

As Harvard’s janitors renegotiate their contract with the University, SLAM’s leaders insist that Harvard should pay its janitors at least $20 per hour plus benefits, increase the proportion of janitors offered full-time employment at the University, and improve benefits for subcontracted workers, according to Gould-Wartofsky, who is also a Crimson editor.

A wage of $10.25 per hour when the sit-in began, in April 2001, was equivalent to $11.38 in August 2005, adjusted for inflation of 11 percent over that period, according to inflationdata.com.

SLAM’s leadership—which includes Alyssa M. Aguilera ’08, Andrew H. Golis ’06, and Amanda L. Shapiro ’08, as well as Gould-Wartofsky—says that the group’s demands come from the workers themselves.

“Part of the broader ideology behind the Student Labor Action Movement is that it’s part of our responsibility as students to help people who help us,” Golis says. “We’re there to support them and promote their goals.”

Harvard’s custodians, represented by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 615, are currently renegotiating their contract with the University. The contract is set to expire on Nov. 15.

Courtney Snegroff, a spokeswoman for SEIU Local 615, declined to comment about some of SLAM’s specific demands. But she adds that the SEIU stands behind the workers’ demands in principle.

“The priorities that SLAM has are the priorities of the janitors,” she says, “and we’re there to represent the workers and what they’re fighting for.”

William J. Murphy, Harvard’s director of labor and employee relations, declined to comment on SLAM’s demands because the negotiations are ongoing.

Murphy says SLAM has not contacted his office.

But SLAM also intends to address issues facing the security guards and dining hall workers on Harvard’s campus, Gould-Wartofsky says.

SLAM, he says, hopes to strengthen the prospects of a union for the security guards subcontracted to the University through AlliedBarton Security Services by demanding that Harvard require a card-check neutrality agreement prohibiting anti-union activity from all its subcontractors.

Snegroff says that the SEIU local—which is presently undertaking efforts to organize the AlliedBarton security guards on Harvard’s campus—promotes card-check neutrality agreements.

“We want that for any site,” she says.

But Harvard’s Deputy Director of Labor Relations James LaBua says that the University does not intend to require a card-check neutrality agreement of its subcontractors because the agreement would be between subcontractors and unions and would not include Harvard.

“To have the Harvard name being included—I don’t think Harvard is in a position to require a card check, because we’re really not a party to that,” he explains.

LaBua and Murphy say the unionization of Harvard’s security guards must be addressed through AlliedBarton, not through the University.

“Whether it’s the SEIU or some other union that wants to organize them, they certainly have the right to do that,” LaBua says.

But Gould-Wartofsky criticizes Harvard for trying to “evade its responsibility to workers who are members of the community.”

“The fact is that Harvard is responsible for outsourcing those security jobs to [AlliedBarton], not to mention busting the old guards’ union in the process,” he says.

The SEIU is presently undertaking efforts to organize the AlliedBarton security guards on Harvard’s campus.

THE LIVING WAGE, RECONSIDERED

As SLAM pushes to institute a $20-per-hour wage with benefits for the University’s janitors, that figure has led some observers to question precisely what constitutes a living wage.

The federally-mandated minimum wage is $5.15 per hour and was last raised in 1996.

Snegroff calls the proposed $20-per-hour wage—nearly double Harvard’s current minimum wage of $10.25 per hour—a reasonable pay scale for workers living in the Boston area.

“For anyone who’s a little bit surprised, I would ask any janitor about what they do and whether they think it’s worth $20 an hour,” she says.

Ascherman Professor of Economics Richard B. Freeman, who specializes in labor economics and institutions, notes that the precise level of a living wage depends on each geographic area.

“Different cities and different universities have come up with different numbers,” he says. “A living wage in Boston is going to be much higher than a living wage in New Hampshire or the Dominican Republic, where costs of living are lower.”

But Freeman—who authored a 2001 article in Harvard Magazine entitled “Why Not a Living Wage at Harvard?”—also notes that unions such as the SEIU are still the main outside force in advancing the workers’ demands at Harvard.

“The whole point of the living-wage campaign was to...allow the union to negotiate without the fear that they would be outsourced,” he adds. “The bulk of these workers should be able to negotiate their own wage, with support from the outside [unions].”

Beren Professor of Economics N. Gregory Mankiw, who teaches Social Analysis 10, “Principles of Economics,” declined to comment on SLAM’s new demands, but says that he stands by the statements he made during the 2001 living-wage campaign.

Mankiw wrote in a 2001 Boston Globe op-ed that the students who staged a sit-in in Massachusetts Hall that spring were “laudable in their intentions but deficient in their analysis.”

“By raising the relative price of unskilled workers, the passage of a living wage shifts the tradeoffs in a way that means fewer of those workers will be hired,” he explained.

According to the Office of Human Resources’ 2005 Annual Report on the Status of Employees, 349 custodial workers were employed at Harvard in March 2001. That number grew to 363 in April 2004, but then dropped back down to 346 in April 2005.

Janitors in their first three years at Harvard were paid $11.35 per hour in May 2001, and that wage increased gradually to $13.50 per hour as of October 1, 2005 in compliance with an agreement struck with the SEIU Local 615, according to the same report.

Continuing his analysis in an article that appeared alongside Freeman’s piece in Harvard Magazine that winter, Mankiw added that, with higher wages, a more skilled worker would be more likely to displace a less skilled worker.

“In the short run, a living wage might benefit those at the bottom of the economic ladder,” he wrote. “In the long run, they would be replaced by those who are already a rung or two higher.”

But Gould-Wartofsky says that there should still be no question about instituting a living wage.

“It’s simply ethical—there should not be poverty at the richest university in the world,” he says. “This is part of Harvard’s responsibility.”

Mankiw likewise noted in his 2001 Harvard Magazine article that the living-wage campaign raises the issue of what Harvard’s mission to society should be. But he differed sharply from Gould-Wartofsky in his analysis of the issue.

“The benefactors who give to the University do so to support education, not income redistribution,” Mankiw wrote. “Harvard needs to pay its workers—janitors and professors alike—enough to attract and motivate them. But it shouldn’t pay more than it needs to, given the competitive labor markets in which it hires. To do so would compromise the University’s commitment to the creation and dissemination of knowledge.”

Freeman says he wonders whether SLAM may be trying to bid up workers’ wages, using the $20-per-hour demand as a negotiating tactic.

“They may be overshooting,” he says. “But it’s also getting them attention.”

—Staff writer Daniel J. T. Schuker can be reached at dschuker@fas.harvard.edu.