Word: wages
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...universities, recently discharged twenty cleaning women from Widener Library without advance notice or pay and without giving them any reason. These women had been in the employ of the university for periods ranging from thirty-three years to two. Harvard University is a vast business corporation employing hundreds of wage earners, excluding faculty members. Its ruthlessness in this case might perhaps be laid to our present industrial organization. But what are we to think when President A. Lawrence Lowell, asked by a minister to reconsider the case of one woman who is in dire poverty with her family of five...
...Dear Sir: I have inquired into the discharge of Mrs. Emma Trafton from the Widener Library and I find that the Minimum Wage Board has been complaining of our employing women for these purposes at less than thirty-seven cents an hour, and hence the university has felt constrained to replace them with men. Some of them, I hope many of them, will be able to be employed at some other work in the university. (Signed) A. Lawrence Lowell...
...Massachusetts minimum wage law applies only to women, and not even to women in all occupations. The board can only recommend that its findings concerning wages be accepted by employers. The law is what it is. The shock to the community is due to the sordid meanness of the richest university in the world in throwing 20 poor scrubwomen out of work for the sake of two cents an hour...
Harvard's administration is wonderfully thrifty when scrubwomen are involved. Chambermaids in the dormitories are not covered by the minimum wage law, for some occult reason; so several of the discharged scrubwomen have been given jobs as chambermaids, who get only 32 cents an hour. Some inconsistency has been pointed out in the paying of cleaning women at the Fogg art museum 37 cents an hour--what the minimum wage commission asked for the scrubwomen in the library. But the extra two cents for the art museum, cleaners are contributed by a generous alumnus whose name should not be withheld...
...Harvard effort to balance the budget by discharging a few scrubwomen rather than pay them two extra cents an hour, as urged by the Massachusetts minimum wage commission, brings the tough-minded realism of the school of business administration into conflict with the more tender-minded humanities, which still flourish, one may hope, in the older departments of the university. It is a tragic collision, in which the humanities have been knocked out. --Springfield Republican...