interviews with activists - campus activism · peter asen student activist at brown university...

THE CAMPUS LIVING WAGE PROJECT

INTERVIEWS WITH ACTIVISTS

Available online at

www.livingwagestories.org or www.clwproject.org

Adam Stone

August 19th, 2005

http://www.livingwagestories.org/

http://www.clwproject.org/

The Campus Living Wage Project

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www.livingwagestories.org

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Table of Contents

I. About the Project .............................................................................................................................................5

II. Interviews .........................................................................................................................................................7

Peter Asen , Student Activist at Brown University.....................................................................................7

Elaine Bernard , Director of the Harvard Trade Union Program.............................................................12

Jared Bernstein , Senior Economist at the Economic Policy Institute....................................................16

Sam Blair , Student Activist at Swarthmore College...............................................................................19

Dan DiMaggio , Student Activist at Harvard University...........................................................................24

Madeleine Elfenbein , Student Activist at Harvard University................................................................29

Matthew Jerzyk , Director of Rhode Island's Jobs With Justice..............................................................35

Kae Kalwaic , Assistant Administrator and Labor Activist at Swarthmore College.................................41

Lawrence Katz , Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard University.................................44

Jen Kern , Director of the Living Wage Resource Center at ACORN.....................................................49

Anna Mumford , Student Activist at Stanford University.........................................................................55

Roona Ray & Amy Offner , Student Activists at Harvard University......................................................63

Nick Rutter , Student Activist at Brown University..................................................................................67

Anissa Weinraub , Student Activist at Brown University........................................................................70

III. Organization Profiles ...................................................................................................................................72

Harvard University , Cambridge, MA.....................................................................................................72

Swarthmore College , Swarthmore, PA.................................................................................................72

Brown University , Providence, RI.........................................................................................................73

Stanford University , Stanford, CA.........................................................................................................74

The Economic Policy Institute , Washington, DC.................................................................................74

ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Re form Now) .............................................75

A Warning: The “Employment Policies Institute” and Public Rela tions Non-Profits .....................75

IV. Reflections & Conclusions .........................................................................................................................77




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I. About the Project

What’s the project about?

In the winter of 2002, I left college to research the campus "living wage" movement. I had followed the drama

of the campaign at Harvard University through the pages of the New York Times, and wanted to find out more.

The Campus Living Wage Project is the result of that research. It's a collection of fourteen interviews with

students and other activists about living wage campaigns and their experiences organizing on campus.

What’s a living wage campaign?

On campuses across the United States, student activists have campaigned to improve the wages and

bargaining power of low-wage university employees. Campus living wage campaigns generally advocate for a

higher minimum wage for university employees and the adoption of a "code of conduct" to protect workers'

rights.

A "living wage" is generally defined as the minimum wage to support a family above the poverty line, and

varies by area. Campus campaigns usually lobby universities to establish a minimum wage for all university

workers at a level above the state minimum wage. (See EPI's useful living wage fact sheet for more

information.)

But campus living wage campaigns are usually about much more than a living wage policy. They are attempts

to reinvigorate employee unions, to protect workers' rights, and to stem university policies that hurt employees'

legal and economic power. They are the convergence point of enormous differences within the university

"community." Campaigns bring together the affluent and the working poor, the educated and the uneducated,

and the advantaged and disadvantaged.

Why conduct interviews? Why read them?

Most research on the living wage is done in economics. As a result, most of the research focuses on the

effects of the living wage on income and employment. In contrast, interviews explore the broader goals and



http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/issueguides_livingwage_livingwagefacts


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effects of living wage campaigns, including the effects on students, unions, and universities, and the

relationships between them. Interviews also allow activists to share their experiences, both their failures and

their successes, with other activists and the general public. Unlike in academia or business, there are few

other forums for activists to share their experiences.

Finally, interviews provide insight into the motivations that lead students and others to devote their time and

energy to living wage campaigns. As one researcher interviewed here pointed out, when was the last time we

heard about “Ivy League” students being concerned about the low pay of university staff? Interviews help us

understand this renewed interest in inequality and justice on campus.

How did you conduct the interviews? How did you ed it them?

The interview process for the project involved a free-form conversation, including typical interruptions,

tangents, and the views of the interviewer. The interviews also included many discussions about the Living

Wage that were not included here for various reasons: redundant, boring, or unspecific.

In addition, questions included in these transcriptions were never directly stated. Instead, they are a

compilation of the set of questions that the interviewer asked on the topic. When possible, the edited

transcripts were sent to interviewees to make sure they adequately captured the meaning of the interview. The

actual questioning procedure did not progress in an organized fashion as the text may first suggest, but it

certainly makes it easier to read.

Most importantly, since almost all of these interviews were conducted during the winter of 2002, the interviews

do not necessarily reflect the individuals’ current views. Don’t hold it against them .

Who paid for all of this?

This project started with a generous grant from the Haas Center of Public Service at Stanford University. I

benefited enormously from the support of Kent Koth, Renato Rosaldo, and many friends and kind strangers,

including everyone interviewed here.



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II. Interviews

Peter Asen

Student Activist at Brown University

Questions:

How did the Student-Labor Alliance decide to campaign for a living wage?

What were the highlights of the campaign?

What was the outcome of the committee formed to look into employment at Brown?

What were the advantages and disadvantages of having students represent staff?

How did the city and campus campaigns differ?

What could other campaigns learn from Brown?

Where do you think the real power of students comes from?

How did the Student Labor Alliance at Brown decide to focus on the Living Wage?

It was partly based on the fact that it was in conjunction with the Living Wage campaign that was going on in

the city of Providence. I think, if I’m not mistaken, that the original writing of the Living Wage ordinance in

Providence would not have exempted Brown, but then it was adapted so that Brown was exempt because it

was a non-profit, or for some other reason. So we decided that if this ordinance passes, it doesn’t make sense

to us that Brown should be exempt from it, so let’s work on something at Brown. That was sort of the impetus

for doing it, and also knowing that a lot of groups who had been doing anti-sweatshop stuff before had moved

on to Living Wage. The group didn’t have a real, good permanent sort of direction in the group after the

sweatshop stuff had finished successfully so this was a good new direction to go in.

What were the highlights of the living wage campaig n on campus at Brown?

To me, one highlight was when we had a sort of rally/protest in coalition with three other causes going on at

the same time during "corporation weekend" in February last year. We formed a group called the "Corporation

Weekend Coalition," a sort of short-term coalition with a group that was fighting for better recognition of and



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more funding for ethnic studies, a group that was working for higher student wages, and a group that was

working for better orientation programs for minority students.

So we had probably an 80 to 100 person rally on the day the “corporation” was meeting, which is like the board

of trustees, and handed out information to the board, asking them to consider these issues. It was a really,

really good action, got a lot of attention, and seemed a really good example of working with other groups. That,

to me, was one of the more positive things that happened.

You told me on the phone that it was “death by commi ttee.” What was the outcome of the committee

formed to investigate employment issues on campus?

It is positive at least in the fact that there is some recognition by the administration that it is an issue that they

want to look at. But we asked for worker involvement in the committee, which they said was against collective

bargaining agreements but we sort of thought was a bullshit excuse. We asked for faculty involvement in the

committee and they wouldn’t grant that either. So the committee ended up being nine members, three students

and six administrators, so the committee membership we felt was stacked against us from the beginning. It

didn’t represent all the interests in the community.

We really felt faculty should be represented, and because faculty were not represented, we started a petition

with faculty to say they supported our campaign. We got about fifty faculty to sign something saying they

supported our campaign. We went to faculty to say part of why we’re doing this is because we want faculty to

have a voice in this process, and we are concerned that they are keeping faculty out of this committee.

The committee also was sort of run by the chief financial officer of the university, who is very anti-Living Wage,

despite the fact that he was a former Teamster. He was very negative from the very start: a lot of people were

saying “We can’t afford this,” but he was saying “Even if we could afford this, I wouldn’t want to pay a living

wage. I don’t see the point of it.” he was very negative, and he drove the committee and wanted to get through

it very quickly. then he kept stalling in the meetings, kept getting put off, and there weren’t enough meetings.

In the end, there was a report that the committee put out, and one positive thing about the process is that they

allowed the students to put their own section in the report. In the end, it was basically split down the line

between students and administrators: all the students on one side and all the administrators on the other. It

was a chance to have a dissenting report, and that did get into the committee report. But in the end, the

committee didn’t make recommendations like what we were hoping for. Some minor positive things came out



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of it, such as the elimination of some of temporary jobs and the conversion of some temporary jobs to

permanent jobs.

I think it was partly pressure and partly just the university realizing that some of their hiring policies concerning

temporary workers were a little bit of a black eye for the university. For example, they had a 1,000 hour policy:

if a worker worked 1,000 hours (which is basically six months, full-time), then they would either have to fire

them or offer them a permanent job. So what they were doing was firing people and then hiring them one day

later or just firing people and hiring a new temporary worker. A lot of people who came to Brown thinking, “I’ll

start with a temporary job and then I’ll get a chance to get a permanent job,” because they knew about this

policy, ended up coming and then getting canned after six months.

So we were really concerned about that, and also concerned about the general unequal treatment of

temporary workers, such as the fact that there was not equal pay for equal work, that temporary workers

weren’t getting health benefits, and weren't even able to use the library, athletic facilities, or other school

facilities that permanent workers could use.

There were little changes in those areas. This February, Ruth Simmons announced that the minimum wage I

didn’t even know there was one) for all university employees was going to rise from $9.00 to $10.00 an hour.

The language of it, to me, was unclear. They made it sound like it included everyone, but I’m not clear exactly

what that means. I’m sure it does not include people hired by temporary agencies, but there aren’t that many of

those anymore. It was something that I think did come out of our group drawing attention to what was going on

in the university.

What are the challenges and successes you’ve had of having students representing staff?

To me, that’s probably the most problematic aspect of having a Living Wage campaign, and it is part of the

reason why we put the campaign on hiatus this year. It made some people very concerned about the campaign

and upset about it. We tried to avoid this sort of paternalistic outlook and tried to avoid the “we are doing this

for you” kind of thing. One thing that we did do was try to have meetings with workers and talk to them, and go

to coffee breaks, and try to get them after work to come meet with students and talk about it. But that was very

difficult because a lot of people didn’t have time after work, or had to go home, and it was hard to get the work

out in certain scenarios—especially with non-unionized people who were worried about losing their jobs or felt

very vulnerable here. It was extremely difficult to do that. The problem is, how do you build a movement that is



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really everyone’s movement, the worker’s movement as much as ours? We didn’t effectively do that in the end,

I think, and that was a major reason it was a problem.

As a contrast, for example, we had some workers from store’s operations contact us, which is a group that

delivers mail and other stuff around the university. There are only six of them, but they wanted to join the

facilities management union. The three workers who were really pushing for unionization were being harassed

by their employer. For instance, they were having a union meeting at their house and their supervisor drove by

and was spying on them, and they were getting written up for being three minutes late as just sort of an

intimidation tactic.

They talked to us, their union representative talked to us, and they said “We want to work on this, and we want

you guys to get some recognition of what the university’s doing and try to stop this.” That’s a case where they

really came to us and we worked with them, and it was a cooperative effort. It was their movement and it was

our movement, and it was a successful thing in that it got this to stop and now they’re going to be able to join

the union. It was a very small thing that affected six workers, but it was successful in the sense it was

cooperative, it wasn’t paternalistic, and it wasn’t “we decided we want to do this for you.” So the question is,

how do we do that? The other question is, do we just want to wait for the workers to say “We want this” and

jump on it, or do we want to jump start these discussions? I think all that is very difficult.

How has the role of students in the city campaign d iffered from in the campus campaign?

In the city campaign, we are one small element working in this broad coalition. We have been doing a lot of

work on the East Side, specifically, such as meeting with a city counselor, and now we’re trying to set up

another meeting for neighborhood residents with her-- but we’re just one small part of it. And that’s fine. There

are a lot of people working on it, and it’s been great to sort of work with these other organizations and such.

But the student campaign, we sort of were it. So it’s different, and there’s less control. Sometimes that

alienates some people because they feel like it is not theirs, but I think it’s important to be able to learn to work

with other people.

There’s a bunch of workers involved in the campaign, especially people who are going to be affected by it who

have taken on roles. For example, school bus drivers, school bus monitors, and teacher’s assistants, who are

all very poorly paid, always come to rallies and speak on behalf of it. It’s not just their campaign, but it really is

in some part theirs.



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What do you want other campaigns to learn from your experience with the Brown campaign?

I think an important thing is to make sure that workers are involved—that you find out what the concerns of

employees really are.

