Word: wages
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...flooded streets around the world recently to protest, nor those who brandished American flags at the Daytona 500. But their soft-spoken and almost reluctant misgivings--the kind that many other Americans expressed in an extensive new TIME/CNN poll--show how unsettled the country is by being asked to wage a kind of war it has never fought before, one launched against a country that has yet to attack the U.S. Such a war requires a new way of thinking about ourselves and poses a question that millions of Americans are now asking: Is it more dangerous, more immoral...
...city of Boston passed a living wage ordinance. Among the first municipal ordinances of its sort, it required that all major city contractors pay workers a living wage—now set for Boston at $10.54 an hour and adjusted frequently to meet the rising cost of living. Many other cities followed suit, including Cambridge and Somerville. In much the same spirit, and modeled in part on Cambridge’s ordinance, Harvard last spring raised the wages it pays its workers to a level it deemed appropriate to the cost of living. Harvard’s changes apply...
...those ordinances. The company has previously received exemptions from Boston, but with its contract up for renewal it now must request one again. If KTI receives an exemption, its success at avoiding the regulation could well inspire others to also refuse to comply, making the hard-won living wage ordinances completely ineffectual...
...goal of living wage statutes, of course, is not to put companies like KTI out of business and their workers out of work, but to ratchet up labor standards, forcing companies to pay a living wage in order to get lucrative public contracts. It is up to Boston, as a major customer of KTI, to use the power it has as a contractor to pressure KTI to comply with the statute...
Harvard has power to improve the working conditions for employees of many of its contractors. Even if not technically required to contract only with companies that pay a living wage, Harvard can make a company’s treatment of its workers a criterion for deciding contracts, in keeping with the standards to which Harvard holds itself on campus. Doing so, in this case by letting KTI know that the university cares about how it treats workers, would put significant pressure on companies to improve—pressure that they might not feel otherwise. Being a responsible customer is simple...