Hundreds of protesters marched down Massachusetts Ave. across Harvard's campus on Friday to demand a living wage for university workers, including custodians, dining hall staff, and security guards.
The workers and Service Employee International Union (SEIU) Local 254, the union that represents them, organized the rally. The same union also represents Tufts workers and campaigned for better wages and working conditions for OneSource custodians earlier this semester.
The rally comes after months of protests that came to a head last spring when the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) staged a three week sit-in at Harvard. In response to the sit-in, the university agreed to establish a committee of faculty, staff, and students - the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies (HCECP) - to generate recommendations on worker wages.
The PSLM and the union hope to influence the committee and the university through continued rallies and events before HCECP's findings are released on Dec. 19. The committee released its preliminary findings in mid-October, which stated that the university directly employs 424 workers and outsources 579 workers earning below $10.68 an hour, the City of Cambridge's designated living wage.
The report also found that the university increasingly turned to outsourcing for lower-paid workers throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. The preliminary data showed that the number of custodians dropped from 980 to 260 from 1980 to 1994 and the median hourly pay for university workers dropped by 13 percent from 1994 to 2001.
Friday's rally was one of the largest to date in the campaign for a living wage. The students and workers marched up Massachusetts Ave., blocking traffic, chanting and drumming. The protesters then congregated on campus at Massachusetts Hall - where the spring sit-in took place - to hear six speakers, including Harvard professors and students.
"We just need to show this community that the students are behind the workers completely, and that we want [the HCECP] to come out with recommendations that will include living wage," said Jessica Fragola, a PSLM member and Harvard sophomore.
The rally also demonstrated that support for the workers has not faded, Fragola said. She felt administrators believe that protesters will stop pushing the issue so it can be resolved quietly.
"It was important that we rally to show that the energy that emerged during the sit-in hasn't faded out," she said. "I think this university hopes on some level that they can just sort of put the recommendations under the table... they're waiting for the energy to die and go back to their old ways."
Fragola personally invited Harvard president Lawrence Summers to the rally on Thursday afternoon, but he "respectfully declined," she said.
She said that she noticed an increased number of police officers during the rally, which she attributed to caution after last spring's sit-in.
"There was a huge police presence on campus starting a few hours before the rally," she said. "Every time we [the protesters] would go near an administrative building, they would come over and stare at us."
Harvard workers will enter into contract negotiations in January, a month after HCECP's report is issued. Tufts custodians came out of negotiations earlier this month with increased wages over the next three years, family health insurance, and more opportunities for full-time work.