One thing we did do that was positive in that regard was interviews with a bunch of workers. We didn’t end up

doing do that many but we probably did 50 or so. We talked to a bunch of workers about what their concerns

were, and I think that’s really important. Living Wage campaigns and policies are somewhat of a broad, cookie-

cutter model, and you can’t just stick it into whatever’s going on in your campus and assume this is the

problem. In some campus contracting out is going be a major issue, or temporary vs. permanent is going to be

a major issue, and in others maybe everybody is permanent and unionized but still only makes eight bucks an

hour-- working with the union if there’s a union, or working with workers in other ways. But a union is sort of an

easy way to try to make that communication happen and that cooperation. I think that is a really essential thing.

What do you think is the real power of students in these campaigns, at the college level in particular ?

What can students really offer?

Students have time. Students aren’t, by and large, raising families, don’t have to work more than 10 hours a

week, but they do have a lot of resources and have these easy ways to organize each other, meet, get

together, and try to build student power. The students are a voice that the university has to listen to and wants

to listen to, or at least has rhetoric saying it wants to listen to.

Another piece of advice I’d give is that you have to make the campaign broader than we did. It was very much

sort of centered in this one group, and at Brown there were a lot of other groups that would have been

sympathetic and interested. Even though we worked in coalition with them, it was really always our 10 or 15-

person group’s campaign. It can’t work that way- you have to have a lot of people on the campus talking about

it, caring about it, being involved.

One really positive thing Harvard did was they were really trying to do was send out these emails that say “If

you ten minutes do this, fifteen minutes do this, an hour do this, and if you have two hours, do this. These are

all the ways you can help.” Trying to make it really user-friendly and really get people involved, and I think that

is something that is important in order for student power to be developed. It can’t be developed from 10

students- it can start there, but it can’t end there and be successful.



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Elaine Bernard

Director of the Harvard Trade Union Program

Questions:

What's the connection between living wage campaigns and the waning influence of unions on campus?

What is the problem with "contracting out" work, and how does Harvard's proposed parity wage policy help?

How did the campaign help beyond influencing policy?

How do you keep students involved in the campaign?

Do you have any advice for students?

Note: This interview was conducted with Richard Freeman of Harvard University present and contributing. His comments have not been

directly included here, but contributed to the focus and development of this interview.

Many people I’ve spoken to connect the emergence of Living Wage campaigns to the decreasing

strength of unions to negotiate contracts for worke rs. Is this right?

I don’t think there’s any question that the Living Wage movement comes out of a vacuum of bargaining power

because of the amount of non-unionized workers. You can make illegal or difficult or impossible all forms of

collective bargaining, and there's a number of ways of doing that: you can de-unionize, you can contract out,

you can union bust. However you do it, you don’t shut the voice down, and you don’t stop collective action: you

just put it underground and put it into other forms.

In the past, you wouldn’t have seen students doing this because the unions themselves could do it. Today, the

unions are weaker, and they are much more constrained in what they are able to do. They are constrained in

the sense they often represent immigrant workers, who are low-paid, who don’t speak English, and who are

not able to take action. One example I used in class is that if the janitors had staged a sit-in in the president’s

office, they would have been fired, and the union would have been fined. It is just not conceivable—but the

students could do that. So the students in fact were freer to take actions than the unions were.

The second reason is that the unions, because of contracting out and other issues, have really seen a great

diminishment of their power. In that vacuum (nature abhors a vacuum) people don’t just roll over. What

happens is that they find different ways start to fight for decent pay.



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Various employers use contracting out, or “privatization,” as a way to avoid union wages and bargaining. Living

wage agreements are often seen as a way to remove the incentive for institutions to contract out work. Harvard

solved this problem through a “parity wage” instead.

As you've said, often employers use "contracting ou t" as a way to avoid union wages and bargaining.

Harvard attempted to solve this problem through a “p arity wage” rather than a living wage policy. Why

is contracting out bad for workers, and how does a parity wage help?

Here’s where the problem is. If from the outside you looked at staff wages at Stanford, for instance, you’d say,

“Well look: for Stanford employee janitors, the wages haven’t been going down.” But look at the numbers of

janitors: have their numbers been going down? The numbers are probably going down so that you end up with

a fraction of the original janitors because most of the janitorial work is now being done by contractors. The in-

house janitors are disappearing, and, with them, the high wages.

A provision of the agreed-upon settlement at Harvard was to set up a committee on wages and contract

workers. While it didn’t totally embrace the Living Wage policy, I think it embraced something that’s probably

more powerful: a “parity wage.” (Although we’ll argue over this for another two or three years). "Parity" means

that Harvard will insist that all contractors and anyone who is hired by the university meet the standards that

Harvard sets through collective bargaining with its unions. Which is perfect: it brings the best of free collective

bargaining with the best of the Living Wage, and it puts the two together. It takes the sting out of contracting,

and yet it leaves the notion of collective negotiations over wages and working conditions.

If the purpose of privatization is to get a more efficient workforce, and it is still more efficient, then workers will

still win out. But if it’s solely to reduce the price of labor, then the workers definitely win. Read the report from

the "Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies” (HCECP, also known as the Katz

Committee) headed by economist Lawrence Katz [interviewed below]. It’s quite worth it. I don’t think you’ll see

a clearer report that basically says that Harvard used contracting out to lower the wages of its most vulnerable

employees over the last ten years.

In the end, Harvard did not accept a Living Wage po licy but a parity wage policy. However, certainly

this point would not have been reached without the efforts of the Harvard Living Wage Campaign. How

did the campaign contribute beyond the actual polic y-making?



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There are many other places Living Wage campaigns make a difference. This is the first generation in years

(possibly back to the thirties) that has actually, as students, concerned themselves with working people. I mean

think about it: students at Stanford and Harvard are talking about low pay? I mean, give me a break. What was

the last time you heard Americans talk about that since the thirties, and actually doing something about it? If

you think about the big student movements of the sixties, it wasn’t like this. It wasn’t focused on workers, rather

it was focused on joblessness and other things.

Never underestimate the systemic, long-term impact of activism during formative years. We know from British

studies that if you’re not involved in or active in a union by the time you’re 26, your likelihood of being in a

union later is very, very low.

The second way to understand how these campaigns make a difference (in a much more narrow way) is to

think about where this campaign came from. The Living Wage, if you look at the evolution of it, starts off from

two places. One, it starts with the anti-sweatshop campaigns, with a union link through the United Students

Against Sweatshops (USAS). Remember, the anti-sweatshop work is focused on the developing world, not the

domestic world.

The second root of the college campaigns is the Living Wage campaigns in cities. By bringing those

campaigns to campus for the first time, activists are bringing it to a private sector-- not a non-profit employer,

but a private sector employer. It’s one thing to do campaign within political jurisdictions, where it’s all about

pressure and politics. Now, however, campaigns are moving into private jurisdictions, into private labor law,

and into private relationships. Once you establish the precedent, you can then ask the whether you can then

take it other places. Can you start to look at other vulnerable private employers? Now that there is a precedent,

a precedent that has worked (while there are unique things about a university), you can see how there’s a little

bit of potential there.

How do you keep students involved in the campaign, especially when that means working with

university bureaucracies and unions?

You have to ask yourself “what do the students get out of it?” I don’t mean to be crass, but I think with the living

wage campaign, there was altruism, but also think about where the campaign came from: it came from the idea

of building stronger relations in students' own community. It was not just a single altruistic action.



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They built a worker’s center here at Harvard. Why was it successful? Because they rooted it right here in the

relationships on the campus, in the environment that the students are responsible for: the university. Students

view themselves as both consumers and as citizens of the university, and they have a right to demand the best

out of it.

What advice do you have for the students working on Living Wage campaigns?

The one point I would make is one we talked about earlier. Unfortunately, for these campaigns to really have a

lasting impact, you have to leave behind an institution. And the institution that gives these workers some power

and some voice is a union.

Ultimately it’s a good thing to win money and improve the wages and working conditions for employees, but

ultimately it’s best to actually leave them with something that they themselves own, which is in fact their own

organization. Even when the relationships get a little strained and tough with unions, you have to go back to it.

Ultimately, I think that any victory can disappear in a year or two if the workers don’t have their own

organization. What’s tricky here is to do that while keeping pressure on the union to make the union real, to

make it democratic.

I think students can help do this. I think they already have. They have done it in a number of ways: they have

done it by invigorating the campuses; they have done it by raising some of these grievances; they have done it

by putting the spotlight on these issues. I’ve seen it here at Harvard. A couple of the unions that were pretty

sleepy until this campaign have managed to build leaders, indigenous leaders right here on campus, who are

now outspoken and knowledgeable and are rising in the union. That’s a good thing.

But it's also understanding that ultimately the students need to work with the union, and cannot completely be

a substitution for it. The union itself has its role to play. Students shaking it up, getting it onboard, jump starting

it is great. But ultimately, you can’t abandon it.



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Jared Bernstein

Senior Economist at the Economic Policy Institute, Washington,

D.C.

Questions:

What do you think is the connection between economic research and activism?

What do you say to students who are frustrated by the bias they see in economic research?

How did your interests in combining economics and social movements begin?

What other advice do you have for student activists?

Note: An article written by Jared Bernstein, "Making a Living: How the living wage movement has prevailed," is available here.

I’ve heard a lot of views on the importance or lack of importance of economic research in the success

of Living Wage campaigns. As an economist, what do you think is the connection between economic

research and living wage activism?

There’s a pretty obvious connection. The simplest kind of Economics 101 textbooks predict that any wage

mandate will have fairly catastrophic effects on the labor market. Those kinds of analyses assume a labor

market is a sort of perfect text-book construction of how labor markets work, so if you disrupt price signals

you’ll create distortions.

The real world doesn’t work that way, and since our job at EPI is to empirically investigate the impact of policy

along with the validity of economic theory, we do a great deal of research to test exactly these kinds of

programs. And so, to the extent that this research yields results that show either that a theory is correct or it

isn’t or is right to a point— whatever light that the research shows on these empirically testable hypotheses are

obviously important to the debate. So we bring them into the debate, and research has been brought to bear

quite extensively on these issues—probably more on minimum wage than living wage, just because we have

much more research on the former than the latter, but there’s a fair bit of research on living wages that we’ve

done as well.

Many student activists I’ve talked to argue that co ntemporary economic theory is inherently

conservative. Traditional economic theory tends, in addition, to warn against polices like the Living

Wage. What do you say to students that are frustrat ed by the conservatism they see in economics?


http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/123/makingaliving.html


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I think you have to know the rules before you can understand how they can be broken. Charlie Parker said

learn everything you can about music, and then when you go to play, forget it. But he learned everything he

could.

It’s the same thing with economics: you need to learn the rules, and a certain amount of humility is what I’d

recommend to students interested in economics. The set of rules and methods that are taught in economics (if

it’s taught well) are a very rigorous and well-organized set of methodologies worth learning about. But I’m

sympathetic to the viewpoint you’re representing: I think that the world behaves much more unlike the neo-

classical model than like it, because the neo-classical model, at its root, assumes a very rational type of

behavior, profit-maximization, and totally discounts the equity side of the equation which looms large for lots of

people—especially students that have that kind of attitude. I would tell those students, be patient, learn the

rules, and then you’ll be much effective explaining why they don’t apply.

The Nobel laureate Amartya Sen had this same frustration early on in his career. He is a very sympathetic and

very humanistic kind of person, but he made it very: "I have to go understand what these folks are talking

about so I can argue successfully against them." That said, at least the whole statistical analysis side of

economics is really very much worth learning, such as econometrics. That is the best way to get to the

quantitative truth of these issues. I don’t think you should have any bones to pick about that; I think

econometrics is something you should just learn.

I think probably the most important thing would be for student activists to learn both sides of all the arguments

so that they find themselves able to really cogently defend the policy, and articulate its benefits and articulate

why the attacks on it are incorrect (to the extent that they are).

Where did your interest in combining economics with social movements, such as Living Wage

campaigns, begin?

For me, it was studying the history of social policy. It was all about softening the edges of free-market

capitalism. I think in a typical economics education you don’t learn that much about ways in which markets fail.

You learn that market failures do occur, and that they are somewhat irregular and they may have to do with a

monopolistic firm or some kind of negative spill-over, and that there’s a set of mechanisms for taking care of

that.



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I learned more that on a pretty on-going basis there can be persistent ways that the market doesn’t work so

well, particularly for groups that are disadvantaged or have less bargaining power. And it was fortunate that I

learned that.

At the same time, throughout my career, I’ve worked with people who have been involved in movements that

were at some level targeted to intervene in the market and create political institutions that help distribute the

fruits of economic growth in a more equitable way: people who were into the union movement, minimum wage

movement, workplace regulation, fair labor standards. Those were the kinds of things that moved me.


Educate yourself on the arguments, so that you’re an articulate advocate for the policy, not simply on the basis

of social justice (which is key), but also on the basis of economic evidence. It’s very important to educate

yourself on those arguments.

But secondly, realize that ultimately it is a social justice argument, and you should feel confident in pushing that

side of the coin. You can’t forget the other side because if it actually did hurt people, you wouldn’t want to

support it. But the economists and the economic arguments are ultimately not going to win the day here. They

can help dispose of irrelevant and incoherent arguments proffered by the other side, but ultimately this is about

equity and not wholly about efficiency. Learn about the economic side of the argument but don’t for a minute

think that’s the whole story because it is only part of it.



