Posted on 12/26/2001 3:14:27 PM PST by summer
Published on Monday, December 24, 2001 in the Boston Globe
Harvard Now Sees the Error of Its Wages
by Robert Kuttner
LAST WEEK, a Harvard committee headed by labor economist Lawrence Katz found that its low wage employees, mainly janitors and food service workers, indeed are paid less than a living wage.
The 19-member panel, including students, workers, administrators, and 10 faculty members, was established by outgoing Harvard President Neil Rudenstine last May to end the biggest Harvard sit-in in more than a generation. Some 40 students occupied Massachusetts Hall for weeks to protest the world's richest university's failure to pay its least powerful a minimal livelihood.
The report is a stunner. It concludes that the students were right. It found that 392 workers were paid less than the $10.68 per hour living wage defined by the City of Cambridge. Some are on food stamps. The committee concluded that the wages of custodians had actually fallen by 13 percent between 1994 and 2001.
The Katz committee recommended an immediate wage increase as well as a shift in Harvard's policies, so that wages of contract workers don't drag down those of permanent employees. The report stated pointedly, ''A good employer should work to ensure that its lowest paid and most vulnerable workers share in economic prosperity.'' Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who complimented the authors, deferred action until the new year. But there's more to the story.
The committee's chair, Lawrence Katz, is a widely respected scholar who served as chief economist of the US Department of Labor under Robert Reich. Katz did some serious labor-market research. He found that the downward drift of wages among Harvard's janitors had a lot to do with the fact that many are immigrants, people often desperate enough to work for less and hence to depress prevailing wages.
His research also confirmed that Harvard's contracting-out strategy not only drove down wages of contract workers, but of permanent employees as well. This occurred despite the fact that the permanent custodial employees are represented by a strong union, Service Employees Local 254. The committee suggested that Harvard break new ground by using contract workers to increase efficiency and flexibility, but not to drive down wages.
Katz also deftly walked a tightrope between some of his committee members who wanted even stronger recommendations and Harvard President Summers, a longtime colleague with whom Katz has co-authored scholarly papers. Katz will need Summers's support in the next bargaining round. And the committee, the students, unions, and an alumni support group will need to keep the pressure on. Many wanted wages to go to at least $15 an hour, as some other area universities pay custodians, rather than the floor of about $11 that Katz's committee recommended.
The broader issue is the role of an employer like Harvard in creating a decent society. Harvard has oscillated between looking big, arrogant, and stupid and taking a real leadership role on social issues. When Harvard plays the former role, it is usually a public relations disaster. When it plays the latter role, it often results from a combination of patrician noblesse oblige from above and idealistic student pressure from below.
Administrators spent more than a decade resisting the right of clerical and technical employees to unionize. Its white- shoe lawyers behaved like attorneys for union-busting company.
It took student and worker organizing and ultimately the personal intervention of then-President Derek Bok, once a labor law professor, to overrule the lawyers and get on with the task of bargaining in good faith. Katz's report, in this spirit, declares, ''Unions can and should provide an effective vehicle for providing Harvard's service workers with voice at the workplace.''
By the same token, Harvard's relationships with Cambridge and Allston have alternated between good neighborliness and a ruthless effort to acquire far-flung properties by stealth and to pay as little as possible in lieu of taxes.
It's hard to keep secret that Harvard is swimming in money. If Harvard were a conventional corporation, it would cite competitive pressures and pay low-wage workers as little as it could get away with. But Harvard, by definition, is a different sort of creature. In an era of cutthroat capitalism, institutions like Harvard need to stand for different values.
The students who risked their sheepskins, the professors who risked cordial relations with their president, and the janitors who risked their jobs all deserve our thanks. Seasonal tidings of community and generosity to all.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Globe.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company ###
Comparing public and private schools is very difficult. One is a monopoly, the other is competitive.
Students of competitive private schools not only pay their private school tuition, they are also forced to pay for the monopoly public school tuition of others.
Consider: if not for the "double tuition" paid by private school students, more money would obviously be available to pay teachers and other employees of provate schools. As it is now, tuition of privae schools is artificially capped by the aformentioned forced monopoly double tuition.
The forced payment of public tuition is the enemy of the private school, and the enemy of employees of private schools who desire increased compensation.
BTW you are not the only one around here who has taught in the public schools.
So what? Are you saying that it is the public schools that causes them to drop out? What are you saying? How is this comment related?
That's exactly what they do. That's why this country will be short several million teachers in the coming years. Maybe you will apply? :)
Yes summer, this is how the free market operates. Individuals and business place value on goods and services. Goods and services (including labor) are priced to produce another good or service that must eventually be sold to individual consumers. If not enough individual consumers perceive value in a good/service, then the good/service isn't sold.
In time, we hope, individuals will enhance their perceived value of education. Then folks would be willing to pay more for that service. As it is now, folks don't see the same value in public education that they DO see in private education.
Public education must become valuable to consumers. How to do this is the frequent debate.
Like riding public transportation, public education has become an "inferior good". That is to say, the more money you have to spend, the less likely you are to utilize public education - and similarly, the less money you have, the more likely you are to utilize public education.
The value of public education must increase. That much is plain to see. IMHO, removing them from government control would do the trick.
BTW, it's not only money that draws one to and keeps one teaching.
That's because they cannot afford to do so. Their students are forced to pay not only private school tuition, but also pay public school tuition.
They do not even pay as much as their public school counterparts, and they know they don't have to, because teachers who teach in private schools are usually already fed up with public schools and their problems.
Well, one of the reasons that they can get teachers from public schools with less pay is that they don't have the same government-related UNsolveable problems. However, to draw teachers from the private sector, private schools DO have to pay. Thankfully, they can choose to pay whatever they want to whomever they want. Their hands are not tied by government-union negotiated pay scales. It is the case that public school teachers moving to a private school are always offerred less, for just the reason you state.
BTW, everyone who is a teacher knows that private schools pay LESS.
You don't have to be a teacher to know this. It is obvious that a business which prices its service at more than 5 times the cost of its competitor will have to cut costs where possible to stay in business-
It's not a joke. It's part of what must happen if public education is to survive without becoming even more of a joke.
Oooops. You don't know this at all. You don't know WHAT knowledge I have to make my assertions. Until you discover this, you sound foolish making this claim.
I never claimed that you have no knowledge of the facts, did I? However, that IS what you said about me, and there is no way for you to know this.
You made a claim about me and you are unable to substantiate it. Saying "we're even" is your way of trying to forget about that?
I've been in private schools, teaching and admin. I've been in public schools too. I made my money in business before getting into education. According to what you've claimed, it is you who has little knowledge of "the facts". You claim to only have been a teacher. You did not claim to have been in admin nor in business- that explains your lack of market function knowledge.
BTW, those owners of private schools who are "raking it in" deserve every penny they earn. If you want to earn more, you can become an owner yourself, or do something that brings you whatever you want. There is no reason to resent the money that others earn, you have the same shot they do at earning.
Your position is one that of a union socialist.
If you ever want to have a serious discussion about what can/should be done about education, ping me.
You didn't say they were criminals! You made no reference to their character whatsoever. Certainly I wasn't to assume they were criminals. Going back and changing your position is not going to garner credibility.
And, the teachers who teach in those schools deserve a retirement plan.
Then by all means, they should find a job that provides a retirement plan! If the job they have doesn't provide a retirement plan, why the hell did they take the job in the first place?????
And, you are wrong in every one of your assumptions about me.
Funny, I didn't assume anything about you. You said you had taught in public and private schools. That's all I referenced. Making stuff up doesn't cut it. But - Happy new year!
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