Letter to the Editor: Alums in Solidarity with Dining Hall Strikers

To the Editor:

We are members and friends of the Harvard-Radcliffe Class of 1972 who wish to express our solidarity with the 750 Harvard University dining hall workers who are on strike, and with their student allies.

Some of us were student-workers in the dining halls as undergraduates. Some of us took part in the struggles for pay equity among campus workers (women and men, black and white) during those years. All of us urge the Harvard administration to accede to the strikers’ demands to maintain (if not improve!) health coverage and to guarantee that all full-time dining hall workers earn at least the very modest sum of $35,000 per year.

Harvard boasts that the average Harvard dining services worker earns $21.89 an hour. According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, however, a minimum subsistence living wage for a worker who is supporting just one child would be $26.87 an hour.

While these numbers do not fully reflect the complexity of the issues at stake, the question remains: What values will be conveyed to students and the community by Harvard’s response to this strike?

Many of our generation believed, as students during “the sixties,” in the possibility of a truly just society, free of racism, sexism, exploitation, and war. Most of us underestimated the nature of the struggle that would be necessary to achieve such a society. Yet we are heartened that another generation is taking up that struggle.

Sincerely,

Bonnie Blustein ’72
Heather Berman Cantino ‘72
Christy Boyer Day '71
Judson Esty-Kendall ‘72
John Farago ‘72
Peter Guarnaccia ‘72
Paul R. Harrison, 72
Stephen Holt ‘72
Douglas B. Kamerow ‘72
Marcia Livingston ‘71
Ellen Messing '72
David Olson ‘72
Steven Peterman ‘72
David Richman ‘72
Marjorie Starkman ’71
James Stodder ‘71
Ned Stuckey-French ‘72
Kathryn Harris Tijerina ‘72
Susan Underwood ‘72
Weezy Waldstein ‘72
Alan J. Weisbard '71-'72