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Sam Blair

Student Activist at Swarthmore College

Questions:

What attracted you to the Living Wage proposal?

What did staff members say that drew you in?

What's the connection between respect and a living wage?

What is the relationship between market wages and fair wages?

What do you think is the major source of power for students?

What have you learned from the living wage campaign?

What attracted you to the Living Wage proposal?

I think, and I think other students would echo this, certainly the most compelling motivation for being involved

and continuing to be involved was having those personal discussions with staff members, and hearing some of

them say the things they were saying. At some level, it was the personal connection—it was very honest, very

straight-forward—and feeling like this potentially could be some way to have some effect on something that

was real in people’s lives.

As a somewhat budding activist at that point in time, I had thoroughly burned out my sophomore year on

attempting to run around and go to the meetings of all the different groups and do this and that, go to protests

or whatever, primarily on international issues, and having absolutely zero effect on anything whatsoever. So

there was a definite sense that we were going local and taking on an initiative where we could at least know

what we were asking for, that we could fight for, and knew (or thought we knew) how to get it. That was a

definite incentive.

Certainly while the campaign has had trouble with continuity, we would have had a lot more trouble with

continuity if we didn’t have some of those—maybe a small number—but some pretty close personal

connections with staff members in different places.

What, in particular, did the staff members say that drew you into the campaign?



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I think more than anything, it was people talking candidly about respect issues. Just in general, the sense that

there are faculty here, and there are staff there--that divide. Having been here for a couple of years, I was very

semi-conscious of them and knew there was class divisions. It was hearing them say what it’s like to not be

given the respect of human decency, from faculty members who would trash their offices to students who treat

dorm housing as a hotel (and that includes after a weekend of revelry).

So I think I was definitely drawn in by the way people talked about respect, and the lack thereof, and

developing, within a small group, certain people who had a real dynamism about them and telling it like it is.

One thing that happens at Swarthmore is that we get so intellectual and into the ways of saying things in

intricate and complex manners. To have someone I know, and now a friend, talking about living from day to

day, and trying to deal with stuff at home, hold down a job, and take home enough to take care of kids-- that

was very strong.

Other people have emphasized “dignity” as a goal of th e campaign. In your opinion, what’s the

connection between showing respect and paying a liv ing wage?

I think the way we came to think about it was as simple as this: you can not honestly pay someone their due

respect and not pay a living way. A living wage is only part of it, but it is one of its manifestations. It is putting

your money where your mouth is when you say "we respect everyone as a full member of this community." To

pay less than basic needs seems like a complete contradiction to that and hypocritical.

What’s the relationship between market wages and fa ir wages?

I think generally the line I’ve heard from my economics professors is that the market has nothing to do with fair.

The market is an efficient means of allocation, but efficient does not mean fair. In issues of fairness and justice,

we can’t just look at what the market could bear. That doesn’t mean that our economists won’t argue against a

living wage, though.

What we are asking is that the work of every person who puts in their time for this institution be valued in a way

that is different from society’s current pattern. We ask that we value someone who gives their life—in terms of

forty hours every week—and gives it in a manner that is different than simply selling your body to a business or

company. People take real pride here, and they take pride in their students, to some extent. I was just talking

one of the custodial staff who works in my dorm, and she was talking about how she goes to graduation every

year and cheers us on. I guess what I’m trying to get at is that we look at it as a different kind of contribution,



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and that, when you invest in a place, and give it what you can give it to make it a better place, you should be

taking home enough to be able to come back the next day, rested, and knowing that you don’t need to worry

about the kids and all that.

What is the reason that a living wage movement migh t work at Swarthmore? Do you think that the

power of the campaign is its moral power?

I wonder, looking back, if we were so naive that we thought that was the case. Perhaps we did. Perhaps we

thought that if we framed it in a strong enough moral high-ground light, they would be embarrassed into taking

action. That certainly didn’t prove to be the case.

We certainly have had an administration that appeared to be all ears at times. The president in particular

thanked us for our presentation to him a year ago, and talked about how he was so happy to see Swarthmore

students caring about these issues, etc. But it goes in circles and nothing concrete every gets said that you

could pin anyone down to.

I think definitely over the last year we have learned that moral arguments don’t take you anywhere on their

own. Especially recognizing the realities of competing priorities, that there are pressures (financial pressures,

for example) that are weighing in on these groups and individuals. If we can’t frame our own effort in terms that

can compete with those, we have no game.

That’s hard here for a couple of reasons. One, because we’re such a tiny school, and I think what that does is

that makes the language of community a lot more believable. I don’t know if they talk about a university

community at Stanford (maybe they do, maybe they don’t), but they talk about it up the wazoo here. I feel like

shooting myself in the foot for how many times I must have written the word "community" in advocacy type

letters last year that were essentially appealing to the moral sense of institution.

The way we see students having power is, perhaps primarily right now, through the potential for publicity about

the college that the president would find unfavorable, and ultimately through alumni and the people who are

the primary donors to the institution, and framing it in some kind of financial terms. It’s difficult, partly because

of the small size and community language.

We’ve been wary about taking on confrontational terms, and have also been very surprised last year, when

stuff was really going on, by how we would be called out for doing things that we wouldn’t consider



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confrontational at all. Looking back, I feel like some people really had the pre-emptive strike going well, getting

us to question our own tactics in a way that would stall what we were doing. We have yet to completely get our

heads straight, but it’s an ongoing process, and it continues to escalate in our own thinking about it, if not yet in

the actions that we take.

What would it take for the Living Wage proposal to succeed at Swarthmore?

Essentially, I think that it would take having the president decide that it is in the financial interests of the

university to make it happen, which could mean a few different things. It could mean fearing a blow-up in bad

publicity and cutting down alumni donations; it could mean having an alumni drive and alumni committing not

to donate again unless the institution agreed to pay a living wage; it could mean alumni tagging their donations

for a special fund. Short of a serious threat of unionization, I don’t think anything else would do it.

What have you learned from the Living Wage campaign ? What sort of suggestions do you have for

other students?

We, being students, really can’t do work on staff issues alone. We’ve had a lot of debates about this, and lost a

lot of energy around issues of legitimacy as a student organization and things like that. But I still think that we

can’t do it alone, and part of the reason is that we face such opposition. We’ve been taking fire from all sides

on that front. So it needs to be about finding an issue, a struggle, that you frame in a common way that will

bring people together and bring different workers to the table, bring more workers to the table.

We’ve gone back and forth about why there hasn’t been more staff participation. It seems very clear to us that

it’s because there’s fear of retaliation and intimidation. And look at us: we have time, we have independence,

flexibility, some knowledge of the administration, and such extreme security. Have you ever heard of a student

getting fired? Maybe expelled.

So what do we do with those? For me, anyway, it’s become an interesting question of not only what potential I

have, but also what responsibility I have to do what I can, particularly having developed personal relationships

with staff members. I think it’s about finding the right balance of reflection, and definitely thinking about what

your mission is.

We maybe weren’t so clear about that from the beginning. And we wanted to be involved in a staff

empowerment project. What we can’t do is make there be a union here at Swarthmore College. What we can



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do is brainstorm and then make steps towards making an environment that is more inclusive, that is it’s more

comfortable, so that staff members feel more ready to put themselves out there if they choose to. It’s always

going to be a risk for them, but maybe we can lessen it some.

If I think of myself as an activist now, that’s solely thanks to this campaign. I did activists stuff before freshman

and sophomore years: did some death penalty stuff, I did some Iraq sanctions stuff, but this is on a completely

different plane, in terms of the complications and commitment required. Because the people you are working

with, talking about, and organizing with are right there in front of you, it’s a whole different kind of

accountability. You have to take it pretty damn seriously, and I think that’s good. I think it’s healthy.



24

Dan DiMaggio

Student Activist at Harvard University

Questions:

How did the sit-in benefit the Harvard campaign?

How has working with unions changed your goals for the campaign?

What is the relationship between the Harvard campaign and the unions?

What is the difference between organizing and advocacy?

Do you have any advice for students working on campaigns elsewhere?

The most visible action by the Harvard campaign was the sit-in. How did the sit-in benefit the Harvard

campaign?

For most people, the cultural ideas of direct action come from Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Both were

tied into the labor movement: the civil rights movement is the labor movement, the labor movement is the civil

rights movement. I think those are the examples that we are drawing from at Harvard. At the same time, we

are trying to become more knowledgeable of labor history itself. But I don’t know if a lot of people saw the sit-in

as a labor action as much as a civil rights action and going back in that tradition, rather than the tradition of the

CIO [Congress of Industrialized Organizations] in the 1930s.

You know when you talk about student activism, a lot of people talk about “freedom summer,” but they don’t

talk about students active in the labor movement, although there’s a long tradition of that. Of course, there’s

also a long tradition of students as strike breakers or “scabs,” as I’m currently learning, and actually Harvard

has been part of that as well. Students have been involved as strike breakers, but they have also been

involved as part of the labor movement, trying to support it.

I think for the most part, everybody saw the sit-in as an overwhelming success. If anything, people were

saying, “We should have stayed longer: it would have only been more successful, not less successful.” It was

amazing the amount of press coverage that we generated, and it was amazing the level of support from the

student body. It felt amazing at times.

As far as the victories of the sit-in, we felt like we won a lot. As time went on, at least I felt that the Living Wage

was a fluid concept. Talking with workers, you realize that it’s really a small step. Of course worker’s wages on-



25

campus have improved pretty substantially. But I think the larger issue was raising the consciousness of

workers on this campus, of students on this campus, and the country and the world about labor rights about

how working people are getting screwed. That’s what I take out of it as the best thing. All my relatives were

suddenly learning more about the labor situation, and I think it’s really important that it gets into people’s heads

-- and we get the labor movement back in people’s heads.

How has working closely with the unions changed you r understanding of the campaign and its goals?

I’ve had a lot of negative experiences with unions, to the point where I’m started to get really frustrated. I’m not

frustrated with unions as a concept at all, I’m just frustrated with the bureaucracy that they become and the

top-down styles that they use. In a way, they can also be an institution of disempowerment for workers.

However, I still think that they are the only hope for working people to have a say over their lives, and that they

are going to be the vehicle for empowerment. They have been that, in the past, and they are now, to some

extent. But I believe that we really need to work on making unions democratic institutions. Workers aren’t just

sitting on their jobs, taking licks from their bosses, from their managers, and not doing anything about it. They

want to do something about it, and we need to organize people so they can have say. It’s not just about the

eight hours or twelve hours you’re on the job, it’s the way you think about yourself, whether you have power

over your own life or whether you’re subject to other powers.

I’m actually questioning how students can help get respect for workers. Because maybe higher wages are the

most important thing for some people, but there’s also the entire culture of the workplace that can be a very

demeaning culture, wherein workers basically have to sacrifice eight hours of their day to this undemocratic

institution. I’m wondering how students, Living Wage campaigns, and student labor organizations can help with

those struggles. But they seem like much more organic struggles, and I’m not sure if we can understand them:

the daily struggle at the workplace for control over who’s going to do what job, over discrimination, and etc.

It’s unfortunate that we’ve gotten to this point where the free-market ideology has gotten to such a position of

power. It’s almost the dominant ideology- I wouldn’t say that it’s totally up there, but it’s really on the offensive.

It’s tough being rooted in that, and in a culture that gives this to you. Your education doesn’t necessarily

provide you with an alternative, so you have to look outside of that. It is tough for us to deal with that. For

instance, my economics class here will not give me any alternative to free-market, neo-classical economic

theory (and there are plenty of alternatives out there) and that really stifles your thought. So part of the process

of all this is unlearning those ideologies. It’s a war, almost, to fight what they’re teaching and really find out



26

what’s true and what’s not true. These ideologies have not been created in a vacuum: they have been created

and pushed by certain interests. That’s what I truly believe.

The existing unions have a lot of problems—some of them are good, some of them are horrible, and most of

them are decent but are tough to work with as students. It was tough, in the last few months, working to

organize janitors for their contract campaign here: working somewhat independently of the union, and then

having (this is my opinion) them push a certain wage level on the workers in a pretty undemocratic manner.

I think students should be making the contacts with the unions, but more importantly making contacts with

workers on-campus, and figuring out how to creatively solve the problems that they face. Students also need to

know how to also push for more democracy in the unions, which will only strengthen these campaigns.

There’s an awful lot of opportunity right now to work with organized labor, but it’s going to be a question of are

we working for organized labor (which, for me, means that maybe you have some input, but for the most part

are working for them) or are we going to be working with organized labor (which is just a little bit better, in my

opinion). Campaigns working with organized labor are going to be supporting the unions but remain somewhat

independent from them. Or, as a third option, are students going to be working, not against organized labor,

but working to democratize organized labor. It’s more like working with workers, and figuring out how best to

create change on a local level, in a more democratic manner than when larger institutions or when union

bureaucracies get involved. I hope that students will work for the third option.

