What the Committee Forgot

Last Wednesday's labor recommendations proposed by the Harvard Ad-Hoc Committee on Employment Policies and President Neil L. Rudenstine's subsequent announcement committing the University to those recommendations are reassuring signs that Harvard does, at some basic level, care about the welfare of its workers. But in that these labor policies, which focus almost exclusively on health and job training benefits, bracket the central issue of wages, the University's response is far from adequate.

When enacted, the committee's recommendations will extend basic health insurance to nearly all of Harvard's non-casual workforce, including those subcontracted by outside firms, and expand programs in job and educational training. Specifically, Harvard employees who work 16 or more hours a week will be eligible for health benefits; previously, such benefits were reserved only for employees who worked at least 20 hours a week. The University will also refuse to contract with firms that do not provide health insurance for their employees. Furthermore, employees will have more access to job training and educational development programs, such as classes in English and basic mathematics. For sure, these policies will have far-reaching effects, making easier the lives of a few hundred workers who lack, but nevertheless deserve, access to education and basic health benefits.

But the committee's report stopped short of recommending any minimum wage floor, focusing instead on workers' "total compensation," a term that includes both wages and fringe benefits. On one level, this is a reasonable approach. The purpose of a "living wage" is to insure that workers can live above the poverty line. In many cases, health insurance can be far more valuable toward this end than a small increase in wages.

Nevertheless, we are not entirely convinced that this means a wage floor can be ignored entirely. There is nothing about the expansion of fringe benefits that precludes an increase in wages. Health insurance and on-the-job training are certainly valuable benefits to workers, but they cannot account for the costs of food, clothing and shelter.

Part of the problem, then, is to defining a living wage to take into account both wages and benefits. The committee has argued that the figure proposed by the Living Wage Campaign focuses too exclusively on wages, and therefore ignores the value of total compensation packages. But the committee neglected to propose any alternative method by which to determine if this total compensation actually places a worker above the poverty line in Cambridge. Regardless of how a worker's compensation is computed, it needs to be placed in relation to this minimum level.

The job of computing the appropriate level of compensation falls on Harvard's shoulders, since the University has decided, unlike the City of Cambridge, to focus on total compensation instead of wages. Perhaps such a calculation will be more than just a simple figure, one that takes into account the marginal value of benefits at various wage levels. For example, many subcontracted workers, particularly guards employed by SSI and janitors employed by UNICCO, currently earn wages far lower than their Harvard counterparts. In their cases, simply adding health benefits might not be as valuable as a pay raise. Since Harvard has dismissed a discussion of actual wages of these subcontracted workers in favor of fringe benefits, there is no way of knowing whether the actual conditions of workers have been sufficiently alleviated. The committee's job will not be complete until such a good-faith assessment has been made.

As one of Cambridge's largest employers, Harvard has a unique leadership position within the local community; as the nation's premier university, it wields tremendous influence among institutions of higher education. President Rudenstine has done well to approve the recommendations contained within the report, but he should realize that the committee's report has not laid to rest the moral need for a living wage for those Harvard employs.