Sit-In Legacy Earns Raises for Workers

A year after PSLM members staged the longest building occupation in University history, Harvard does not have a mandatory wage floor for its employees.

But the school’s janitors and guards now earn more than Cambridge’s living wage. The University is still negotiating wage increases with its dining services union. And all subcontracted workers will now receive the same wages as Harvard employees who do equivalent work.

While the nearly 50 members of PSLM who occupied Mass. Hall last spring did not get all they called for, their efforts caused the University to make substantive change to its labor policies.

An Ending And A Beginning

For PSLM members, this year began quietly.

They ended the sit-in last spring to the promise of a new committee charged to examine the University’s labor policies. The Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies (HCECP), headed Professor of Economics Lawrence F. Katz, met by confidential sessions through the fall, gathering data and hearing testimony.

The committee membership, selected last spring by former University President Neil L. Rudenstine, included 11 faculty members, three unionized Harvard employees, two administrators and four students.

The breadth of membership was just one aspect that distinguished this committee from its predecessor, the Mills committee, which met from 1999 to 2000 and recommended increased educational opportunities in lieu of higher wages for Harvard’s lowest-paid workers.

But this newest committee was not without controversy.

In October, one day before committee members released their preliminary data in an open forum, Professor of Economics Caroline M. Hoxby ’88 resigned from the committee claiming it had favored a pro-living wage agenda. She argued the committee had not sought out a diversity of opinion on labor at Harvard.

Additionally, PSLM members continued to agitate for a living wage throughout the course of the committee’s meetings, organizing a rally in October and hosting a workers’ forum attended by several HCECP members.

After three months of weekly meetings, the HCECP released its report—recommending substantial pay hikes for Harvard employees and blaming increased outsourcing of workers for eroding real wages on campus—to a largely empty campus on Dec. 19.

The recommendations asked the University to reopen union negotiations to boost wages for the school’s 1,000 lowest-paid service employees to at least $10.83 to $11.30 per hour—a number that exceeded the $10.25 rallying cry of last spring’s sit-in.

Although committee members voted unanimously to back the report, almost half of the committee—eight of 19 total members—submitted statements that called for a “backstop” wage, a minimum wage floor similar to a living wage.

“I think the absence of a living wage is something that screams out,” Benjamin L. McKean ’02, a member of both the wage committee and PSLM, said at the time.

Explaining the committee’s decision not to recommend a living wage, Katz said that creating this wage floor would encourage subcontractors to merely pay the minimum.

While the committee stopped short of calling for an explicit ban on outsourcing in its report, the recommendations required contractors to pay wages and benefits that are at least equal to those paid to unionized Harvard employees.

Although he was not bound to accept the recommendations, University President Lawrence H. Summers quickly issued a statement of support for the report and, more than a month later, announced that he would accept the significant pay hikes.

At the time, Summers said the recommendations would “break new ground in defining the relationship between employees and contracted workers doing similar jobs.”

But support for the report was not unilateral. While PSLM members applauded many of HCECP’s recommendations, they argued the proposals were not enough and the University still needed to tie wages to the rising cost of living.

And McKean said Summers would have had no choice but to accept the recommendations.

“It would have been a disaster if he didn’t approve the report,” McKean said.

From Reports to Contracts

The principles laid out in the HCECP report were put to the test nearly immediately by the reopening of the janitors’ contract in late January.

The heated negotiations between Harvard and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 254 seemed for weeks to be making little progress—on Feb. 26, a group of union and student activists were arrested by Cambridge police for civil disobedience as they protested the apparent gridlock by stopping traffic on Mass. Ave.

Just the next day, after six weeks of negotiations, SEIU and Harvard negotiators agreed on a contract—retroactive to May 2001—which would immediately bring the minimum wage up to $11.35 per hour and increase benefits.

According to the agreement, wages will increase over the next three years so that, by October 2005, all janitors will make at least $13.50 an hour, with $14 per hour going to those with at least three years on the job.

SEIU Deputy Trustee Rocio Saenz applauded the new contract as “a great step on workers’ rights.”

Within PSLM, however, the settlement provoked intense frustration. Although the agreement’s wages were above the committee’s suggested range, PSLM members said they worried about the absence of an automatic adjustment to Cambridge’s rising cost of living. Cambridge’s living wage had increased from $10.25 to $10.83 last spring and is currently set at $11.11 per hour.

“I think the wages that were settled on were clearly inadequate to bring janitors out of poverty,” PSLM member Madeleine S. Elfenbein ’04 said at the time. “I’m disappointed that Harvard continues to refuse to take poverty off the bargaining table.”

And in May, the Harvard University Security, Parking and Museum Guards Union agreed on a new contract—like the janitor’s union, coming away with a higher starting pay rate than Cambridge’s current living wage figure.

The settlement, which came on the eve of the anniversary of the sit-in’s end, committed Harvard to paying all members of its guards union at least $11.15 an hour.

Lead guards union negotiator Matthew Levy said at the time that the new wages were a “good faith gesture on both parts” that fell in line with the HCECP recommendations.

Museum and parking service employees will earn a minimum hourly wage of $11.15 under the terms of the agreement and the University. Security guards will earn at least $12.25 per hour.

But McKean said he continues to object to the way the University deals with the unions in negotiations.

“The negotiations showed that Harvard’s attitudes haven’t changed at all. They still want to treat workers as expendable labor units,” McKean said last week.

Katz, however, said he is pleased by the speed with which his committee’s recommendations are currently being implemented. PSLM members had criticized the Mills committee for failing to follow through on the report’s suggestions.

Members of the HCECP convened again in May with those in charge of implementing the different aspects of the report.

“There is a real culture change,” Katz said last week.

—David H. Gellis and Sarah M. Seltzer contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer J. Ross Macdonald can be reached at jrmacdon@fas.harvard.edu.