How would you characterize the relationship between the Harvard campaign and the unions?

At Harvard, I’d say it was more working with unions. We independently talked to workers, and tried to organize

workers through the Worker’s Center here. It was more working with unions, seeing them as the major

institutional supporters of the campaign, and attempting to get the support of their leadership—while, at the

same time, having these conversations with workers which were important. But most of the focus I believe was

on the top-level union leaders and less on the organizing of workers, which says something about the way

Living Wage Campaigns run: they pick out who are going to be the important influences on the university.

Obviously unions, or union leaders, politicians, and community groups will influence the university. But at the

same time that might not be the most empowering or democratic way of running a campaign. Maybe it will be

the most successful way, but not the most democratic. What we’ve been working on since the sit-in has been

to organize workers and less just pushing on the university to change its policies.



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Everyone I’ve interviewed agrees that there are imp ortant differences between advocacy and

organizing. How do you understand the difference? Ho w would characterize Harvard’s campaign?

I think when you’re doing advocacy, you have a bias towards the influential people, instead of building up a

true democratic movement. But when you’re doing organizing, then you’re really working towards (I keep on

going back to these two phrases) empowerment and democracy. I think people come around to that, and that

can be one of the most difficult things to realize. And it’s also a point of contention: “what should the focus be?”

It also impacts the way you run your campaign. I also think there’s a bias in saying “let’s go door to door and

talk to students today,” rather than “let’s go dining hall to dining hall to talk to all the workers in there and try to

get them out to this rally.” Some of it is practical: who will actually have the time to come to this? Students will.

But at the same time, there are certain biases involved.

In Spring of 2001, particularly, we were focused on the organizing of influential people because some people

felt that that was the way to really influence policy. We weren’t necessarily doing that much outreach to

workers. But it also takes experience to do that, and, at the same time, there were enormous rallies of workers

going on because the dining hall workers had negotiations then. But I would definitely change that to build

more bonds between students and workers. We went into that sit-in and I’m sure that there were plenty of

people who had never talked to a worker. That’s fine, but I would have definitely changed what our focus was

more towards organizing. However, who knows if it would have been more successful, if it implied that we

would have to dedicate more resources to organizing workers than organizing politicians.

I think that these campaigns can be an important part of people’s education about what it means to participate

in a democracy and to really make sure that people aren’t thinking about their own power, but are thinking

about the way that they can work to make sure that everybody has the same type of power. There’s a number

of possibilities that people can come out of these campaigns with. You can come out committed to improving

the lives of people, but at the same time, where do you see yourself? Do you see yourself as a leader of that

fight because you’re going to have some sort of institutional importance? For instance, are you going to be a

union president? Or are you going to come out of the campaign and be a grassroots organizer who is really

working with people on an equal level?

Do you have any advice for the students working on Living Wage campaigns elsewhere?



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Number one, don’t be afraid of workers. Talk to them as much as you can, get to know them- that should be a

central part of your campaign. It can be a central part of your learning experience in life.

Focus on the educational aspects of all of this. Learn about the labor movement, learn about the history. That

helps you find out exactly what you’re doing, and what you’re facing. Plus, it’s fun to learn this stuff. That’s one

way that I’m able to enjoy doing this -- and you have to enjoy it. I think a lot of people get frustrated on the

focus of “work, work, work.” I think a lot of people want to step back and analyze what they’re doing, and make

it part of their education. People want to have fun while they’re doing it and not have to just keep working,

almost unthinkingly.



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Madeleine Elfenbein

Student Activist at Harvard University

Questions:

How did the decision to stage the massive sit-in come about?

Why was dialogue with the administration no longer worth pursuing?

Does dialogue not work because the university doesn't give student voices weight?

Has this experience changed the way you think about power relations in general?

What advice do you have for students choosing campaign goals and wage levels?

Do you ever feel like you're working against the "way the world works"?

What made the Harvard campaign so successful?

What were the ambitions of the Harvard living wage campaign (PSLM) when you joined in fall 2000?

How did the decision to stage the sit-in come about ?

When I joined in the Fall of 2000, the group was still meeting with the administration. They had had one big

rally where Matt Damon and Ben Affleck came. We were planning rallies, holding teach-in’s, trying to circulate

information, and leaf-letting events.

At that point, actually, there was sort of a lull. That first semester was sort of a crisis place for the campaign:

we weren’t really getting anywhere. It was really hard to organize workers and convince them to feel like this

was a meaningful thing. Workers were really fatalistic about their situation, or they were dealing with really

messed up internal union politics. Faculty members were supportive, but they can’t be relied on as organizers

or people to be organized. They sort of scatter. So it wasn’t clear what the direction was.

Then in January or so, we started talking about something really big and radical, something to shake the

university out of its torpor and force it to take action. So were like,

“How about a really big rally?!”

“No, no, no....”

“How about we take over a building?!”

“No, no, no. That’s crazy. We’ll just alienate people.”

“Maybe, maybe, we’ll form a link around Massachusetts Hall and link arms and not leave?”

“No, no, no.”



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Clearly we wanted to do something big, so we decided to have a rally. So we had one in March 2001 that we

totally didn’t organize for, and we still got out 150, maybe 250 people. When we realized that there was sort of

latent support on campus, we began to wonder, "How much more would there be if we did something that was

worth going to?"

After a certain point, the idea of a sit-in began to emerge as the obvious but very unfortunate solution. Nobody

wanted to do it. It is one of those things where the group decides something, yet everybody hates the idea.

Just this sense of inevitability: we have to do a sit-in because there’s nothing else to do.

The strength to do the sit-in came from our group. You know how this works: one person with a strongly held

moral conviction can be strengthened by similar senses in other people. We had all been thinking about this for

so long, and very actively reflecting on it and discussing all the issues involved: the practical ones, the

philosophical ones, and so on. It was pretty clear that we all reached a point that was sufficient for each of us,

individually, to take this step. There were so many people who wanted to go in who couldn’t go for various

reasons. There were seventy or eighty people willing to go in. In the end, fifty people went in. Twenty-six

people held out for all 21 days of the sit-in.

The sit-in ended when the university agreed to re-open all the contracts. That was good because it was clear

that the unions were going to negotiate much better with all the evidence behind them. And they did: they got

really good contracts. They also agreed to a moratorium on contracting, and we got this committee [the

HCECP]. The committee didn’t really meet the Living Wage Campaign’s and workers’ demands, but they were

still a major improvement.

Doing the sit-in, and seeing what a success it was-- despite the university’s rhetoric throughout of “this is

coercive, what we need is dialogue”-- it made me realize what a lot of bullshit that was.

Why do you feel like dialogue was no longer worth p ursuing?

The Harvard Corporation is seven corporate magnates-- people with whom I don’t put a lot of trust in the power

of dialogue. I think that their rhetoric of dialogue is totally hypocritical when the university has stopped being

willing to meet with us. That’s the indication that dialogue is bullshit. We didn’t have a dialogue—what we had

was a series of meetings with the administrations that were intended to mollify or divert student energy into a

void of counter-productive “further research,” or “alternatives.” I don’t believe that dialogue is possible with a



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university whose interests are so clearly entrenched with the maintenance of the status-quo. I truly, truly spent

many anguished months seeking to be disproven. It’s not fun to be engaged in a power-play with an extremely

powerful university—okay, that’s not true, it’s sort of heady, but it’s also scary; it’s really scary.

I don’t believe in dialogue because we’re not speaking on equal terms. A dialogue between you and me is one

thing—presumably, we’re both open to the other’s feelings and the other’s views. Neither have us has power or

control over the other.

Would it be right to say that dialogue doesn’t work in this situation because your perspectives, as

students, don’t have any weight with the university ?

I would say that, but I would also say it sounds like a dangerous principle to assert. If we’re allowed to do a sit-

in because we are not being responded to or having our demands met, can any group stage a sit-in? I think

what gave the sit-in its moral validity was the enormous support from the community. Without that, it would be

hard to justify. I mean, that and being willing to accept the consequences of an action against an institution.

What has this experience taught you about power rel ations? Has it changed your concepts of power or

made it more concrete?

Definitely. I really believe it now. Before, the theory that the university represents a body of class interests was

sort of a sexy, appealing, radical theory—but it never was internalized so much as it has been since then. I saw

what they responded to was an assault on their reputation, the “tent city” and its symbol of a populist

movement growing in the yard like a fungus. That’s the first thing they wanted to go: “Just take down the tent

city. Just take it down, stop having rallies; there are too many people, too many weird people, too many people

with no affiliation with Harvard." (Other than Harvard owns everything in Cambridge and they have to deal with

it.)

Harvard wanted to put out this fire of class mobilization that was starting up with Massachusetts Hall as its

epicenter. The entire activist community made Cambridge its base for those few weeks. It was so exciting, it

was really inspiring. I had never seen such diversity of people, and I’m sure Harvard Yard will never see such

diversity of people again for quite some time.

Harvard Yard was not meant to have these tents in it. It was an assault on the symbol of Harvard, and was a

symbol that got projected all around the country. The news cameras loved this tent city and all these people in



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the yard-- really weird looking people, people you usually don’t see walking through Harvard Yard. We really

struck at the core, not even at first meaning to, of what Harvard was about. To defend this principle of

separation, they had to concede something. While it is not a concession that would kill them, it’s a major

concession for the worker groups. It was worth it to them.

What advice do you have for students choosing and a dopting campaign goals and wage levels?

In terms of what other students need to know, know that you are not going to get what you ask for. That’s

important. The universities have an entrenched interest in paying their workers as little as possible. Any way

they can do that, and minimize the damage to their reputation that you will do, they will use. I don’t doubt that.

Second, you just sort of have to pick numbers that are just in the first place. Our choosing the Cambridge

Living Wage and pitching that as a moral standard was a very effective rhetorical tactic, but it didn’t describe

reality. The difference between the $9.00 they were making and the $10.25 we were calling for was not the

difference between an immoral and a moral state of the world. That was a false juxtaposition that we set up. It

came back to haunt us when janitors were asking for $14.00 an hour and everyone was horrified. It's an

interesting lesson: make sure that you’re supporting workers in their demands, and not putting forth demands

for them.

As Ed Childs [Harvard staff leader] says, “It’s a struggle.” It’s always a struggle. It seems to me you’re not

going to get just wages for service workers in a single campaign or in a single twelve month period of time. And

that’s really frustrating.

That’s been part of my radicalization, realizing that $10.25 isn’t enough, that $14.00 isn’t enough: that isn’t a

just state of the world. So I’ve stopped looking at it teleologically. I see my activism more as an ongoing, never-

ending process.

Do you ever feel like you’re working against “the wa y the world works"? That raising wages just won’t

work in our market system?

No. I don’t feel like that at all. I think what I’m doing is part of the way the world works. What I’m doing is what

I’m supposed to be doing. I’m a part of the world. I really do see myself and the movement I’m in as essential

in shaping the world, and we clearly are. I feel very rooted in reality. More than ever.



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An activist at Brown told me his first piece of adv ice was to watch the Harvard campaign. What are you

doing right?

Building coalitions. A movement for workers can’t happen without workers and it can’t happen without

community support. Often you do see students trying to do it without workers. It’s funny: a lot of people come

to this by learning about Rawls or whatever in some class and they get these ideas of justice. They are like,

“Maybe people at the bottom of the ladder should be higher up. Maybe they should be paid enough to spend

some time with their kids.” And they go off and start a campaign to make that happen and sort of assume that

the workers will play as little of an active role as they have before.

That’s a really flawed, problematic approach and one that’s destined for failure or at least partial failure.

Because the most important part of this, in my view, is worker empowerment. The assault isn’t of a purely

economic nature, it’s also an assault on dignity. What we’re fighting for here is one another’s dignity. The work

you do, the process of doing it, must be one that respects dignity and recognizes the fundamental equality that

exists. It’s this word that gets tossed around irreverently: solidarity, which I think is an extremely powerful

concept.

There is the argument that what students do here is patronizing. But you have to recognize the reality of the

power that students have. Students need to recognize and do what they can to share power, access,

resources, knowledge, and all the things that they have. It’s not enough for students to go into office hours and

talk a lot about how workers need to be paid more and how workers need a voice on campus. What they

should be doing is asking workers if they want to come to office hours, even though office hours aren’t for

workers-- or maybe there should be office hours for workers. And the only way that idea gets introduced is

when workers and students demand it.

Workers need the help of students and the validity and legitimacy that they can offer in front of an

administration, and in return, students get the legitimacy of working with workers—the legitimacy that the

demands are real. A real good elucidation of these principles is on the United Students Against Sweatshops

website. Check out the principles of unity.

