A Living Wage For Harvard’s Workers: Fairness or Folly?

To the editors:



In response to your editorial “Don’t Increase the ‘Living Wage’” (Oct. 13), I’d like to propose a modest alternative. The wage labor system itself (i.e., capitalism) should be abolished, and everyone guaranteed an ample livelihood, free from material anxiety, with a drastically reduced working week in a democratically-run workplace, where all managers would be elected and recallable. Yes, friends, I’m talking about the ‘s’ word: socialism.

At this and most other universities, a sizeable minority of workers, students, graduate students, and faculty members agrees privately with this proposal, yet it is never is publicly debated. It should be, if humanistic critical thinking (rather than the gaining of professional credentials) is really the ethos of the University. Fundamental ideological debate is badly needed and might turn out to be darned interesting. Why not give it a whirl, right here in the pages of The Crimson? Here’s my gauntlet.



ED DUPREE

Cambridge, Mass.



The writer is a member of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers.





To the editors:



Your editorial opposing increases in the living wage exposes a dangerously flawed logic buttressed by internal inconsistencies. I don’t know much about the living costs in Boston and Cambridge, so I have no opinion on what the living wage should be. But your editorial repeatedly conflates arguments against a specific living wage with arguments against the very concept of a living wage. Perhaps $20 per hour is the right living wage rate, perhaps it is wrong, but if Harvard’s janitors are indeed members of the University community, they must be accorded a wage that can provide them with decent living standards.

You state that Harvard must not pay more than “what is fair,” but aside from the free market, you provide no other standard of fairness. Does The Crimson Staff believe that all wages set by the free market are inherently fair? Your editorial itself suggests that you do not, given that you seem supportive of the janitors’ current wage rate of $13.50, which was itself achieved in part through a living-wage campaign at Harvard.

Yet you later write that living wages are flawed because they calculate “the money necessary to support a decent lifestyle independent of the nature of the actual work being done, and independent of the compensation that the labor market demands.” Yes, that is the very point of a living wage. People without marketable skills deserve to have decent lifestyles, even if the free market would compensate them at a wage rate that could not support them. Either you believe that the free market always leads to fair wages, or you believe that free-market wages are sometimes unfair. If you agree with the former statement, then you should not claim to support the current wage paid to the janitors. Otherwise, you ought to debate the merits of a specific living wage, not argue against its very existence.



DAVID B. ORR ’01

New York

October 13, 2005





To the editors:



In his Oct. 12 op-ed (“Uncounted Costs of a Living Wage”), Vivek G. Ramaswamy argues that securing higher wages for Harvard workers would “inextricably yet fatefully marry” human worth to monetary worth, and that this would somehow result in Harvard students acting in a condescending manner toward Harvard workers. If Ramaswamy would start acting in a condescending manner to Harvard workers simply because Harvard chose to pay them enough money to live above the poverty line, that tells us something about Ramaswamy’s moral condition, not about the relative merits of the living-wage campaign. Regardless, I imagine that Harvard workers care much more about their ability to pay for food, heat, and shelter than they do about something as inconsequential as Ramaswamy’s respect.



DAVID N. HUYSSEN ’02

New Haven, Conn.

October 12, 2005



The writer is a student at Yale University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and an organizer for the Graduate Employees and Students Organization at Yale.





To the editors:



I think I understand the hidden motives behind Vivek G. Ramaswamy’s incoherent op-ed about why paying people decently is actually condescending. Ramaswamy apparently believes that talking about what people earn is really a covert way of calculating their value as a person. Since Ramaswamy earns nothing by writing for The Crimson, he must be worried that people will notice that his opinions are worthless.



BENJAMIN L. MCKEAN ’02

Princeton, N.J.

October 12, 2005



The writer was a member of the Progressive Student Labor Movement as an undergraduate.