When Harvard students staged an aggressive three-week sit-in last spring to demand a uniform "living wage" on campus (see "Harvard Hubbub," This Just In, News and Features, April 26), they knew the school’s lowest-paid workers had it tough — toiling away at several jobs, sacrificing sleep and family life, all to make ends meet. But this week, students have come to realize what "tough" can mean in hard, cold numbers: a new Harvard University study shows that median wages for university custodians, security guards, and dining-hall servers have failed to keep up with inflation throughout the 1990s and now equal less than $10 per hour.

"We knew workers were overworked and stressed out," explains Emma MacKinnon, a freshman with the Harvard Living Wage Campaign, which organized the sit-in last May. "But we didn’t anticipate such drastic cuts in wages. It’s worse than we’d thought."

On October 22, the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies — the group that former president Neil Rudenstine established as part of a compromise to end the student protest — unveiled a preliminary report on the school’s wage and employment trends from 1994 through the present. The report found that as many as 1003 of the school’s workers earn less than Cambridge’s mandated living wage for public employees — $10.68 per hour. Janitors are the hardest hit, with 82 percent making an hourly wage below $10, compared to 20 percent in 1994. The number of dining-hall servers who are compensated below the living wage has nearly tripled in the past seven years, rising from 21 to 58. And security guards saw their median hourly wage fall from $14.31 in 1994 to $9.58 in 2001. Today, not a single guard makes above $14 per hour — whereas 58 percent did in 1994.

These findings provide new ammunition for the students’ cause. Says MacKinnon, "They reflect a huge problem at Harvard."

At the same time, though, MacKinnon and her fellow campaigners criticize the study for being "biased" and "incomplete." The report, they contend, fails to put the workers’ wage cuts in the context of their daily lives: it doesn’t mention how workers have had to grapple with, say, the ever-escalating costs of housing, child care, and food in Greater Boston. Worse yet, they say, it ignores the larger fiscal picture at the university. During the past seven years, tenured professors’ salaries have grown to an average of $135,200 a year — compared to the $20,633 salary of the average janitor with four years’ experience. In 1994, Harvard professors earned about four times what janitors made; they now make close to seven times as much. Harvard, of course, has also seen massive growth in its endowment, which now totals $18 billion.

Lawrence Katz, an economics professor who chairs the HCECP, counters that the report seems incomplete because it is. "This is not the committee’s report and recommendations," he says in an e-mail response to the Phoenix. Rather, the study is meant to "facilitate discussion of the issues related to the economic welfare and opportunities provided to lower-paid employees," he explains. The committee, which consists of faculty, administrators, students, and workers, is still collecting data on worker benefits, as well as reports about their daily lives. In December, it’s scheduled to make its recommendations to Harvard’s new president, Lawrence Summers.

Until then, students are stepping up lobbying efforts among Harvard alumni. And they’re hoping to sway Summers himself in upcoming meetings. As MacKinnon says, "We have guarded optimism now. We agreed to this process, and we have to keep our faith."

Issue Date: October 25 - November 1, 2001