"Richest . . . Unfortunate"

Harvard, richest of universities, recently discharged twenty cleaning women from Widener Library without advance notice or pay and without giving them any reason. These women had been in the employ of the university for periods ranging from thirty-three years to two. Harvard University is a vast business corporation employing hundreds of wage earners, excluding faculty members. Its ruthlessness in this case might perhaps be laid to our present industrial organization. But what are we to think when President A. Lawrence Lowell, asked by a minister to reconsider the case of one woman who is in dire poverty with her family of five depending on her as its sole support, replied that she and the others were dismissed because the State Minimum Wage Commission had complained that the university was employing scrubwomen at less than thirty-seven cents an hour?

Revered William M. Duvall, a young man, graduate of Boston University Theological School, who has taken courses in the Department of Social Ethics at Harvard under Dr. Richard C. Cabot and others, is pastor of the Trinity Community Methodist Episcopal Church in the slum district of East Cambridge. His church is, in effect, a settlement house to which he brings all races and religious. He wrote a personal letter to President Lowell expressing his astonishment that Harvard, with its traditions, should have treated Mrs. Emma Trafton (who lives in a dark, dreary tenement directly in the rear of Mr. Duvall's church) as it did. On December 30, 1929, President Lowell replied as follows:

"Dear Sir: I have inquired into the discharge of Mrs. Emma Trafton from the Widener Library and I find that the Minimum Wage Board has been complaining of our employing women for these purposes at less than thirty-seven cents an hour, and hence the university has felt constrained to replace them with men. Some of them, I hope many of them, will be able to be employed at some other work in the university. (Signed) A. Lawrence Lowell."

Mr. Duvall was bowled over by the president's letter. Until then he had not known the cause for the women's dismissal. He was complaining only about the heartless manner of it. But here was a brusque note from President Lowell announcing that Harvard University would not raise the wages of the cleaning women, from thirty-five cents an hour (which Mr. Duvall knew Mrs. Trafton was receiving at the time of her sudden discharge) to thirty-seven cents to conform to the findings of a State board. Mr. Duvall, when he showed me the letter, asked if I did not agree that the circumstances warranted making it public. Fully appreciative of the ethical problem involved in disclosing a private letter, he did not finally decide to do so without serious thought. The sorry predicament of Mrs. Trafton was the precipitating factor. She has tramped the streets looking for work, making numerous trips to Harvard in search of the "some other work at the university."

Were human misery not involved in the cases of several of the women, discharged the position taken by President Lowell would seem more humorous than anything else. The Boston Post, which published the facts on the front page on January 16, approached the situation from that angle. In his lead, the Post reporter figured out that the two-cents-an-hour increase in wages demanded by the State Minimum Wage Commission would amount to $2 a day (the women worked from six a.m. to eleven a.m. in Widener Library) or $12 a week for the twenty, women. The increase would have given each woman sixty cents more a week, or $11.10 instead of $10.50. The Post did not point out, as it might have done, that Harvard has investments conservatively listed by the treasurer's recent annual report at $81,000,000.

All the women I interviewed told essentially the same story of their discharge as was told by Mrs. Trafton, who had been an employee of the university for thirteen years. About half of them were peremptorily discharged on November 1 last. The others were discharged without notice on the Saturday before Christmas--"a fine Christmas present", as Mrs. Katharine Donahue ruefully described it. Mrs. Donahue has been in the employ of Harvard for thirty-three years. She said that so far as she has been able to find out the university has neither pension nor compensation protection for its old employees.

C. R. Apted, superintendent of the yard and buildings at Harvard, who signed the notices discharging the women, and other officials at Harvard say that it was the university's intention to replace the women with men anyway and to work the women into other jobs. One can only remark that it was most unfortunate that the Minimum Wage Commission's insistence should have been the factor crystalizing that intention.--Gardner Jackson in The Nation.