Public Policies on Work and Pay

Your group should provide a rationale for Adopting a Living Wage at Harvard based on
the information provided below. You will be part the defendant team in this court. Your case paper should provide an analysis of the issues of your case.

Adopting a Living Wage at Harvard

Following mass demonstrations and a “sit-in” at the President’s office during Spring 2001, administrators at Harvard agreed to establish a committee to examine pay policies for low wage employees. The union at Harvard agreed to a collective bargaining contract that called for low wage employees to be paid below the “living wage ordinance” in Cambridge Massachusetts. Protestors thought the wage should be much higher, and that Harvard, the richest university in the U.S., could afford to pay its low wage workers more to secure a “just wage.”

The administration at Harvard University thought that any funds above the negotiated wage were a violation of the collective bargaining agreement, and that they could get all the workers it needed in the Cambridge area at the negotiated wage. Further, the increase in pay would have to come out of fellowships for graduate students and funds given to “disadvantaged undergraduate students.”

Relevant comments from the report are enclosed and the full report is available on the WEBCT for this class.

1) Should Harvard raise the wage given to low wage employees above the collective bargaining agreement?

2) Who gains and loses if the pay increases recommended by the committee and the “activists” are implemented?

3) Should the “activists” just support the union in its negotiations rather than protest?

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RECOMMENDATIONS REGARDING PAY AND BENEFITS-RAISE PAY
IMMEDIATELY, ADOPT THE PRINCIPLE OF PARITY WAGES AND BENEFITS
FOR CONTRACTORS BASED ON COLLECTIVE BARGAINING WITH HARVARD
EMPLOYEES, AND ESTABLISH AND ENFORCE A STRONGER CODE OF
CONDUCT FOR CONTRACTORS

It is the unanimous conclusion of the committee that Harvard’ s current wage and contracting practices for lower-paid service workers fall short of meeting the University’s appropriate goal for being a good employer. Thus we recommend:

! Raise pay immediately – Because of the pressures on wages generated by Harvard’ s current contracting practices for on-campus service work and because of the past failures in the collective bargaining process, the committee calls on Harvard and its service unions (SEIU Loca1254, HUSPGMU, and HEREIU Local 26) to reopen the wage provisions of their existing collective bargaining agreements and negotiate appropriate and sizeable increases in pay for Harvard’s lowest-paid service employees: custodians, security and parking workers, and dining service workers paid at retail rates. Though we are reluctant to set the terms for each negotiation, we expect the parties to agree on wages that do not fall below the range of $10.83 to $11.30 per hour-the wages now paid to Harvard’s most comparable lowest-paid workers in settings where significant outsourcing pressures under the current contracting system have not been a concern. (This range is above the $10.68 hourly wage that is called for by some living wage supporters and that is the current living wage applied to certain contractors of the city of Cambridge.)

! Establish a parity wage and benefits policy governing on-site contractors -The committee rejects calls to ban outsourcing, but we believe the University must ensure that outsourcing is used to increase quality and spark innovation, not to depress the wages of Harvard’s own service employees. Thus we call for a
Harvard Parity Wage and Benefits Policy requiring service contractors to pay wages and benefits for their on-campus workers that are at least equivalent to those paid to unionized Harvard direct employees in the same service sector. In cases in which no Harvard in-house employees work in the same service sector, the parity wage and benefits would be based on those of the Harvard in-house unionized workers who are most similar to those being employed by the contractor.

! Adopt a strengthened code of conduct for service contractors with ongoing
employees working on the Harvard campus.

The committee’s rough estimates of the increased wage and benefits costs for Harvard and its service contractors of these recommendations (quickly raising wages for all Harvard service workers at least into the range of $10.83 to $11.30 per hour and adopting a Harvard Parity Wage and Benefits policy to cover the on-campus employees of contractors) is in the range of $2.4 to $3.7 million per year. If one reasonably assumes that wage increases for security workers, especially following the events of September 11, would be necessary regardless of what the committee proposes, then the overall costs of the committee’s wage and benefits proposals are estimated to be in the range from $1.9 to $2.9 million per year.
The committee as a whole also has not called for adopting a permanent and specific uniform minimum wage for Harvard based on a living wage concept, though we are sympathetic to the intended goals of such a policy. Many members felt that such a plan addressed the symptoms and not the causes of the problem of declining real pay for service workers at Harvard. Outsourcing has been used to undercut pay set forth in collective bargaining at Harvard. Setting a uniform minimum wage, without other changes in contracting policies, would raise pay up to the level of the specified minimum, but if unions tried to push pay above that level, contractors could still undercut them by paying the minimum Harvard wage. Thus the wage floor could also become a kind of wage ceiling. With a parity wage and benefits policy, unions can negotiate higher pay and benefits and do not have to fear that outside contractors will be able to undercut them simply by paying their…