Word: wages
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This movement serves to create an artificial rift over a social policy that the vast majority of us agree on: the need for a minimum wage...
...contract deadline approaches, the Service Employees International Union, which represents the custodial staff, is demanding that the University pay our janitors $20 per hour, provide them full benefits (increasing the real hourly wage significantly), create more opportunities for full-time work, and end outsourcing...
Besides the contradictory nature of demanding both higher pay and increased benefits while asking the University to create more jobs, the level of absurdity reached by these demands can only be fully realized by contextualizing the numbers. Currently, the hourly wage for Harvard’s custodians is between $13.50 and $14.77, depending on their level of experience. Any employee working more than 15 hours per week also receives benefits. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national average wage for service occupations (which include custodial staff...
...demand that we pay our custodians $20 per hour, nearly twice the market wage for their work, seems to be the beginning of a never-ending battle against reality. If we tamper with labor negotiations and cause an artificial increase in the wage, we can expect one of two scenarios to result. The first option, fewer jobs, is decidedly unpalatable, and thus it’s understandable that many students would rally against it. Unfortunately, the other option is an increase in our tuition, which is already enough of a financial burden to any family...
Given those options, it seems difficult to justify campaigning for such an exorbitantly high wage for unskilled labor. Worse yet, the real tragedy is that the Living-wage campaign at Harvard and those like it elsewhere detract from the importance of the minimum wage—the institution towards which the efforts of groups like SLAM should be directed...