An Uneasy Alliance

When members of the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) took on the campaign for a living wage for Harvard’s workers nearly four years ago, they found themselves fighting a powerful University.

With Harvard’s lowest-paid workers faced with the constant threat of outsourcing and the union representing them out of touch with its membership, PSLM was the only game in town.

Students were in the driver’s seat—staging their own protests, making their own claims, deciding to push for the City of Cambridge’s living wage formula as the one the University should adopt.

But as the Living Wage Campaign picked up steam, workers and a newly revamped Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 254 were pulled along by the students’ energy.

Spurred by PSLM, workers and unions joined with the students to form a far more formidable opponent than Harvard’s administration had faced in years.

The strength of the partnership became clear last spring, as PSLM members forced the University to agree to renegotiate workers’ contracts with a three-week long occupation of Mass. Hall.

Students benefited from the experience, size and credibility of unions. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney’s speech outside the sit-in to thousands of students, media and workers mobilized from throughout the area was national news.

And Sweeney’s negotiators helped broker a deal with administrators who had previously refused to consider any compromises to end the sit-in.

While the unions benefited from the energy brought by PSLM, the students bolstered their cause with the support of unions skilled in bargaining and well-connected with the actual workers.

Labor experts say this sort of cooperation marks an important new trend.

“The labor movement has been ruled by a group of old white men for a long time, and those old men are getting old and they’re leaving,” says Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University. “Young people coming in are waking them up and challenging them.”

Yet some of PSLM’s greatest victories on behalf of workers have demonstrated the limits of student power in the world of labor relations.

As PSLM members pushed the issue of higher wages onto the bargaining table, it entered a realm in which they as students could merely be supporters, not leaders.

With SEIU in charge of contract negotiations, PSLM—with its years of contact with workers—worries that the hierarchical union, however revitalized, may still not be the best advocate for workers’ concerns.

The irony is that without PSLM’s activism pushing the living wage and the union to the forefront, this spring’s wage hikes might never have happened. But with the student group’s success has come uncertainty about the role students can play in organizing workers once they have helped the union regain power and credibility.

From CEC to HCECP

Harvard students have a long history of reacting to wage movements.

In 1951, Harvard’s maids and janitors asked the University for a pay hike, saying that increased cost of living and higher taxes made it difficult to make ends meet.

Students afraid of a subsequent rise in board fees were angered by the requests and worried whether, as one Crimson staff editorial put it, “they can use every future government Cost-of-Living Index to prove they need a new boost in wages.”

The maids were ultimately phased out and replaced by less costly student porters—and thus, Dorm Crew was born.

Many students had reconsidered the wage issue by the 1980s, when the Phillips Brooks House-based Committee for Economic Change (CEC) was active in establishing the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW), which now represents about 4,500 Harvard employees.

“We had student labor supporters crawling all over our offices and coming to our rallies and doing all kinds of wonderful creative work,” recalls HUCTW Director William Jaeger.

PSLM is also a part of the Phillips Brooks House Association. But what has separated PSLM from groups like the CEC was the leading role it has taken.

While important in the establishment of HUCTW in 1988, the CEC took most of its cues from an active union leadership.

“We weren’t interested in telling the workers what they wanted,” said Elisabeth A. Szanto ‘86-’87, who was active in the organization and now works for the State Health Care and Research Employees Union. “We encouraged the rest of the community to remain neutral and to let the union make up their minds.”

Szanto says student support is critical to any success with labor activism on campus, because historically Harvard has used students against labor movements, accusing unionized workers of being “disloyal” to students and hurting the University’s primary mission of education.

But PSLM faced a different set of circumstances than the CEC when students began campaigning for a living wage in the late 1990s.

In the early 1990s, SEIU began a steady decline, losing its ties with workers and its clout with local employers, a decline noted in the final report of the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies (HCECP), a committee that recommended the University raise wages after being charged last spring to examine the wage structure for Harvard’s lowest-paid workers.

“The Committee is troubled by allegations that the previous leadership of SEIU Local 254 failed to adequately represent the interests and preferences of its membership both within and outside of Harvard,” the report said.

With scant help from the union, workers were left little power at the bargaining table. And so when the students in PSLM wanted to work on wage issues, they decided to take a more active role in setting the agenda.

“The old leadership...were not folks interested in what was good for the membership,” says PSLM member Benjamin L. McKean ’02. “It appears they were much more interested in collecting dues and all the things that give labor unions a bad rap.”

Facing the threat of further outsourcing, SEIU in 1996 actually negotiated a pay decrease for its workers.

“In the old union, workers weren’t involved,” says Shakespeare Christmas, a custodian in Paine Hall and a new shop steward for the union. “The leadership just did what they wanted to do without the consent of the workers.”

With a distant union, students took it upon themselves to interview workers about conditions on the job, march in protests and meet with University officials.

