A Stocking Stuffer

What can you get for $123,000? A luxury car. Five years of a Harvard education. A couple of minutes of air time during prime time on a major network.

Or you could get a union contract signed and satisfy 3,600 workers who have been laboring without one since June 30. And you could put an end to the rallies, petitions, open letters, anger and frustration that have surrounded Harvard's negotiations with the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers all fall.

Harvard needs to promote excellence in all areas of the University--not just the ones it deems most important. If Harvard can agree to give pay raises to its top administrators, if it can afford to dole out million dollar salaries to financial managers whose work places Harvard endowment returns in the bottom percentiles in the nation, then Harvard can afford to give the union members who shelve our books and staff our offices the pay raise they desire--especially when the dollar amount that is stalling contract negotiations is $123,000 per year.

Both sides framed the argument in various terms after last week's rally in Harvard Yard. The union's moral argument: Union members are on the low end of Harvard's pay scale. After working three years without any salary increases they deserve a bigger raise and they need it more. The high cost of living in Cambridge and the surrounding area puts huge financial constraints on lowpaid workers; the recession only increases that strain.

The union's humorous argument: The amount of the raise Harvard's negotiator got in July could buy lunch for all 3,600 union workers.

And then there's the University's financial argument: Union members already make more than market wages for their jobs.

In the past, Harvard has also argued budgetary constraints for not being able to meet the union's demands. But the fact the two sides are separated by $123,000 or 0.15 of a percentage point, weakens that argument. While this dollar amount is only per year for a three year contract, the total amount of money for that duration would not make much of a dent in the University's annual $1 billion operating budget.

We agree with Harvard that the term of the contract should be three years. An ugly contract negotiation every year would destabilize the University.

But more importantly, we agree that the union's members, many of whom live in conditions that can be described fairly as working poverty, deserve a raise. Harvard makes such an effort for "greatness" in so many other areas of the University that it is strange that they would fall back on other universities' standards when paying their workers.

Harvard needs to recognize that the union workers make as much a contribution to our overall success as an institution of learning as any other part of the University.

Earlier this fall, The Crimson called for Harvard to grant the union pay raise. Harvard does have budgetary constraints, but if it prioritized correctly, it would be able to afford to meet the union's demands, especially considering that the amount of money separating the two sides seems too small in comparison to the amount of money Harvard spends on other salaries and projects.

Union members started the school year with no contract. They worked through Halloween and Thanksgiving with no contract. Will they have to work through the winter holidays with their future unsettled?

For $123,000 per year Harvard should buy them the security--a mere stocking-stuffer from the University's budget--that these workers deserve and need.