Word: hcecp
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Over the past eight months, the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies (HCECP) has made an amazing amount of progress. It has moved the campus away from the acrimony and conflict that marked the Massachusetts Hall protests last spring to a shared and earnest desire to improve the economic conditions of Harvard’s low-wage employees. The committee’s recommendations are sound, and Summers should move promptly to implement them. However, the president should also move on his own initiative to adopt an additional safeguard: an annually adjusted wage floor that guarantees an adequate standard...
...have repeatedly supported the concept of a living wage that takes into account external measures of need. Harvard has the responsibility to ensure that its employees are not impoverished. In his statement reacting to the HCECP report, Summers expressed a concern for the welfare and living standards of Harvard’s service workers. This concern should lead him not only to adopt the committee’s recommendations, but also to adopt a policy of paying wages that allow employees living in the Boston area to afford the basic necessities of life...
...agree with the HCECP and with Summers’ recent statements that collective bargaining is an appropriate means of setting the terms and conditions of employment. However, we do not believe that the living wage should be a bargaining chip in union negotiations. Harvard’s workers should never be placed in a position of trading away other benefits in order to obtain minimally adequate wages. Harvard should safeguard employees’ living standards by adopting a living wage...
...HCECP also deserves praise for calling attention to what appears to be a pervasive climate of mistrust. If Harvard’s workers are not aware of their rights or are afraid to exercise them for fear of retaliation by management, something is terribly wrong. As the committee noted, Harvard should not reduce workers’ hours in order to avoid paying them appropriate benefits; it also should not act in ways that frustrate the attempts of workers to join unions, nor should it hire contractors...
...house unions would be protected by Harvard’s deep pocket, almost entirely insulated from external market pressures. And presumably there’s an argument to be made that the proper negotiating balance between capital and labor is one that forbids price competition through outsourcing. Yet the HCECP never makes that argument, nor does it claim that low wages are bad in themselves—instead, it relies only on vague references to the University’s “good faith...