“Given the fact that the union leadership was not really playing a constructive role on the Harvard campus...I think that students stepped into that vacuum,” says Libby Devlin, director of higher education for SEIU Local 254. “The leadership role was critical to the success of the campaign and was a key reason why the workers have now stepped up and taken over their organization.”

Without a clear agenda set forth by the union, PSLM soon created its own, focusing on the living wage figure used as a minimum figure by the City of Cambridge in paying its workers.

The call for $10.25 per hour became a powerful rhetorical slogan for the Living Wage Campaign at protests and during the sit-in in particular. PSLM members routinely said that if the University would simply adopt the living wage, the protests would stop.

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

Leading the Charge

PSLM member Madeleine S. Elfenbein ’04 says PSLM was well aware of the problems of trying to speak for workers.

“In some ways it was a necessary evil, necessary because without student groups or the union they couldn’t organize themselves,” Elfenbein says. “I think we were at least intellectually aware of that problem from the beginning…and we would always have workers speak at rallies. We organized them, they spoke at them.”

Workers soon gained another advocate when the SEIU international union placed Local 254 into trusteeship in February 2001.

Devlin says the union regained its strength after it went into trusteeship and became involved with PSLM members.

“Union membership has consistently always had a good relationship with the students,” she says. “The leadership needed to be brought along, and that happened in the course of the Living Wage Campaign.”

The HCECP report also acknowledged the improvement in SEIU leadership, saying that it “appears to be much stronger today.”

And the union seemed to be successful in helping workers find their own voice.

In January, a Justice for Janitors rally was organized and run by workers, with students showing up to provide support rather than run the show. Elfenbein says the rally was a success rooted partly in PSLM protests and last spring’s sit-in.

“Workers felt empowered by the sit-in,” Elfenbein says. “All of a sudden you had workers being interviewed by the media…and we were sensible enough to get out of the way and let them tell their stories.”

Yet in the midst of one of their biggest victories, PSLM was forced to face its limits.

As the sit-in dragged on last spring and administrators still refused to negotiate with protesters, help came in the form of AFL-CIO General Counsel, Jon Hiatt, who played a significant role in negotiating the deal with Harvard that brought the students out of the building.

Hiatt says that then-University president Neil L. Rudenstine placed a “courtesy call” to AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.

After the AFL-CIO’s public presence in front of Mass. Hall, Hiatt and Sweeney went into a closed meeting with Rudenstine and Paul S. Grogan, then Harvard’s vice president for government, community and public affairs.

Hiatt says Rudenstine explained that Harvard was willing to negotiate—and probably could get to a $10.25 wage without much trouble—but not while students remained in the building.

And so, Hiatt says that a few days later he was actively negotiating between the students in Mass. Hall and Harvard General Counsel Anne Taylor.

In the end, the AFL-CIO helped to broker a deal bringing students out of Mass. Hall—and Harvard was obligated to post three press releases on its website: its own, PSLM’s and the AFL-CIO’s.

Hiatt says he was initially concerned that he would meet with reluctance from students inside Mass. Hall to have a proxy negotiator. Some students were indeed ambivalent.

“I think we would have preferred to sit at the table ourselves,” McKean says, “but it’s not every day that you get the general counsel of the AFL-CIO offering to help.”

In hindsight, Elfenbein wonders about the ramifications of allowing union representatives to negotiate for them.

“It was very frustrating to a lot of us,” Elfenbein says. “[The unions] wanted a labor victory…If we had made the administration deal with us, and been our own advocates, would we have gotten more, or would we have been starved out? Who knows?”

With this, Harvard has started looking to the unions to deal with the issues it was forced to confront with the sit-in.

“Institutions like Harvard...want to deal with other institutions, like the AFL-CIO,” says Nancy DellaMattera of the UMass-Lowell Labor Extension Program. “They don’t recognize the students as having an institution; they see them as just a group of students who took on this issue, and they don’t take them that seriously, frankly.”

Knights of the Bargaining Table

The scene at the SEIU contract renegotiations this spring told the tale: union negotiators and University officials sat at the bargaining table, while PSLM members watched from the audience.

With the union suddenly dealing more closely with both workers and Harvard, it was increasingly unclear what PSLM’s new role was to be.

The union appeared to have improved its relationship with workers, according to Christmas—making it more difficult for PSLM to argue that workers were not being represented.

“The union asked us to voice our opinion, and you were able to say whatever you wanted,” Christmas says.

Still, says David A. Jones, Harvard’s director of labor and employee relations, the students are the ones who understand workers best.

“The students actually had more credibility with the workers than the new union leaders did,” Jones says. “The students knew and understood the issues with these workers much better.”

Christmas says that for many workers, the students are more credible as labor advocates.

“The students have day-to-day contact with the workers,” he says. “They live in the buildings they work in.”

