Word: waging
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...second piece of fuzzy math that wage increase opponents get away with is the tendency to compare Harvard’s workers to a national average. Boston isn’t America. It’s one of the most expensive places on God’s earth, and wages just don’t go as far here. Harvard workers may make more than low-wage workers in New Orleans, but attempts to make Harvard workers seem like a mop-wielding gentry miss the mark. Harvard workers have benefited from past battles, but their wage level, in a city...
...course, a wage increase for Harvard employees probably isn’t a matter of life and death, but the fact is that low wages have real effects on real people. I’m not suggesting that Harvard employees are as economically vulnerable as New Orleans’s poor were beore Katrina. Thanks to the work of activists and labor unions, Harvard employees do fairly well compared to service workers in the rest of the country. But Boston is expensive, and Harvard employees still need more help...
Opponents of the living wage have used an interesting collection of bogus statistics to make it seem like Harvard workers are living lives of luxury. The most common kind of fuzzy math makes two fairly ridiculous assumptions. First, it assumes that Harvard workers are in families with two wage earners working full time. This ignores the fact that many Harvard employees can’t work 40 hours per week. Harvard won’t let them. But even ignoring the exact statistics, it’s worth pointing out that this assumption suggests a moral framework that I would...
...question shouldn’t be whether this wage is reasonable for a two-parent family with two wage earners employed full time. The question should be whether Harvard’s wages are appropriate for all kinds of families. We may disagree about what wage level is appropriate, but we shouldn’t base our calculations on the desire to provide subsistence only for workers with a specific type of family structure. Harvard should pay a wage that allows all sorts of families to achieve a reasonable standard of living. That means Harvard wages shouldn?...
...won’t make the argument here for any particular wage level. My beef is with the tenor of the discussion. Both sides have been too eager to attack the other side. This discussion isn’t about whether the Student Action Labor Movement (SLAM) is too radical or The Crimson is too conservative. It’s about the workers. It would be criminal to oppose a reasonable wage increase for Harvard’s workers because you don’t like the tactics or the personalities of SLAM activists...