Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...majority of the University's long-service employees the University pension and insurance plan now provides for larger pensions than would be received under the terms of the Social Security Act. The groups of long-service employees to whom this does not apply would not, if in similar non-exempt employment, become eligible for pensions under the Social Security Act for several years. The point has accordingly not been reached where University employees actually retiring receive smaller pensions than they would receive under the Social Security Act, and with the present possibility, of changes in the Act it does...
...many of Harvard's higher paid employees, like carpenters, the University plan is more advantageous than the federal act. But as a matter of plain statistical fact the provision which the University makes for its lowest paid employees does not equal the pensions set by the Social Security Act for workers on the same low wage level. Thus a maid who receives a pension of ten dollars a month after thirty-five years under the Harvard plan, would under the Social Security Act receive twenty-five dollars a month...
This illustrates the difference in emphasis between the two plans. The federal act weights the returns in favor of the lowest paid workers by applying to their pensions some of the money contributed by their more fortunate comrades. But while the Social Security Act redistributes the security, the University plan perpetuates without any amelioration the extraordinary inequality which a pension system should correct...
...state the difference between the two plans is to point the way to a much needed amendment of the University system. Harvard should incorporate into its own plan the redistributing formula of the Social Security Act. In this way, the University without adding to its own already substantial contributions can increase the pensions of its lowest paid employees. It is these workers whose security must be the first concern of any pension system...
...this suggestion is economically sound, it may seem to be morally objectionable because it proposes that the University, a private institution, should tax some of its employees for the benefit of others. But by so doing, the University would merely be following the principles approved by Congress in the Social Security Act, which Harvard professes to accept as its own standard. If the University should choose to be guided by broad sociological considerations rather than by narrow logic, it will see that a policy of accepting the principle of security for the lowest paid and then failing to provide that...