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UNCOUNTED COSTS OF A LIVING WAGE

By Vivek G. Ramaswamy, Contributing Writer
October 12, 2005
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The “Living-Wage Campaign” at Harvard is like a Boston winter: you know it’s
going to strike, but wonder only when and how hard. And last weekend—much like
the Boston winter—it struck. And surely it won’t be long before throngs of
students and Cambridge activists will march, chant, and protest outside the
Holyoke Center and around Massachusetts Hall, believing that they are fighting
an important battle in a larger war to achieve higher wages for Harvard’s
lowest-paid workers.

The campaign’s flaw, however, lies in the consequences that follow should it
ever become successful. Its flaw is not simply the substitution effect—the
economic consequence of shifting labor demand curves—or anything else that we
may have learned in Ec10. Rather, if the living-wage campaign were successful in
achieving a wage increase for Harvard’s lowest-paid workers, it will have done
so at the cost of respect that the rest of the Harvard community has for these
workers—a cost that, no matter how high the wage increase, is too high to pay.

It might seem presumptuous to criticize a living-wage campaign on the grounds of
lost respect for those whom the campaign is intended to help. Perhaps there is
actually a more monetarily selfish reason to be resistant to such a wage
increase. (For example, I might oppose the campaign because I am disinclined to
spend a few extra dollars on a needy Harvard janitor.) After all, according to
the living-wage proponents, it is the very intrinsic human worth of the
lowest-paid workers that fundamentally entitles them to such a minimum level of
wages.

But herein lies the dilemma. At the start of a living-wage campaign, all of its
proponents agree that the monetary worth of Harvard’s poorest workers is
entirely unrelated to their fundamental human worth. However, by using the human
worth of these individuals as the basis for entitling them to a certain level of
monetary worth, the living-wage proponents inextricably yet fatefully marry the
two previously separate notions. Once the notions of monetary and human worth
have been linked—be it in the minds of students, workers, or living-wage
advocates—the consequence is stark. As long as there ultimately exists some
difference in monetary worth between Harvard’s lowest-paid workers and other
members of the community (and there surely will), so too will there exist a rift
in the human worth accorded to members of each of those two groups.

The notion is more intuitive than the formal argument makes it seem: when a
Harvard student knows that the University has allocated a greater portion of his
or her fees to pay the wage of a janitor (at a higher level than the laws of
supply and demand would require), a condescending strain of sympathy subtly yet
naturally replaces the mutual human respect that otherwise would have existed.
The higher level of Harvard fees allocated to paying the higher wages is the
price paid to purchase a right to condescend—a “right” that Harvard has no
prerogative to sell in the first place. To know that the nature of every polite
exchange, be it a greeting or a handshake, between the more and less privileged
members of Harvard’s community would be forever altered by redistribution is not
worth any material benefit may come out of that exchange—even a higher wage for
already poorly paid workers.

The natural reply of living-wage advocates might be that, even though all
members of the community are entitled to the same level of respect, the
bottommost members require a baseline level of monetary worth, because their
poverty results from arbitrary factors beyond their control. That our society
chooses to monetarily reward certain talents (intelligence, for example) over
others is inherently arbitrary. It is insignificant, at least from a moral
perspective, that certain people are born with more prized talents. That
inequity should not be the basis of denying society’s poorest individuals a
baseline standard of living.

If it is arbitrary, however, that Harvard’s poorest workers happen to not
possess the talents our society prizes, then it is also arbitrary that these
workers should be the prime beneficiaries of a campaign to achieve a more
equitable distribution of wealth. That is, the poorest workers in parts of the
world outside Harvard live on wages that make Harvard’s janitors’ expenditures
seem luxurious, yet living-wage campaign proponents at Harvard focus primarily
on achieving a higher level of equity within their own community. If a
distribution of talents or monetary wealth is arbitrary, then so too are the
bounds of the Harvard community. If living-wage campaign proponents were true to
their rhetoric, they would be campaigning for living wages in another hemisphere
before asking for higher wages at home.

This criticism against living-wage campaigns does not mean that Harvard should
avoid taking a stance on this issue. To the contrary, supporting a higher wage
would simply be taking the wrong stance. Instead, the more appropriate stance
would be to cultivate an environment (through education and other means) in
which all people, prosperous and poor alike, would be accorded the level of
respect to which they are entitled—independent of where they live, the language
they speak, or the wages they earn.



Vivek G. Ramaswamy ’07 is a biology concentrator in Kirkland House. He was



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