Word: pslmã
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April is a good month for protest. Roughly four years before the Progressive Puker opened his mouth, the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) spent 21 days “occupying” Mass. Hall to compel Harvard to pay its workers a living wage. The criticism of PSLM??s act sounded a lot like the criticism of the Puker. The Crimson, which supported a living wage, argued that the occupation was “unjustified and inappropriate.” A majority of students supported a living wage, but less than a third supported the occupation. The University...
...PSLM??s exploits aren’t the most interesting example of what unpopular tactics can do. Forty-four years and three days before the Puker, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote a letter that would become famous. He was not attacking Southern mobs or Northern politicians. The targets of King’s letter were the liberal ministers and rabbis who had previously been some of his most powerful supporters. When King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had moved into Birmingham to stage a civil disobedience campaign, the liberal clergy objected to King’s tactics...
...brutal history. According to this line of thought, we were all sitting around politely discussing ways to end torture before some crazy radical came and puked in our faces. This argument has some legitimacy. Vomit is more newsworthy than the CIA’s history, just like PSLM??s sit in was more newsworthy than the poverty of Harvard’s workers and civil disobedience was more newsworthy than the brutality of Jim Crow. The fact that these tactics generate more discussion than the issues that prompt them demonstrates their effectiveness. In the real word, most people...
Today, critics worry that the University is inching backwards from the promises it made following PSLM??s famous 21-day sit-in of Mass. Hall. Administration officials have admitted that the University’s implementation of those recommendations has been more difficult to enforce and monitor than originally hoped, mostly because of the University’s decentralized hiring and firing practices. Back in 2001, PSLM??s main concern was that Harvard was outsourcing work to private contractors—whose low-paid workers were not allowed to unionize—to save money...
Chaudhry says PSLM??s current lull is merely the calm before a storm, likening the general labor movement’s current atmosphere to the years which preceded 2001?...