How did we know that using the press was going to be an effective tactic? I mean, we had to think about where

we had power. We clearly aren’t going to use physical force, we were not going to try to wrestle President

Rudenstine to the ground and twist his arm until he agreed to a living wage. But we could do that



34

metaphorically through public shaming. I mean, what else do we have but the moral impact of the issue? What

can you appeal to beside a basic sense of justice? There isn’t really much else.


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Matthew Jerzyk

Director of Rhode Island's Jobs With Justice

Questions:

How has your activism changed since being a student activist at Brown?

What is a successful city living wage campaign to you?

How have students contributed to the city campaign?

How do you approach economic theory and data in your campaign?

How do you compete with anti-Living Wage groups funded by industry groups?

What advice do you have to students working on living wage campaigns?

You graduated in 1999 from Brown University, where you were active in various activist organizations.

Working in Providence now as a community organizer, how has your activism changed since college?

I never learned the true principles of organizing until I left college. What I mean by that is that I was still stuck in

this community service model of justice. Even at a school like Brown, students aren’t taught what power is.

They’re taught what power is in such an ambiguous, amorphous, really complicated way. I spent two years

working on a project on how ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the south of Sudan is nothing more than an exercise

of continuing imperialism. I did a documentary on relief workers and how turn-over rates among relief workers

and the psychological dilemmas of those with good intentions are just part of the larger U.S. foreign policy

machine.

It wasn’t until after I returned to Providence, when I started working with certain community groups, that I

learned that organizing starts at home. The world is a grid of power relations, and you can attack, and you can

restructure, and you can really address that grid of power relations wherever you are in the world. Wherever

you are in the world you can deal with it: it’s a matter of staring into the grid and finding out which is the best

entry point in order to change or restructure the grid the way you want it changed.

For me, at that time, I realized it wasn’t about going to Sudan or wasn’t about doing any of that stuff: it was

about how, in Providence, we could change that grid of power relations. I was hired by Jobs With Justice as

the full-time director and worked on the Living Wage campaign, and two years later we are still working on the

campaign.




36

I would say the primary difference between my student activism and my current activism is that as a student at

Brown University for four years, I wasn’t taught what organizing was. Not in the classroom, and not outside the

classroom. I did some organizing, but I didn’t know what it was called. There were teach-in’s on some things,

but it was more of an exercise in education and not in action.

When I was a student, and certainly after I was a student, I had so much ideological “blah-blah”. I was taught to

be the liberal and critically think and critically examine all of this stuff, but I would still get nervous if I walked

into a union hall with mostly Latina women. Race issues, gender issues, class issues-- all these things. Now

I’ve reached a point where I don’t think twice: half my day is spent with workers.

I think students, more than anything, to be successful activists, need to learn to take risks and make yourself

look ridiculous. That means dealing with a certain level of fear, and understanding that you’re not in control of

the situation. When we work with the Brown students, we’ve been really trying to encourage them to go to

union meetings and to figure out easy ways to talk with workers. It’s an easy thing to do, but there’s a level of

anxiety there that only experience can overcome.

People often think of Living Wage campaigns as focu sed solely on increasing worker wages and

benefits. But many activists picture the Living Wag e campaigns as part of a much larger struggle.

What’s a successful Living Wage campaign to you?

Our Living Wage campaign means nothing if two things don’t happen: number one, we do a successful job of

figuring out ways to change the debate about economic development in our city and our state. For us, this

means going into community centers, going into church parish basement halls, doing bilingual workshops over

and over again about what bottom-up economic development is and what it means. This means going through

the basics, looking at how cities are structured, where the revenue comes from and how the revenue’s

distributed, and very basically going through this stuff and saying “we can think about this in different ways.” If

we’re not able to change minds, and change the way the debate is shaped around economics, we will have

failed the Living Wage campaign even if it passes.

Second, the campaign is useless and nothing more than a shadow of my ego or someone else’s glory if we

don’t shift the power grid like I was saying earlier. We have two workers in our campaign who are now running

for political office, and, of two more people who have been active in the campaign, one’s running for Senate

and one’s running for City Council. I can give you concrete examples of how we’re changing the way

leadership happens in the state by putting a bus monitor on the radio or putting a teacher’s assistant on the



37

nightly news. Now they are the new Latino leaders, when previously the Latino leader was the corporate

person from Fleet Bank, Rhode Island.

We’re trying to create and change who the leaders are. But in the process, the way the power grid changes is

when we bring 200 workers to city hall and they realize that city hall is messed up. Then they realize what’s the

next step: “Okay, you run for office.” Elections don’t always change the power grid, but people understanding

how city politics work and taking shape of the issue for themselves will.

So those are the two things. If we’re not able to change the debate on economic development in the state, and

if we haven’t built power for low-wage workers, changing the way low-wage workers relate to their union, the

way they relate to their communities, and the way they relate to their supposed leaders, then we will have

failed. But I think, on both of those, we’ve done a pretty good job overall.

The Brown activists I’ve interviewed have mixed fee lings about the campus campaign. At the same

time, support and enthusiasm for the city campaign has grown. How have the students contributed to

the city campaign?

Brown activists have done a number of things for the city campaign: first and foremost, they always bring

students to events, which is always nice.

There are a couple stories: number one, they produced a comic for our kick-off for our living wage campaign.

The comic was put into the hands of the electrical workers’ union. The comic basically implied that the trade

unions were racist, and so that comic basically got one of our closest allies in the trades to drop out of Jobs

With Justice and drop out of the Living Wage Campaign. So that was a harmful effect the SLA had on our

campaign.

One our most important votes on the City Council is from the area of town that Brown University sits in and a

lot of the students live in. So we’ve asked them over the last year to really dedicate themselves to building a

strong committee and building up strong relationships (good ally organizing) with businesses, with churches,

with community groups, and with residents that live around Brown. They’ve been disappointing in a lot of ways

in making promises, and when not being able to fulfill those promises, not saying “we can’t do it.” We invested

a lot of our coalition time in trying to build relationships with students that would do that.



38

However, it’s coming around again: in the last couple of months they’ve been doing a lot more work. I think

they’ve done a good job in working on winning their particular vote. It’s a simple question where we approach

them and say, “We need you to win one vote for us, and it’s where you live. You can do it. Here’s a list of three

hundred people in that ward you can talk to.”

Academic economic theory and research has a very mi xed record with activists I’ve talked to. How do

you approach economic arguments in the Living Wage activism you do?

When I was a student at Brown, I tried taking so many economics classes, and I ended up taking zero. I

actually went through weeks and weeks of these classes, and then just stopped. Part of it is that you’re

learning a poisonous language, and I was worried about it poisoning me because the system is structurally

messed up. But I also think I haven’t done a good enough job of examining (and I think I have now, because of

this Living Wage campaign) how one develops different economic development models. Now I can sit in a

room with the city’s finance director, the mayor, the director of administration, and the head of the economic

policy council and can run them into the ground. The language they speak is now the language I know and can

deal with.

How do you deal with anti-Living Wage groups, such as the Employment Policies Institute? Groups

such as these get funding from vested interests, su ch as the restaurant industry. How do you

compete?

It’s not about whether our propaganda’s better than the other side’s—we have to show that it works. If it

doesn’t work, we need to think of something else, and if it doesn’t work because we aren’t enforcing it, that’s

not good enough. If we think Living Wage ordinances are really going to solve the problems of low-wage work,

temp work, privatization, the lack of a middle-class in our cities, we have to show that it is doing that. I think

ultimately, in terms of who’s on what side in this nation, we have to be able to give concrete examples of

stories. We’re not going to win the fake numbers war. We’re going to win it because we’re actually winning it.

We think that we have more truth than they do. We’re trying to win a progressive proposal in a moderate (if

that) city government.

Obviously, my identity is shaped by the work I do as an organizer. If three years down the line we pass this

thing and it’s not working, I’d be the first one to say let’s do something different. If we don’t, then what’s the

point? If we’re not being honest with ourselves, it’s going to catch up with us. I do think it’s a partisan battlefield



39

and people are wearing flags and making state flowers out of their campaigns, but I think it’s going to catch up

with you at some point if you’re not falling on the right side of the issue.

Maybe that’s why I don’t like politics, or political elections, or working on campaigns: it is about the win. I don’t

think it’s about winning. One of the legacies of Martin Luther King, Jr. was that, above anything else, he was a

great organization builder. He was a tremendous organization builder. He built breadth and width in the

organization, from SCLC to SNCC. I think he was almost there, but it shows you his inability to really do that,

because when he died, they died.

The point is that Living Wage campaigns are about a different type of infrastructure building that activists and

community organizers forgot over the last thirty years. They’ve forgotten how to do it. And Living Wage

campaigns are an attempt to rebuild that infrastructure that’s been lost.


I think students have the ability to be amazing organizers in four ways.

The first way is, since they are at centers of knowledge production, to utilize their location. For instance: we

have to produce newspapers, fliers, research reports, and analyses—all different kinds of “sit at a computer for

a couple of hours and hammer out a fact sheet.” Students can do this. They have access to high-speed

computers, they have access to the internet, to big libraries—they can do this type of research for campaigns

such as ours.

The second thing is, since again the universities are the center of knowledge production, students have the

capacity to hold public forums, workshops, teach-ins, and anything else they can do to expose the issue and

try to find the truth about the issue. We keep pushing the Brown Student-Labor Alliance to do public forums, to

bring in some academics, some activists, the Chamber of Commerce representatives, and host a debate. We

keep pushing them to use the university as a tool to get at the heart of the issue.

The third thing that student activists and student activism could contribute to a living wage campaign is the

ability to energize and bring a vitality. The workers in our campaign are mostly bus monitors, teacher’s

assistants, and bus drivers. And these are mostly 33-50 year old Dominican, Bolivian, Haitian, and Liberian

low-wage immigrant workers. They’re working two jobs, and when we have a meeting and stuff, students have



40

the ability to make puppets, drums, and a real youthfulness to meetings. I think that is really, really powerful.

The success of a campaign can turn on the energy in a room where you have a meeting.

The fourth thing is utilizing, again, the location of where students are, which means utilizing the power of their

university and organizing inside their university. A large part of what, in the past year, I’ve tried to encourage

among the campuses we work with (which is Brown University, Providence College, Rhode Island College, and

the University of Rhode Island) is building multi-issue or multi-racial coalitions on campus. How do you as a

student-labor alliance (you’re all white kids) talk to other student groups who are on campus around this issue?

Because, you know what, when you graduate you’re going to be like me and you’re going to have to be doing

the same thing. You might as well start now.

Utilize the power of the corporations. The university is a corporation in the sense that it tries to influence sweat-

shop policies and living wage policies on campus. What happened at Harvard is a key way to utilize the power

of your university to influence other campaigns. In fact, the effect of the Harvard Living Wage campaign was to

make the living wage issue on everyone’s mind in Providence—that helps us. That helps us tremendously.

Understand that a lot of students have fathers and mothers who are corporate executives. I think it is just a

simple matter of talking to them, saying, “I want to talk to you tonight. I’m learning about this, the living wage

campaign means this, this, and this, and this is why it’s important.” Put a lot of time into it and understand that

there’s a lot of political and economic power of parents at Brown University.

The difference between an advocate and an organizer is that an advocate wants to win, and an organizer

wants to build. It’s not about winning a Living Wage ordinance, it’s about building a coalition, and it’s about

building one that has power. What we’ve done is create a coalition of over 200 small businesses, community

groups, ministers, and many other groups. We had to do the painful, painful work of organizing one person by

one person.

It is less about wages and it’s more about putting a coalition in place so that three years from now we can raise

the Living Wage even higher. If we win this in Providence, we will take it to the state level. And what do we

need to do at the state level? We have to build coalitions.

For me, it’s a glorious victory when we can have our coalition meetings and everyone shows up and there’s a

sense of camaraderie, togetherness, solidarity, and all this other stuff. For me, that’s the primary goal of the

Jobs With Justice coalition: to rebuild the movement. That’s the painful work of organizing.



41

Kae Kalwaic

Assistant Administrator and Labor Activist at Swarthmore College

Questions:

How did the living wage become an important issue on campus?

What do students learn from working on the living wage campaign?

Do you have any other advice for students working on campaigns elsewhere?

You’ve worked for many years at Swarthmore. How did the Living Wage, in just the last few years,

become an important issue on campus?

The issues have always been there; it is just a matter of staff being able to express themselves, to come

forward and say what they are thinking and having a unity to do that. There are no models here for staff to

come together on behalf of their own interests. There’s no union to go to. There is just nothing there.

I think the one huge issue that has confronted people, including myself, when they become involved in the

campaign, is that the issues are so complicated. It is so complicated. It has many variations on a theme that

keep confusing and muddying the waters constantly. I think that the muddying of the waters drives some

students away, but only a few, because there has been lots of student support. But that muddying of the

waters makes this issue sometimes unclear to people about what’s gong on. And when you have people of

authority also muddying the waters, it is like you are not able to find yourself anywhere in the stream. You are

just kind of washed along with the current and you don’t know where you are going. I think that is one of the

difficulties of running a campaign is that it is just so complicated. Then you mix in human emotions and human

foibles, and fear (mix in a good portion of fear), and—wow.

