Stakes is High

As the debate over raising the wages of Harvard workers continues to play out in The Crimson and on campus, I can’t help but feel like I’ve accidentally taken some kind of serious mind-altering substance. It’s not that people on both sides don’t have facts and theories at their disposal. But in the course of all the intellectual combat, I have a strange impression that the dialogue has moved farther and farther away from what ought to be its primary focus: the nature and implications of poverty and inequality in American society.

A few weeks ago, a simple internet post shocked me into a new way of looking at this discussion. The post, which originated with Arin Dube, a Berkeley economist who was involved in the 2001 Harvard living-wage movement, was about New Orleans. In 2001, New Orleans overwhelmingly passed a $1 minimum wage increase in a popular referendum. In a shocking bit of judicial activism, the State Supreme Court ruled that the city had no right to regulate wages. The court struck down the new wage law, dropping the wages of many of the poor city’s poorest citizens.

Dube’s post, though not a fully-realized research report, suggests that the increased minimum wage—more than $2,000 per year for each wage earner working full time—could have made the difference for many of the poor New Orleans residents who were unable to flee Hurricane Katrina. Imagine. What if just 100 people would have left New Orleans if they had had a few thousand more dollars to spend on transportation and hotel rooms? How many people lost their lives because the Louisiana Supreme Court didn’t think New Orleans had the right to demand a minimum level of economic security for its citizens?

Of course, a wage increase for Harvard employees probably isn’t a matter of life and death, but the fact is that low wages have real effects on real people. I’m not suggesting that Harvard employees are as economically vulnerable as New Orleans’s poor were beore Katrina. Thanks to the work of activists and labor unions, Harvard employees do fairly well compared to service workers in the rest of the country. But Boston is expensive, and Harvard employees still need more help.

Opponents of the living wage have used an interesting collection of bogus statistics to make it seem like Harvard workers are living lives of luxury. The most common kind of fuzzy math makes two fairly ridiculous assumptions. First, it assumes that Harvard workers are in families with two wage earners working full time. This ignores the fact that many Harvard employees can’t work 40 hours per week. Harvard won’t let them. But even ignoring the exact statistics, it’s worth pointing out that this assumption suggests a moral framework that I would imagine many Harvard students are not entirely comfortable with.

The question shouldn’t be whether this wage is reasonable for a two-parent family with two wage earners employed full time. The question should be whether Harvard’s wages are appropriate for all kinds of families. We may disagree about what wage level is appropriate, but we shouldn’t base our calculations on the desire to provide subsistence only for workers with a specific type of family structure. Harvard should pay a wage that allows all sorts of families to achieve a reasonable standard of living. That means Harvard wages shouldn’t make it impossible for parents to take off some time to be with their children. It shouldn’t make life impossible for fathers or mothers who are trying to make it on their own.

The second piece of fuzzy math that wage increase opponents get away with is the tendency to compare Harvard’s workers to a national average. Boston isn’t America. It’s one of the most expensive places on God’s earth, and wages just don’t go as far here. Harvard workers may make more than low-wage workers in New Orleans, but attempts to make Harvard workers seem like a mop-wielding gentry miss the mark. Harvard workers have benefited from past battles, but their wage level, in a city like Boston, still leaves them vulnerable.

I won’t make the argument here for any particular wage level. My beef is with the tenor of the discussion. Both sides have been too eager to attack the other side. This discussion isn’t about whether the Student Action Labor Movement (SLAM) is too radical or The Crimson is too conservative. It’s about the workers. It would be criminal to oppose a reasonable wage increase for Harvard’s workers because you don’t like the tactics or the personalities of SLAM activists.

It would be just as bad to treat this issue as a purely theoretical question. Harvard students love to throw around economic jargon. It’s too easy to forget that real people are affected by the policies we discuss in the comfort of our well-maintained classrooms. We need to recognize that for Harvard workers who are working hard to make ends meet, these discussions will affect their lives and the lives of their family members. Next time you’re spouting off about deadweight loss or economic inefficiency, take a second to look around. This means looking at the historical record to see if the pretty theories you learned in Ec 10 actually play out in reality, but it also means thinking about the human costs of our economic theories. If economic inefficiency means dangerous vulnerability for Harvard workers, is that right?

Reasonable people will disagree about the appropriate wage level for Harvard workers, but we can’t afford to forget what is at stake. One of my favorite music albums ends with a brief interview with a homeless man. The man nonchalantly describes his life on the street and how he came to live it. He’s not angry, and he doesn’t ask for help. He just wants his interviewer to understand one thing. When you’re talking about poverty, he says, “Stakes is high.” Harvard employees have fought their way out of rock-bottom wages. They’re not as vulnerable as the people we saw on our television sets devastated by Hurricane Katrina. But they still face economic uncertainty that makes their current wage battle far more than a test of economic theories. As this debate continues to play out, that’s one thing we could all stand to remember.



Samuel M. Simon ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.