The Tragedy of the Living Wage

It would seem that the once quasi-justifiable living-wage campaign has descended into the realm of the absurd.

The Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) is a group of students whose mission is to “raise awareness of labor issues on campus, support workers and unions, and to show the Harvard administration that workers and students united are a powerful force for change.” Although SLAM was only just recently formed, its members and students just like them have been actively engaged in Harvard labor negotiations since the Progressive Student Labor Movement led the now legendary sit-in of Mass Hall back in the spring of 2001.

This movement serves to create an artificial rift over a social policy that the vast majority of us agree on: the need for a minimum wage.

As the Nov. 15 contract deadline approaches, the Service Employees International Union, which represents the custodial staff, is demanding that the University pay our janitors $20 per hour, provide them full benefits (increasing the real hourly wage significantly), create more opportunities for full-time work, and end outsourcing.

Besides the contradictory nature of demanding both higher pay and increased benefits while asking the University to create more jobs, the level of absurdity reached by these demands can only be fully realized by contextualizing the numbers. Currently, the hourly wage for Harvard’s custodians is between $13.50 and $14.77, depending on their level of experience. Any employee working more than 15 hours per week also receives benefits. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national average wage for service occupations (which include custodial staff) is $10.65.

To demand that we pay our custodians $20 per hour, nearly twice the market wage for their work, seems to be the beginning of a never-ending battle against reality. If we tamper with labor negotiations and cause an artificial increase in the wage, we can expect one of two scenarios to result. The first option, fewer jobs, is decidedly unpalatable, and thus it’s understandable that many students would rally against it. Unfortunately, the other option is an increase in our tuition, which is already enough of a financial burden to any family.

Given those options, it seems difficult to justify campaigning for such an exorbitantly high wage for unskilled labor. Worse yet, the real tragedy is that the Living-wage campaign at Harvard and those like it elsewhere detract from the importance of the minimum wage—the institution towards which the efforts of groups like SLAM should be directed.

A minimum wage guarantees that workers are compensated in such a way that a basic quality of life is guaranteed to all of society’s members. This is both an economically and morally justifiable cause as everyone benefits from the alleviation of extreme poverty. However, that’s not to say that a luxurious lifestyle is the divine right of every person who simply has a job. On average, salaries and the lifestyles to which they correspond to are reflections of the characteristics associated with any particular line of work.

One can argue that society shares the burden of elevating the quality of life of its lowest-earning members to some minimum threshold. However, to attempt to eliminate the spread of wages over the range of possible jobs and the skills, training, difficulty, and risk associated with those positions flies in the face of any logic. No group or organization can thoughtfully demand wages 50 percent higher than their current level and nearly double the fair wage as valued by the nation as a whole.

The leaders of SLAM—who wage their campaign of guilt via rhetorical exaggerations about dignity and respect—are in dire need of serious introspection and critical analysis of the immediate and less obvious implications of their statements, their cause, and their own individual choices. SLAM and the SEIU act out of a combination of misinformation, miseducation, and self-preservation. We’re all owed more than that.



Joseph T. M. Cianflone ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is an economics and mathematics concentrator in Leverett House.