In the beginning, it was very simple to get a living wage. When we first started a campaign, the bottom wage

on the published salary schedule was the minimum-wage. That’s what we were starting with at the bottom

rungs of the ladder. We looked at that and said, “How could anybody live on that wage?” So we did a lot of

investigating to find out to whom we pay five dollars an hour, six dollars an hour, seven dollars an hour. What

are we paying our workers? So that took a lot of investigation and we found out pretty much where people are

on the scales. We did our research with the Women’s Alternative Group’s figures, as well as with what the

Economic Policy Institute published. What we found was it took $9.19/hour for an individual to live just above

the poverty line with no dependents-- and that’s just above the poverty line.



42

What do the students learn from the Living Wage Cam paign?

That has always been my primary objective in all this: to open students' eyes to what is really happening at the

place they go to school; to see what is really there, not what you see on the surface, but what is really there.

The other important thing is that I hope they learned that this is their issue too. It doesn’t just belong to staff,

because someday the students are going to be out in the workplace too. I hope that they can draw on what

they saw here and apply it to wherever they go. I hope that they have some skills to start with, and they can

understand why certain things in their workplace are happening certain ways. They won’t be starting from

scratch, they’ll already know about how the system works. It’s that quotation about one’s liberation being tied to

mine.

This also brings up why we included "democracy" in our organization’s name ("Living Wage and Democracy

Campaign"). What would be really revolutionary would be if the institution, Swarthmore College, were

democratic, rather than in the CEO or top-down management model. That’s the one thing that the institution

will get in trouble with in terms of what is learned in theory, and what is actually practiced. What is practiced in

business and in these institutions is basically a top-down hierarchical form. It doesn’t model democracy in any

shape or form. It gives the appearance of democracy because there are some meetings. Don’t take it from me;

just interview anybody who’s been at meetings: they’ll say, “We met a lot, but I’m not sure what the outcome

was.”

One of the things we did in our investigation was to find out how decisions were made. They’re basically made

by the board and the president. He takes all these things into consideration, but basically it rests with his

decision and the board. Basically, there is no democracy. To me, that would be the ideal: a democratic

workplace, where people make decisions about their job, without the hierarchy of management.

Do you have any advice for the students working on Living Wage campaigns elsewhere?

I think the main lesson is that it is not fighting for the figures. It is fighting for greater fairness and equality in our

wage structure, and truly valuing the contribution of every worker.

The other lesson I’ve learned is that the only way you’re going to get a living wage is not through any kind of

concessions from the administration, but through the exertion of your own power or influence. Don’t expect it to

be handed down as a gift. You have to get out there, you’ve got to agitate, you’ve got to put it on the table, and



43

you’ve got to advocate for yourself. A lot of what we do in this campaign is educating, and that takes a long

time. It is true democracy, because you are trying to educate people about what their rights are, about what

you can do, and about what you can do when you go out there. I don’t know if there’s any venue in any of the

educational institutions that says, “Okay, how are you going to go out and fight for your rights?”

The university only changes when people demand their rights, and do so in a way that puts it out there for

public attention. When people come forward for their rights publicly, that’s when the institution realizes that

something’s going on here, and that they better address it.



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Lawrence Katz

Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard University

Questions:

Why did the students launch the campaign at Harvard?

If not a living wage, what should the goal of the living wage campaigns be?

What resulted from the committee formed to investigate labor on campus?

Were the tactics of the students effective from your view?

How can students separate objective from biased economic research?

Do you have any other advice for student activists?

Note: Economics professor Lawrence Katz opposed the living wage policy at Harvard. Professor Katz is included here because he

chaired the committee formed to investigate the employment practices of Harvard University (the so-called "Katz Committee"). The

report issued by the committee on Harvard's practices is available here: The HCECP (Katz) Report.

Why did the students launch the Living Wage campaig n at Harvard? What were the goals of the

campaign, and what do you think of them?

It’s very difficult to define what is a fair or living wage. One of the things you see when you go through it is that

every group has a different definition of what it is. I think, in some sense, in situations that we saw at Harvard

where wages are sort of determined by collective bargaining inside Harvard, clearly there is no one market

wage. There is outside, opportunity market wages, and there’s then some range of indeterminacy.

One can view the Living Wage as an attempt to raise the bargaining power of the unions, but I think there are

important differences. We as a society decided that workers have the right to collectively bargain, and there

are certain rules of the game in which they have that ability to bargain with an employer. If they are able to get

a wage above the outside market level, we consider that legitimate.

The issue here is some of that the United States has introduced, since the passage of the National Labor

Relations Acts in 1935, many strategies of keeping out unions, and of getting around unions contracts through

the use of out-sourcing. In the case of Harvard, the situation here was unionized house workers, who had

traditionally earned wages through bargaining, above or below the common denominator outside.


http://www.livingwagestories.org/Files/hcecp_final_report.pdf


45

Harvard was following modern management strategies of being able to use out-sourcing to find, in the case of

security guards, non-union workers and, in the case of janitors, essentially a very weak union that had a

leadership that is actually in jail now to lower the wages. I think putting pressure on parties to follow the rules of

collective bargaining as probably the intent of the law of 1935 was, although not the actual implementation, a

very reasonable approach.

I am much more uncomfortable with some of the Living Wage rhetoric that everybody ought to be paid a wage

that is required to live in their community. That sounds extremely reasonable from the point of view of a

government intervening-- and that’s exactly what the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) does, which I think has

been the major social policy advance in the U.S. in the last twenty years. It basically says different family

structures need different incomes, so we let the labor market pay out and get a reasonable market wage (with

a minimum wage holding at the bottom) and then we add additional income to families with greater needs.

You’ve suggested that a blanket Living Wage policy for the Cambridge community should not be the

goal of the Living Wage campaign. What should be th e goal, in your view, of Living Wage campaigns?

I would focus much more on strengthening collective bargaining, improving the minimum wage at the federal

and state level, and expanding the EITC at federal and state level. I think Living Wage campaigns are very

good at forcing particular employers to strengthen collective bargaining. They are symbols that unions can take

on to say, “If you don’t treat us respectfully and well in collective bargaining, here’s a film of what happened at

Harvard. Look what we’re going to do to you in terms of bad publicity.”

But I worry about it as a stance. We don’t want to chop up the economy and let a few salient, big employers

pay higher wages because they are visible and you can have a campaign against them, but everyone else gets

left behind because we spend all our energy on Living Wage campaigns. If progressive individuals spend all

their energy on that and the national minimum wage erodes and the national EITC erodes, that’s not going to

do much good for workers on average. Workers who get a job at Harvard or for a local government will do fine,

but the vast majority of workers are not going to be employed there. If those wages grow too far from the rest

of the market, you also have the problem that they will change the mix of workers. You’ll think you’re helping

disadvantaged minority individuals, but if Harvard pays a wage extremely above the outside market, it’s going

to pick and choose its employees, and it will reflect the standard discriminatory preferences.

The extent you view this as a symbol that can transfer to other union settings, it’s good. The extent you that

you believe literally “we’re just going to hit up big vulnerable employers who are going to cave to publicity,” it is



46

a worrisome trend. It uses up a lot of energy that would be better used on focusing on issues like the minimum

wage and the EITC. Shifts in the EITC affect around twenty million households; hitting up on Harvard and a

few other big employers affects a few thousand workers.

In order to end the student sit-in, the university agreed to freeze out-sourcing and form a committee t o

investigate wages and employment on campus. Many s tudents have told me that committees are

simply a way for universities to side-track student s. What, if anything did the committee contribute

towards the goals of the students?

The stated goal of the activists was for the university to adopt a Living Wage policy. The university certainly

didn’t choose to do that. I think the student activists were rightfully concerned with another committee, because

there had already been a previous committee, but I think the negotiated settlement between the administration

and the students set up a committee that was much broader than the previous one. It also had a number of

commitments of the university to re-open collective bargaining agreements.

In the process, the committee learned a lot of facts. I think the student activism was quite good at pointing out

issues that were not getting attention, and I think the students on the committee learned a lot and were quite

constructive. The students were very good at being intermediaries for the concerns of the workers.

I think the settlement is well above what the students were actually demanding in their initial sit-in. They were

asking for a $10.25 Cambridge Living Wage level, and the university just settled for $11.35 to $13 (estimate),

and that’s going to go up to $15.00. In fact, the big problem wasn’t going to be solved by a Living Wage per se-

- those wages are actually pretty low. The parity wage policy we came up with really got at the core of the

problem: out-sourcing and using out-sourcing to drive down wages. In contrast, functioning collective

bargaining is seen in the latest agreement.

What do you think about the tactics used by the Liv ing Wage campaign at Harvard? Were the tactics

effective from your point of view?

I think the students were quite good at using civil disobedience to get attention, and quite good at setting forth

a set of issues that a more deliberative process dealt with.

I think some of them have gotten a little out of hand. It’s a good rallying cry to demonize the opposition, but it

doesn’t lead to necessarily the best substantive policy choices. They had good ideals and good instincts about



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what was wrong, but it’s quite understandable that it was often hard to turn that into practical suggestions. That

is not a big criticism.

I think the biggest problem is if you’ve had a successful campaign, how do you transition to being a

constructive party for an ongoing relationship? How do you move on to another issue, rather than just move

the goal posts?

I think, in fact, the students who were most successful in having influence in the committee, as in all these

processes, are not the ones who shout slogans the loudest, but were actually the ones who could engage in

what the data were. There were a lot of different students: some of them were quite serious and quite

thoughtful on those issues, and some spent too much time demonizing the opposition. I thought those students

had much less influence, because whatever you think of the Harvard administration, you can only say these

people are evil so many times. If they make a concession, taking nothing on trust is going too far-- so that part

lost credibility. Students need to keep their sights on the moral issues, but also be willing to talk about the

practical analysis.

It’s difficult to sift through the economic data ab out minimum wages and living wages, especially when

so much research is funded by commercial enterprise s interested in keeping wages low. How can

interested students or activists separate the good research from the bad?

There’s a bunch of junk out there. I think one of the really important aspects, for example, of the committee

was that there was an attempt to seriously look at the evidence and not just have slogans or pull up a think

tank. In fact, even many of the student Living Wage activists saw that some of the stuff coming out of the

supposed leading characters of the Living Wage movement didn’t have a lot of substance behind it. Someone

like Alan Krueger, who does very rigorous work, had a lot more influence on the process. He’s done very

serious work on these processes, versus people from advocacy groups, who you just went into the logic of

what they were doing and a lot of it didn’t hold up.

If you want to be a serious activist who is taken seriously and thinks objectively, I think there is a case for

seriously learning some statistics. To be an active citizen, there are some fundamental things one has to know

about statistical inference, about data, understanding how the data’s put together, and a little bit of economic

and other social science theory. I think having more training, better knowledge, and not being afraid of

numbers and getting dirty with the data is quite important-- otherwise you will be driven by popular press

interpretations. I think this is true whether you are an activist or a journalist: you can say all economists are evil



48

and that statistics can lie, you’re never going to be able to do a good job unless you can actually understand

and think about the data.

Do you have any other advice for the students worki ng on Living Wage campaigns elsewhere?

Advice number one is do your homework. The more knowledgeable one is about the actual facts of what

happened the better. How do wages at this institution compare to other places? What are the trends in the

labor market? What’s the history? In the initial stages, you can do a bit of sort of chanting. There are different

roles. But I think it's important to do one’s homework, be engaged in the hard work of coming up with a

constructive solution, and, importantly, to know when to declare victory.

If you make progress, there’s a part where you need to move on to other issues, or you need to set up some

institutional way of dealing with more collaborative activity. And it may not be that the same people are good at

all these things: it is not clear that the best rabble-rousers are going to be the best at implementing plans, and

that’s important. Once one has a victory at one place, think about how to channel it to others. Fighting the last

war continuously is probably not the right strategy.



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Jen Kern

Director of the Living Wage Resource Center at ACORN

Questions:

Are unions necessary for a successful student living wage campaign?

How can students help support the campus staff unions?

What is the role of economic research in promoting the living wage?

What is the effect of living wage campaigns on the students involved in them?

Do you have any other advice for students?

At Swarthmore College, the students were having tro uble organizing a successful living wage

campaign without an on-campus union. Are unions nec essary for a successful student Living Wage

campaign?

More generally, how do I envision the relationship between the living wage and unions? I think that ACORN's

position is clear: no ordinance or administrative policy of a college campus will ever replace having an

organized union. A union is the best way to bargain for better working conditions and protect those working

conditions. Without that, there is no guarantee: the administration can change their policy next year. We

believe that to the extent that the living wage campaigns in cities and on campuses can be directly connected

to organizing, that makes them more successful. That’s what we’re going for.

