Posted on 09/24/2003 7:16:14 AM PDT by Loyalist
When I asked Gary Newmark if I could talk to him about his job, his response was, "You want to know about regular working stiffs? You want to know what I do? I unloaded from a truck probably every book you ever read at Harvard. That's what I do." It was my first honest conversation with a campus service worker.
There is a deliberate aura of wealth and power at Harvard, and it is tended to by more than a thousand workers. They dust the portraits, polish the oak panels, and prune the trees. They cook the food and guard the campus; they work in every room of every building, day and night, and yet one of their frequent complaints is that the nation's most perceptive students and scholars simply do not see them.
I was embarrassed when someone had to explain to me that the reason the lights were on all night in Harvard's buildings was that crews of custodians were in those buildings, working all night to clean up the mess of the day before. Then, during my junior year, I read Studs Terkel's Working, and I was shocked that no teacher had ever assigned me that book -- or any other workers' histories, for that matter.
Later that year -- 1998 -- I went to a meeting that my childhood friend Aaron Bartley had called about starting a living-wage campaign on the campus. At the meeting, I learned that while Harvard recently had broken all records for university fund raising -- the endowment had nearly tripled, from $7-billion to $20-billion between 1994 and 2001 -- the university had, at the same time, been cutting the wages and benefits of its lowest-paid employees through outsourcing. Amazed, I presented an outline of what would become Harvard Works Because We Do, consisting of interviews with and photographs of campus service workers, to the history-and-literature program as my proposed senior-thesis topic. It was rejected, on the grounds that it was not adequately academically rigorous. The rejection only made me more stubborn. I started the project anyway, and after graduating I spent the next three years working on it.
As an undergraduate, I always worked. I inspected bags in a library, I tended to a research greenhouse, I cleaned dorm rooms and bathrooms, I shelved books in Widener Library, and, after graduating, I worked as a carpenter's assistant on the campus. At one point, during my stint as a carpenter, my supervisor had assigned me the uncommonly monotonous task of drilling countless tiny holes through a number of metal pieces. After a few hours of drilling, just before lunchtime, he walked up to me and gave me a hard look. "Twenty-three years old and sittin' at a drill press," he said. He shook his head in pity. "When I was your age I owned my own business."
Perhaps because of my own background, I was never entirely comfortable at Harvard. On weekend nights, "Harvard men" would walk confidently around the campus in tuxedos, half-drunk and singing a cappella. For a while, I tried to join in. I bought a tuxedo and joined the Phoenix, a wood-paneled, all-male social club. Primarily we drank, played pool, and held black-tie functions. Though to that point I hadn't fully begun to notice the service workers, I do remember a long night, at 4 in the morning, when Carol-Ann, the cleaning lady, came in early to get her work done so that she could get back home to take her kids to school. I remember seeing someone in the club lifting his legs momentarily from the table while Carol-Ann wiped beneath them.
The next morning I bought a tape recorder. Uncertain how to proceed, I let the interviews go in whichever direction they seemed to take us. The interviewing process made me a student all over again. It seemed to me there was nothing more complicated, fascinating, and problematic than trying to understand, and then describe, another person's life.
At times, people's desire to talk seemed almost urgent. I was a passing stranger, but I could listen for hours, and often that was enough. More than once, I conducted an entire interview simply by pushing the "record" button. Still, many managers and supervisors forbade workers to talk to me, despite their legal right to do so. As the Living Wage Campaign began to publicize these narratives, food-service and security companies contracted by Harvard forbade their workers to speak with me about their work conditions.
As a rule, the more protective the supervisors, the more I tried to get around them. With its wages starting at around $7.50 per hour, the law-school dining hall was the lowest-paying site on the campus. It also had a reputation for disregarding workers' rights. Not surprisingly, its managers were also the most guarded and resentful of my curiosity. I had to wage a letter-writing campaign just to get permission to photograph on the property for a single day, and even then a supervisor decided to observe me quite deliberately. He sat hunched forward, taking slow drags on his cigarette, watching as I photographed one of the line servers.
"Do you ask them not to smile?" he asked finally.
I did not, I said, and, controlling my voice, added, "I let people look however they want to look." He threw his cigarette down and left.
From the perspective of management and those being served, service workers at large institutions are not really meant to be noticed; they are meant to get things done quickly and quietly. I wonder sometimes whether the limited interactions that do occur between server and served are so often superficial because they represent a relationship with which both "sides" are fundamentally uncomfortable. And yet, why do we seem even more uncomfortable when that structure is challenged? I asked that question of a library guard one day and got this response: "Some people treat us like furniture. ... It's as if they feel irritated if I talk to them, as if they feel violated. Some people feel as though the person on this side of the desk belongs in a certain role, and if you violate that, you're violating the status hierarchy, ... to the point where some people seem damaged by it."
Greg Halpern, a 1999 graduate of Harvard University, is pursuing an M.F.A. at the California College of the Arts. The text and photographs are from his book Harvard Works Because We Do, to be published next month by Quantuck Lane Press.
He previously thought that elves did the work?
I could not imagine going around acting like people are furniture.
We get along because we both love football, and have journeyed to several Dallas Cowboy games in Indy and Cincy in the past few years.
On the other hand, there are service workers with whom I simply could not be friendly on a real personal level, as they are (as best I can tell) extremely dull and uninteresting people. While your income and job don't necessarily make you interesting, education and occupaion do shape your horizons, and some people have quite limited horizons.
Gotta watch that, though. The CEO of a company I worked for once dumped his wife and married his secretary. Turns out that she was no dummy, though. She was the last young and cute secretary he ever had.
I enjoyed this article, but I feel like the author needs to sharpen his point a little. For instance how does this incident relate to the treatment of workers at Harvard? It is not explained whether the supervisor is a Harvard employee or a private contractor. It is not explained whether the supervisor perhaps was gloating over his one chance to humiliate a Harvard graduate. Perhaps it is included as an example of the author experiencing the treatment of the workers. Or perhaps it is a non sequitur which is only vaguely related but stands out in the authors mind because of his hurt pride.
I know of a young man who was working for a technical company and whose boss suggested "You don't seem very happy with your job."
He answered, "No, I am planning on leaving in a couple of months."
He was out of work that day.
If someone is going to complain about their job, they better find someone else besides me.
Hey...You win.
I only lasted four hours working at an air-freight animal kennel. But that was really due to the fact that my supervisor appeared to have an IQ in the sixties.
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