The Numbers Tell a Grim Story

Administrators, more than any other group of people I know, have the amazing ability to make anything sound boring. A case in point is the statement that President Neil L. Rudenstine issued last week on "contingent workforce issues," enticingly titled "Statement of President Neil L. Rudenstine On Contingent Workforce Issues." Most students probably didn't see it--it was in the Gazette, and it really was so dreary that I had to start it three or four times before I could convince myself to get all the way through.

What's crazy is that this statement should have been anything but boring. It was Rudenstine's first public effort to stave off pressure for a living wage. His tactic, however, was dull writing, designed to convince the reader that poverty on our campus is just a mundane, technical issue that literally can be left to the boss. Specifically, Rudenstine explained in 550 words that he has a committee looking into things.

Unlike Rudenstine, the Living Wage Campaign has spent many nights this year knocking on doors and talking to students about poverty on our campus. In my experience, no one finds the issue boring. In fact, it's difficult to find people who won't talk for a few minutes, sign a petition in support of a living wage and call their roommates over to do the same. This is because, despite administrative attempts to sterilize injustice with bad prose about committees, it's obvious to the thinking human beings in our community that the living wage debate is about horrible working conditions and human need.

I'd like to refocus the debate with some facts about working conditions at Harvard. These are the facts that motivate the Living Wage Campaign, and as Rudenstine's statement makes clear, they are facts that administrators like to keep very quiet.

According to the administration's own figures, there are roughly 1,000 workers on this campus earning less than $10 an hour. These workers range from directly-hired janitors, who make as little as $7.50 per hour, to the hundreds of subcontracted dining hall workers, janitors and security guards who make as little as $6 per hour and typically lack union membership. They work two or three jobs, and as many as 80 hours a week. They often have to choose between seeing their children and providing for them. At least 90 percent of these workers receive no benefits whatsoever. Decent health care is beyond their reach, and we know of workers who have died from lack of medical treatment.

Personally, I know a janitor who makes less than $10 per hour and who is struggling to pay for his wife's cancer treatment. I also know subcontracted security guards who are eligible for some benefits, but cannot accept them because they realize that when they cost the subcontracting company $9 to $9.50 per hour, they lose their jobs. Interestingly, administrators typically argue against a living wage by claiming that wage standards ignore benefits which workers receive. Perhaps most disturbingly, the workers facing these intolerable circumstances are disproportionately immigrants and people of color--people whom Harvard administrators evidently consider not quite important enough to merit a dip into the $14 billion endowment.

These workers don't stand a chance of surviving in the local economy. Affordable housing is generally defined as housing that costs less than 30 percent of income, so a subcontracted dining hall worker making $6 an hour and raising one child would be looking to pay about $288 per month in rent. Unfortunately, the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in our area is actually $1,400 per month. Even if this worker took a second full-time job and was lucky enough to find the cheapest possible housing, rent would still amount to nearly half of the pre-tax income. Add to that the nearly hundreds of dollars in monthly child care costs.

This example is hardly exaggerated. Today, 37,000 Boston tenants spend at least 60 percent of their income on rent. Some have lost their homes entirely. A single Cambridge elementary school has reported the disappearance of 700 students from its rolls in recent years--these are children whose families were forced to leave the city because they couldn't pay their rent. Studies show that their parents would have needed wages of $12 to $30 an hour to remain in the city, wages they wouldn't receive if they were cleaning the office of President Rudenstine. When talking to people who work on this campus, we've found that many of them used to live in Cambridge, but were forced out during the last ten years by a combination of rising rents and stagnating wages. Now they live in outlying suburbs, they spend hundreds of dollars a month on transportation, they sleep less, and they still struggle to make ends meet.

Poverty at this University might not be so shameful if it were not so needless. We attend the richest university on the planet. Harvard fund managers take home up to $10 million a year--that's 800 times as much as our subcontracted dining hall worker makes working two full-time jobs. Harvard's annual budget exceeds that of the United Nations by about half a billion dollars.

What our community has been saying for the last year is that we believe there's an obvious and a just way to use a tiny portion of this money: Give it to workers. It would cost Harvard $10 million, or three-fifths of one percent of its budget, to implement a living wage. This cost would be unnoticeable amid the extraordinary expenses that the University assumes without complaint. And yet it would profoundly change the lives of at least 1,000 families in our community. We believe that this is a price worth paying.

Amy C. Offner '01, a Crimson editor, is a history concentrator in Lowell House. She is a member of the Living Wage Campaign.