We’re an organizing-focused organization. We don’t just think poor people should get programs, we think they

should join ACORN and get a collective voice to contest for power for their own community—and the same on

campuses. I’m actually quite encouraged by the trend on campuses of connecting their living wage fights to

either starting a union where it doesn’t exist, or something independent. Like in Knoxville, TN, campus workers

started an independent union through their involvement in the living wage campaign. Originally, they were not

affiliated with any AFL-CIO union, but they began to function as a union. The students and citywide living wage

campaign supported them, but the workers actually organized into their own union on campus.

One reason that students are an effective conduit in the absence of campus unions is because workers are

afraid of getting fired. They are afraid of speaking out because they could be punished on the job or lose their

jobs completely. Students may speak out on behalf of workers without the same fear of retaliation. Students

can help protect workers from the constant fear of retaliation by fighting for a union. Workers with strong union



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representation and a good contract that says they can’t be fired for speaking out can speak for themselves,

and are no longer dependent on transient students for their voice.

A good way for students to think about their role is that, “I’m not going to be here forever. I’m graduating in four

years, and I’m not the be-all, end-all savior of the workers. I’m here to help build a permanent organization that

workers can use to improve and protect their working conditions in the future.”

How can students help to support the worker unions on campus?

In some cases, the students are helping build new unions. But once you have a union, you have to have a

contract—and a contract isn’t automatically golden. The contract is only as good as what you organize for and

what you negotiate for. The strength of a student body supporting higher wages is to help unions to win better

contracts.

Look at Harvard: half of those workers were organized workers already. When their contracts were up, that’s

when the Harvard Living Wage Campaign thought, "Okay, this is something we can do. We can help build

support for a better contract, one which more equitably reflects what the endowment allows.’ Student living

wage campaigns can both support new organizing drives and back the workers to win better contracts.

The student role will differ across campuses: in some places there aren’t workers involved in these

campaigns—let’s be totally honest. There are some campaigns where it’s just students saying “We want a

living wage for the people who clean up after us.” There’s no union interested in organizing, and there’s no talk

of organizing, and the workers aren’t coming to meetings. That’s not ideal, but in some places, the campaigns

begin because students know that it’s the right thing to do. The lasting effects of this model are unknown—

what if everyone graduates and there’s still no union?—though it does help draw attention to the critical issue

of poverty work on campus.

The students who are thinking in a sophisticated way about this are thinking “We need to find a long-term,

worker-based solution to low wages and a lack of power on the jobs,” and that’s why they’re thinking unions. It

can’t happen everywhere. I’m not suggesting that living wage campaigns are useless unless they result in wall

to wall unionization. But I think it means that you must build a student labor action or living wage group that

comes back year after year and provides some continuity to the issue of worker support. You’re always going

to have some younger kids and they should be cultivated as leaders.



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The students’ challenge is to make sure, to the extent that they can, that they’re talking to workers,

understanding their demands, and taking those demands as students to the administration and saying, “Our

job is to watch over you, and as far as we can tell these workers aren’t getting what they should get.” That’s

another model. If unionization is not a possibility now, it might be in two years, when some local gets

interested. Students can still build support for improving the conditions of people on campus in the meantime.

Most of the activists I’ve talked to seem skeptical about using or relying on research (especially

economic research) to win Living Wage campaigns. Wh y are they skeptical? What are the limits of

research in your view?

The limits are, in one sentence: You don’t win a living wage campaign because you are “right." That’s not why

you win. You win because you brought enough pressure to bear on the people who can make the decision,

people who can change their behavior and give you what you want. You win because you’ve convinced your

target that it will be more painful for them not to do what you want them to do than it will be to do it.

Sometimes it helps to have a study that says, “hey, this isn’t going to bust the bank” or whatever. But, chances

are, they know that already, but they just don’t want to give it up. What makes them give it up isn’t the study

that says “give it up.”

Having said that, research can be useful. One, the press likes to hear about studies and numbers and etc.

Two, the administration likes to sit down across tables and talk about numbers, especially in these campuses.

They get these students into "task forces", and then they know they can hammer them because the

administration finance people know much more about the campuses finances then the students do. Then it

becomes just a game of catch-up for the students, for the students to pick the right number and try to

understand the big picture.

I think the useful parts of research are the research reports that help demonstrate that there is a problem, such

as a survey to find out how many workers make less than living wage. For instance, at Brown University

students went and recorded testimony from workers, and then walked around and played the tapes from a

huge boom box. It was called “I Work For Brown.” The low wage workers would start by saying, “I work for

Brown and ...” and then they would tell their story. That’s campaign research. That's research that you do to

move your campaign forward. It’s not a study for the sake of having better numbers than the administration.



52

I’m not trying to write off the important contributions of folks like the Economic Policy Institute. It’s useful to

have numbers and white papers. The larger national living wage movement (outside of colleges and

universities) has really benefited from having a handful of studies that report on the economic impact of living

wage laws that have already passed and can debunk some of the opposition’s arguments. It’s useful just

because of course you get this argument, “Oh look, contract costs are going to go through the roof, people are

going to lose their jobs, and it is nice to be able to say, “We know they’re not, but here’s something that

actually shows that they didn’t.” But that in itself ain’t going to win a campaign.

The other problem with getting sucked into the research trap is that it allows you to be taken off message. It

forces you to buy into the fact that research may “prove” that a living wage policy is unnecessary or impossible.

We don’t want to concede that – ever. We have seen the results of getting out there and repeating our simple

message a million times in a row: if you work, you shouldn’t be poor. It actually works. I think that when people

sit back and say, “There’s another side to the story,” it does the campaign a disservice.

I would argue that in an organizing campaign, there’s actually not another side, though there may be nuances.

No living wage victory is perfect: we almost never get everything we initially demanded. But we would never

have gotten anything unless we were hell-bent in our belief that the distribution of wealth and power in our

society is completely shameful. There is too much power on the other side to allow that there is another way to

look at it.

There is no other side of the story. Stanford has enough money to pay its people a living wage. Period. There’s

sort of no discussion after that. They’re pretending that they don’t have other money, and that’s absolutely not

true. To the extent that students actually engage in looking through the books, it takes them away from what

they just know to be true: that somebody who wakes up everyday, cleans up after them, gives them food, cuts

the grass, and makes sure that the campus machines are all working does not deserve to go home with less

money than they need to support themselves.

That’s the thing: I think the best attitude for organizers is that there is no other side of the story. Of course, you

should have a couple of students who are the ones who are going to look at some of the books and try to

discern what the lies are and what may be truth-- such as "maybe we need to phase this in because the

budget," etc. But the overall approach has to be "there is no other side of the story."



53

How do the Living Wage campaigns affect the student s involved in them? Many students have

described their experience as more educational than their classes. Others have called it

“transformative." What do you see happening to the s tudents?

Living wage campaigns are making people want to do organizing, making people want to work for a union, and

explore what it’s like to work for ACORN. Living wage campaigns are making people want go out into

neighborhoods, knock on doors, talk to the actual people themselves to find out what they want to do, and then

organize them to do that. I think the best thing that you can do is continue doing campus organizing that’s as

in-your-face as you can, so that one night you have to choose between making your turn-out calls for the rally

or do your paper, and you actually chose to do the turn-out calls for the rally.

I think these living wage campaigns on campus should be incubators for people who are committed to careers

in organizing. Of course, there are also people who are going to be lawyers, and maybe legal services lawyers

who could be helpful in our campaigns. There are going to be economics majors who turn into economists who

do studies about how living wages help workers, business, communities. And that’s great; we need those

people.

But we need many more people who are just going to throw down, go talk to workers, sign workers up, get the

union dues coming in the door, get the community organization dues coming in the door, and build our

membership so that we can march on bigger and bigger targets and have more and more influence. The most

important project, as a progressive, is to do real organizing of a mass-base constituency of low-income people-

- whether in their workplace through unions, or in their neighborhoods through a community organization.

That’s where there’s not enough staff.


This could be more than just what you’re doing in college—this could be your life. The problems that you’re

addressing now have been around for years, they are going to be around for years, and the employee pool for

them is way too low. You need to get into this, and we need to build staff for the movement. Make activism

your life. Don’t treat it as something you’re doing before you go on to law school.

Students are actually gaining great skills, and they are smart. I’m completely impressed by these student

organizers. They have a good set of instincts, but they can be honed if they do Union Summer, or train at the



54

AFL-CIO organizing institute, or they come to work for ACORN. Wait until you see what you can do. It’s the

most rewarding job you could have.


55

Anna Mumford

Student Activist at Stanford University

Questions:

How did you first become involved in labor activism?

What was the result of the campaign at the Stanford Hospital?

What led up to the hunger strike in the Spring of 2002?

What do you see as the larger goals and benefits of the living wage campaign?

How did the campaign work with ethnic student groups on campus?

How do you use economic arguments in your campaign?

Where do you think students' power comes from in campaigns?

What advice do you have for other students?

Note: The report on low-wage employment at Stanford issued by the Presidential Committee on Workplace Policies and Practices is

available here.

You've been involved in labor activism for nearly y our entire time at Stanford. How did you first

become involved?

When I was a freshman, I started talking to workers in the dining hall and was shocked by some of the things I

heard. Some of them were my age and had kids, trying to support themselves. They had wanted to go to

school but couldn't because they had to work. And they had to work a lot because the wages were so low.

I felt really, really uncomfortable when I first got to Stanford having people serve me and clean up after me.

That was never something I had had before, and I felt a very weird power dynamic. I didn't like it. So I tried to

get around that by getting to know people.

Olympia, where I'm from, is a very white town. But it is also a sort of middle class or lower-middle class

community, so there isn't a lot of income inequality. You don't see the racial hierarchy, power, wealth, and all

that. You're not exposed to that.

Also, I had just come right from working in a very rural community in the Dominican Republic. I saw the wealth

and inequity here in Palo Alto as a sort of a continuation of the situation there. I felt like my alliances were with

the people who were serving me, rather than with the school.



http://www.livingwagestories.org/Files/Report_Final.pdf


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One of the major labor campaigns was aimed at stopp ing subcontracting at Stanford Hospital. What

was the problem, and what did the campaign do?

In 2001, Stanford Hospital administration was trying to subcontract housecleaning jobs that were formerly

union positions. The hospital had opened up new satellite buildings around the hospital and were trying to

switch those jobs over to subcontractor workers. It was a huge cut in wages. The subcontracted workers would

be earning about $7 an hour with no benefits. Union wages started at at least $12, plus benefits.

The union realized, "Oh my god, this is the start of a trend. They are going to try to subcontract all this work

out." We started talking to the union, and they suggested we talk to the administration of the hospital. The

administration wouldn't talk to us—they just kind of blew us off.

So in the Fall of 2001, we did a protest action at the Stanford hospital about the subcontracting policies. I was

one of the six protestors who were arrested and dragged off. At that point, I realized Stanford didn't give a

damn about 99% of the people here, including students. It was all about maintaining its sort of corporate

image.

After the arrests, which got a lot of attention and a lot of media, President Hennessey (who had previously

refused to meet with us over the issue) agreed to a meeting. He came out with a proposed "living wage" policy,

but we quickly realized that the proposal wasn't right. Basically, it excluded everyone that it could possibly have

covered. We still haven't found a single worker that it would have covered.

We continued to pressure the university for a code of conduct. We confronted President Hennessey in an

ASSU meeting, wearing black holding signs. It really sort of freaked people out, and we got a lot of negative

backlash at that point from the general community of Stanford people. At that point, we were realizing that we

needed to just do more educational outreach on campus to get more general support, because we were

getting nasty letters written about us in The Stanford Daily, saying that it was a bunch of crazy wacko students.

It also made us sort of realize our own power and the power of SLAC [Student-Labor Action Committee]. It was

the first big action that we had done on our own, and it made us realize that we could start moving things-if we

were organized enough and radical enough to make things happen.



57

How closely did you work with the unions during the hospital campaign? I know there has been a lot of

tension between unions and students at other school s. What's your view on the relationship?

During the Stanford Hospital campaign, I don't think we were working too closely with the unions. It was more

that we had heard about this from the unions, and then took our own initiative and came up with our own plan

of how we were going to proceed.

It's interesting. For awhile, I really believed unions were the solution to everything. If you could have a more

powerful union, everything would be better. And I still believe that to a degree, but I've also become a lot more

jaded about what unions are actually capable of doing. I've seen how the lack of leadership, disorganization,

and infighting that goes on in a lot of unions keeps those unions from doing what they really should be doing. It

keeps them from achieving the goals they should be.

In the Spring of 2002, the Stanford Labor Action Co mmittee [SLAC] began a hunger strike to protest

labor policies at Stanford. How did that come about ?

What lead up to the hunger strike was just this continuing frustration that it wasn't going anywhere—and a

bunch of people were graduating and leaving the whole group.

The idea first came up right before Christmas, the year before, when the hospital workers were going on strike

for a day. We talked about that if the workers didn't get a contract we might go on a hunger strike. It just kind of

got tossed around. We talked about occupation and stuff, but after the administration's response to our Main

Quad protest, we knew that they would be likely to kick students out of school. People wanted to graduate.

