Word: pslm
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...same tired message day after day: “We’re certainly not going to speak to them while they’re occupying a building,” he said Sunday. The University will not negotiate until it has cajoled the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) out of the only leverage they have by making them leave the building—and then they can go back to a few more years of empty “dialogue” until PSLM’s leaders graduate...
...Sure, PSLM has made some mistakes in its three-year campaign for a living wage. Greeting President-elect Lawrence H. Summers with a contentious rally from the get-go wasn’t a great idea, and the sit-in’s first few days—with sleep-deprived Yard residents raising a ruckus and a daytime rally accidentally drowning out a Holocaust Remembrance Day reading nearby—seemed to only hurt the campaign, not help it. But over the past five days the tide turned, with the protesters gaining the support of both Massachusetts senators...
Behind Harvard’s carefully measured rhetoric lies a masterfully orchestrated public relations game, one that seeks to give the appearance of responsiveness in front of a shroud of inaction. After PSLM agitated for over a year, the University responded with a nicely-crafted package which gave its workers increased health benefits and programs to boost literacy and improve their job skills—but which also shot down a living wage. In the year-plus since, administrators have referred time and again to these moderate reforms as proof that they care. But they have also used them...
With an impending change in the presidency, Harvard has a ready-made excuse for pushing off the implementation of a living wage even further into the hazy, indefinite future. According to a statement by PSLM member Alexander B. Horowitz ’02 in Perspective’s extra last week, outgoing President Neil L. Rudenstine recently told campaign members that it would take his successor a year or two to get “acclimated” to the issue. Apparently it will take one of the nation’s foremost economics minds at least a year...
...more than being about money, the living wage is, in the end, a moral issue. Intricately intertwined with the living wage cause is Harvard’s increasing reliance on subcontracting for its workers, a practice which has steadily weakened campus unions, leaving PSLM to fight for the hundreds of subcontracted workers which Harvard does not count in its living wage calculations. The campaign also draws attention to how little real control undergraduates have over the College’s future, whether it be through blocking group size, the selection of Harvard’s new president or the ability...