PSLM members—many of whom had put their academic careers on the line with the sit-in and some of whom were arrested in an act of civil disobedience in February to put pressure on Harvard negotiators during contract talks—were unsure about the handling of the negotiations, which ended with a base pay of $11.35 per hour, with that figure to rise significantly over the three years of the contract.

PSLM member Emma S. Mackinnon ’05 says that many were frustrated with the final contract and felt that it fell short of the workers needs.

“There was definitely some resentment,” says Mackinnon. “We also think they could have gotten more.”

“The union claims to have done its best...but the manner in which [the negotiation] was structured was in many ways problematic,” Elfenbein says. “Some individual workers did have power, but the way it worked is not a model of worker democracy and fair representation.”

Elfenbein cites problems with translation equipment at the negotiations for Spanish and Portugese-speaking workers.

“There are ways to cross the language barrier when the opinion of non-English speaking people is seen as important,” Elfenbein says.

But there was little PSLM could do to cross that barrier, or any other barrier, during negotiations.

Bronfenbrenner says collective bargaining laws only allow certain parties to have a say in decision-making—and workers are the parties with interests at stake.

“Collective bargaining is the most democratic practice that we have, and the most well-regulated,” she says. “Students get an inflated sense of what their role is—but in fact the people who took the risk to actually organize the unions took the greater risk.”

Jones says the problems came when students in PSLM weren’t sure when to give in.

“I think [the problem] was their not knowing when to declare victory,” he says. “And instead they decided that they could get greedy…They ended up damaging their own credibility.”

Other students feel that the unions, though stronger than they were before SEIU went into receivership, still lack some of the strengths that students have.

Mackinnon says the unions and the students had different priorities.

“It’s just a difference between student activism and professional labor organizing,” she says. “We were much more helpful and more willing to keep relying on direct action to keep pressuring Harvard.”

To some close to PSLM and wage issues, the tensions are a sign that the relationship between labor and PSLM is beginning to show signs of rust.

“The coalition between students...and workers themselves who are unionized was certainly strongest during the sit-in,” says Timothy P. McCarthy ’91, faculty adviser to the PSLM. “I think they have broken down—it’s obvious.”

DellaMattera says she thinks the labor-student dynamic will have to be reshaped in order not to leave students feeling used and left out.

“Something does need to change,” she says. “We have to recognize that it’s not just because the unions wanted to ‘use’ people—it’s because their institutions aren’t set up to deal with people that way.”

Cletus E. Daniel, professor of American labor history at Cornell, says it is natural for students to become frustrated with professional labor.

“Some students will accommodate themselves to the nature of things; others will drift away because they become disillusioned,” he says. “If they want to remain involved, in the end they’re going to have to subordinate their views to workers.”

Where Do We Go From Here?

Those who stick with the movement will be forced to redefine a PSLM and Living Wage Campaign that have been necessarily weakened by their own success.

The workers have higher wages, the unions have stronger alliances and even Harvard—which the HCECP report repeatedly reprimands for driving down the wages of its lowest-paid workers—has claimed success in improving its treatment of workers.

Hiatt says students should see the ultimate victory of the movement as a triumph for their organization.

“We tried to convince the students that they should see this as a win,” he says. “They were risking snatching defeat from the jaws of victory if they saw this as a sell-out.”

Mackinnon says the organization will also refocus on its relationships with individual workers at Harvard, where the organization first began.

“It’s important for us to stay in touch with the realities of working at Harvard,” she says. “Returning to that and rebuilding those relationships will do a lot for the campaign and for our own morale.”

McCarthy says he agrees that rebuilding the dynamic between worker and student is crucial to future PSLM success.

“It’s in those coalitions that any social movement historically is strengthened,” he says. “They need to...not worry so much about the public campaigning—there needs to be a reordering of the movement in the house.”

He also says that a rebuilt relationship would involve a better understanding of who controls decision-making.

“They need to continue...to be savvy about when they need to lead and when they need to follow,” he says. “Last year was a classic example of when the students led, because it was a moral challenge that they put to the University.”

As for continued work with union administration, Mackinnon says PSLM thinks that unions have improved substantially from earlier days, but that students can help unions by making them more representative.

“[SEIU has] come a long way. I don’t think they’re done yet by any means,” she says. “We’re consensus-based and they’re very hierarchical. We’re very interested in making sure that the union becomes more democratic.”

To this end, the PSLM says it will work to strengthen the Workers’ Center, a place—not affiliated with any union—for workers and students to meet and discuss issues pertaining to their jobs and help one another out with legal aid and advice.

Included in that is a meeting planned for later this month between representatives of SEIU and the Workers’ Center to discuss the role that each will play in the near future.

This is an issue Christmas says has been weighing on his mind lately.

“I think you need students and the union to help workers,” he says. “If a supervisor wants to move a worker for whatever reason, you need the union to file a grievance, and you need the students who know the worker to speak up. Management does not want that to happen, but it must.”

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

—Staff writer J. Hale Russell can be reached at jrussell@fas.harvard.edu.