Too Cruel for School

Every morning, at the crack of dawn, they file through the gates unseen. The darkness parts before them as they trudge across the yard. Feeling the autumn chill through their crimson uniforms, they can look forward to a day full of sweeping your trash, scrubbing your floors, and making it possible for you to live the life you do.

By the time they get home at night, maybe after their second or third job of the day, maybe after their kids have gone to bed, many of Harvard’s janitors have no more to show for their hard work than they did 10 years ago. And in the wealthiest university in the world, they continue to be paid unconscionably less than what it costs to live and raise a family here.

All of that could change on Nov. 15, as their campaign for an effective living wage, fair benefits, and full-time jobs culminates in the renegotiation of Harvard’s contract with its 750 janitors. But if they are to win dignity and respect on the job, workers need students to stand behind them. Here’s why that is exactly where we ought to be standing.

At its best, Harvard is a community that realizes its responsibility to all who contribute to its development. Janitors belong to that community as much as anyone else, and from day to day, it may be said that they give more to us than even the university’s most generous donors. If they all folded their arms today, Harvard would simply cease to function amid the filth.

At its worst, Harvard puts the whims of its Corporation before the needs of that community. Such was the operative principle in the late 1990s, as the University fueled a race to the bottom, outsourcing service jobs and slashing janitors’ wages by more than 13 percent.

In 2001, the Living Wage Campaign was able to turn that around with its historic sit-in at Mass Hall. Students and workers together taught the university to trade in some of its corporate avarice for the well-being of its community’s lowest paid members.

Still, Harvard never adopted a living wage standard, though student support helped janitors and dining hall workers get a serious raise that year and the committee appointed to study the question recommended “compensation levels that significantly contribute to ensuring that Harvard’s workers and their families enjoy at least a minimally decent standard of living.”

Over the past four years, the wages of Harvard janitors and other low paid employees have fallen further and further short of that “minimally decent standard,” as the cost of living in Boston has shot up and the university’s endowment has exploded.

All reasonable studies of life in the Boston area now call for a living wage of $20 or more plus benefits. The Massachusetts Family Self-Sufficiency Standard is $20.85 for a parent with one child. The National Low-Income Housing Commission estimates $24.35 as the bare minimum. And the Economic Policy Institute says $28.03 is needed for a parent with two kids.

At $13.50 an hour, what our janitors are making today just isn’t commensurate with the needs of people who have mouths to feed, kids to clothe, rent to pay, heating costs to cover, and daycare to take care of. As the saying goes, you can’t eat prestige.

How do they get by? By working as many as three jobs at once, as many as 75 hours a week, sacrificing most of their days, most of their nights, and above all, sacrificing the time they could have spent with their families and their children.

Harvard compounds the crisis by failing to provide hundreds of janitors with full-time work, breaking the promise made in its last contract to expand full-time opportunities to 60 percent of custodial jobs on campus. And the University continues to cut costs on workers’ backs by outsourcing work and allowing its subcontractors to pay lesser benefits for the same job.

Let’s face it. The richest university in history can afford to pay its workers more than poverty wages. The proposed raise would cost just a little over $10 million, amounting to no more than 0.3 percent of last year’s endowment return, or 1 percent of the expected payout.

Compare Harvard with its $25.9 billion to Boston University, which, with an endowment of just $694 million, pays its janitors $17.23 an hour. Harvard, in so thoroughly undervaluing hard work, has allowed itself to fall well behind all comparable institutions in the area.

Would a little decency really cripple this University? It didn’t in 2001. A raise of similar proportions wrought none of the disaster prophesied by the true believers of Ec10 orthodoxy. Employment of custodial workers has remained steady, because Harvard needs the work they do.

And yet since then, the pie has only gotten bigger, the cost of living has only gotten higher, and this University has returned to its place as the penny-pinching kid on the block. It’s time to share a piece of the pie with the people in our community who need it most.

These workers want to live in freedom, dignity and respect, and not have to give up all the things that make life worth living just to get by. Can anyone look them in the eyes and tell them this is not a reasonable demand?

They’re out there for us every day. For once, it’s time for us to be out there for them.



Michael Gould-Wartofsky ’07 is a government concentrator in Kirkland House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.