Plus, fasting was sort of a higher pass. You can't criticize someone who is doing this very non-violent thing,

while it is easy to criticize someone that's doing something a little more violent.

What the hunger strike successful? Do you think, in retrospect, that it was a good idea?

We won some of our smaller demands. One of the workers, Victoria Vega, had been fired from Manpower for

speaking up and wanting a job. She got a permanent job out of the hunger strike-that was one of our demands.

Getting the committee created was also a step forward. Before, the administration always had refused to have

a place where students, workers, faculty and staff were all in the same room talking about wages and hiring

policies. So that was good.



58

But looking back it now, I have some regrets that we didn't hold out longer and push a bit harder. We should

have demanded the specifics of what the committee was going to look at, who was going to decide who was

on the committee, how the meetings were going to be run, how the recommendations were going to be

implemented, and so on. Hunger strikers weren't thinking about all of that, since they're basically not thinking

about anything. We didn't have the experience they had. The administration had lawyers and other people who

knew exactly how to talk their way out of anything.

I am glad that we did it, and it was a good step. It was probably the most defining experience of my life,

personally and spiritually.

The hunger strike led to the formation of a committ ee. Most students have told me that committees are

usually a waste of time. What was the committee at Stanford like? What were the results of it?

Basically, because of the hunger strike the administration agreed to form a committee that was going to look at

the issues in our code of conduct.

The committee finally met a quarter after they were supposed to have started meeting. There was no one from

SLAC represented on it, there was no low-wage workers represented on it. While four out of the five

undergraduate students who applied to be on the committee and were nominated were from SLAC, they

picked the one person who wasn't from SLAC. In addition, they initially refused to have the union

representative that the union chose to be on it. Also, the non-union workers on the committee were secretaries

and administrative assistants-higher up people and not low-wage workers.

As far as the report the committee issued, there are good parts and there are bad parts. The committee wasn't

able to look at the issues of subcontracting at all, because they didn't have the data on it. But that is exactly

where most of the problems are with low-wage workers. So one of their recommendations is that the university

should start collecting that data.

For temporary workers, the committee had some good recommendations. They recommended wage parity

between temporary workers with fulltime permanent workers, which is huge—if it gets implemented. They also

recommended English Second Language programs for low-wage workers.



59

The committee also recommended union neutrality in union organizing campaigns, but not fully. Union

neutrality means that the university wouldn't actively campaign against unions that are trying to organize

workers. That's not illegal. There are certain things they are not supposed to do, like offer to raise people's

wages if they agree not to vote for the union. But they can bring people into a meeting and say, "Unions are a

bad thing, and if you vote for the union, that's bad."

They also non-unanimously recommended a living wage. I think a lot of people on the committee would

recommend one, but not all.

Did the committee find out things that students cou ldn't about hiring practices and wages on campus?

It's pretty easy to show the wage and benefit differences between unionized and non-unionized workers. It's

not with the directly hired workers that the problem is--it's with the subcontracted workers.

Not even the university has information on subcontracted workers. It's really, really hard to get information on

them. We can get personal stories from people saying they’re earning this much, but we don't know how many

subcontracted janitors there are. That is not information that we are able to get.

These are the sort of issues the committee was supposed to be gathering, but they failed to do so. It's a

problem, and a big problem. Not knowing how many subcontracted workers there were meant not knowing

how much proposed changes would cost.

But the debate with the administration was less about the current wages of employees, and more about

whether higher wages were a good thing or not. The administration has just been saying they do not think

paying people a certain wage is a problem. But they didn't deny they were paying those wages.

Living wage campaigns are usually about a lot more than just raising wage levels. They are also about

power, race relations, and fairness. What's your ta ke on the larger goals and benefits of living wage

campaigns?

If people are able to get unionized, then people are more able to advocate for themselves. Anything that leads

to people working collectively is a good thing. I think living wage campaigns bring workers together,

collectively, to fight for something. And it brings students together as well—which is important, since there are

so many obstacles to student organizing.



60

I think that for people who get really involved, it does affect the way they think about things and do things in

their lives. Even if those people go off and become investments bankers or whatever, they will be cognizant of

janitors in their building and how much they are earning. They will at least think about that.

And as far as the wider community, I think it does help that people are thinking about living wage campaigns or

reading about them in the newspaper. An average student who walks by and sees students caring about living

wages may think about the issue in a way that they would not have otherwise.

Also, many of the students on campus are going to be in power someday, somewhere. Maybe they will have

decision-making power, and maybe they will make a decision that will be more in favor of people without the

means to support themselves. Maybe they will make a decision that leads to a more just society.

For me personally, the campaign was a huge eye-opener. Before the living wage campaign, I hadn't been

exposed to labor activism and the way that Stanford ran. When I became involved in the campaign, I thought,

"The administration just don't understand that there is a problem. As soon as we inform them of it they will try

to fix it." That is obviously not the case.

I know that there are often racial tensions among s tudents and employees in labor activism. How did

the campaign work with ethnic groups on campus? How did you build coalitions in general?

We started to build coalitions with the hospital campaign, but it was very superficial. Later, we moved beyond

that and started having statements signed by the Coalition for Labor Justice, which was a coalition of

representatives of different ethnic groups. Then the hunger strike had a lot of support—the coalition ran a lot of

the logistical support for it.

This ended up leading to a lot of the conflict internally last year. Some people felt that the coalition was being

used for all the grunt work of running the hunger strike, while the people who were making the decisions were

SLAC members (who were a larger percentage white than the coalition folks).

I am kind of worried right now about SLAC in that way. In the past, it was actively trying not to be a bunch of

white hippy people, or people who were having a minor "liberal phase" in their life. I think that SLAC had

actively recruited minority students, students of color, and females-it has nearly always been run by women.



61

But recently that commitment has waned, or people don't see the importance of actively retaining that quality of

the group. So that worries me.

It's also hard being a white person and saying this kind of stuff. People feel like they are being tokenized, and

there are all these racial politics that come and make it complicated. I think any organizing is complicated when

you are trying to do multicultural organizing.

For instance, most of the workers aren't white--most are Spanish-speaking immigrants. How do you bridge

gaps between student populations and those worker populations. Should students working on this be Chicano

students? Is that necessary? Being able to speak Spanish is sort of necessary to do this kind of stuff. How do

you actively make sure that your group is able to communicate with those people you are supposedly

advocating for? Should privileged students be advocating for workers?

Many activists I've talked to are suspicious of eco nomic arguments and research. How do you use

economics in your campaigns? Is the campaign mainly about economic rights?

I think it's really hard to win arguments for the living wage using just economics. Because of the way

economics as a discipline is organized, it is very difficult to argue for a living wage using just economic terms.

There are certain studies that show living wage policies help, but there are also lots of studies that show they

don't. And people that are making many of the decisions about living wage policies tend to believe the latter

research.

For me, it's not so much about the economics. It's more of an ethical or moral argument. For instance, at

Stanford we haven't just been focused on getting a living wage. While that's part of the problem, a lot of the

problem is power dynamics—who has the power to make decisions about other peoples' lives. We weren't just

asking for a living wage policy, we were asking for this code of conduct: the right for people to organize, the

right to have educational classes, the right to have wage parity. There are all sorts of ways of changing the

situation, not just living wage policies.

In some ways, it's surprising that students have ha d any effect on wage levels at universities. Studen ts

are neither primarily employees of the university, nor own any part of the university. Where does

student power come from?



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From what I have seen recently, what the university cares about is its image. It's all about public relations.

Anything you can do that affects their image is where your power is. That's why if you have a student rally, no

one really cares. But if you talk to the alumni and people who donate to the university, you have much more

power.

Recently, I've been working on corporate responsibility and looking at where Stanford is investing its money.

Just at Stanford, it’s generated a lot of press in the last year. We have ten people in our group and we do little

action-and the press cares. We get much more press than we ever did with labor activism. We didn't even get

as much press when we did the fast. It's sort of crazy. It is because we're talking about money. We are talking

about hedge funds, and the hedge funds are scared students will start looking at them more critically.

My suggestion to other activists is look where the money is. Basically, just follow the money. If you can affect

the money at all, that's what the university cares about. They care about their money and their image, and the

way those two relate.

I like to end interviews with a question about advi ce for other students. What advice do you have for

other students or activists interested in labor iss ues?

First, I think people need to be aware of their reasons for doing living wage activism. If they are doing it

because of this feeling of pity and charity, that is okay for a certain level. But people need to be consciously

trying to empower other people, and not just be their voices. They need to actually empower them to have their

own voices.

Second, if you are going to do a big action, make sure that you have everything planned out as much as

possible beforehand. Before you begin a hunger strike, or with anything that people are going to be under a lot

of stress, make sure you have decision-making bodies in place that everyone can agree on.

You also want to be very cognizant of who at your university is making decisions-which bodies and which

individuals. You need to figure out who has power over whom, and who are talking heads and who are actually

pulling strings. You need to make sure you are targeting those who are pulling strings, not just talking heads.

Finally, within your group, make sure you know who has decision-making power. Make sure that power is

distributed more or less equitably, especially among the younger people in the group. You need to make sure

they feel empowered to lead the group after the old folks have moved on.



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Roona Ray & Amy Offner

Student Activists at Harvard University

Questions:

What has made the Harvard campaign so successful?

Do you have any other advice for student activists elsewhere?

The gains and attention the Harvard living wage cam paign has achieved are impressive. What has

made the campaign at Harvard so successful?

Roona: We don’t have any secrets. The work we do is similar to what has been done by the United Students

Against Sweatshops across the country and living wage movements across the country.

Amy: One thing that we always tried to do was to involve as many constituencies as possible, and design

actions that could tap involvement of different groups of people. For instance, we had alumni pledging that they

would never give money to Harvard if they didn’t agree to a living wage. We also got alumni involved in the sit-

in, alumni went into the building, and so on.

Many times faculty members don’t know how to involve themselves in a community campaign: they feel

awkward, they are used to sitting in their offices, and think they are going to lose credibility with their

colleagues if they are seen at a rally. So we had to find ways to get the faculty involved. They did all sorts of

things, from meeting with administrators to collecting faculty petitions, to publishing a full-page ad in the Boston

Globe.

They also did their own forms of direct action that we gave them ideas for. So we had professors go up to the

building during the sit-in and saying “Well, you know, my job is to teach students, and I think it’s a real shame

that the students inside can’t attend their classes. So I’d like to go in and teach them class.” Police officers

would gather in front of the door and block professors from entering the building which became a spectacle

and embarrassment. And so then we’d have these events where professors would stand outside the buildings

and deliver courses to the students inside. So they found ways of being involved.

That’s the power of getting tenured faculty involved—they can’t really be reprimanded. President Rudenstine

and an extremely right-wing dean called a special faculty meeting in which they really hoped to put out the fire.



64

We called together some faculty (they were meeting regularly at this point) and helped prepared them for this

meeting. So every faculty member that spoke—with perhaps one exception— spoke in support of the living

wage and in support of the sit-in. Rudenstine and the dean were so obviously defeated in this meeting that

they never called another faculty meeting during the sit-in. And they needed the faculty, but they had lost them.

Some of the other ways we tried to involve constituencies were that we had events that worked different parts

of the community. We had “Labor Night” where all the unions in Massachusetts that wanted to participate could

come and have their own rally. We had the Boston area FTAA rally at Harvard during the Living Wage sit-in.

So all the Boston globalization activists got involved. The Black Student Association had its own teach-in in

front of the building. There was an event happening in Boston in support of amnesty for immigrant workers, or

for immigrants in general. So that day we had, and sort of right after that, a solidarity action in front of the

building with the Boston amnesty coalition and some of the people working on ethnic studies at Harvard. So

there were different ways that different groups could get involved.

Roona: So I think throughout we tried to give people different opportunities to get involved, at different comfort

levels and different skill levels, and try to play on the different talents and strengths that people have. Not

everyone is going to be able to go and shake their fist at the President but they can do other things.

I think the other thing we did really well is that from the start we would go to administrators and we’d ask them

“Hey, do you know about working conditions on campus?” They would say, “No,” and then we’d tell them and

we’d say, “So we need a living wage. Lots of people think so.” They would be like “Oh, interesting.”

So basically we attempted to have a constructive dialogue through every avenue open to us, regardless of how

much we knew or thought that it wouldn’t work. You can’t shoot yourself in the foot in the beginning by going

“Oh, evil Administrators!”, even though we know that pretty much they are evil administrators, that they won’t

give in and that there is no democratic process for getting decisions made at the university.

In order to prove the need for more forceful action, you sort of need to go through the motions. Leave a paper

trail, basically, of talking to administrators, having those dialogues, writing the letters you need to, and being

turned away at every turn. We have a particularly stubborn administration, so it was very predictable for us to

send thousands upon thousands of names and have them refused. When it came time for the sit-in, people

who have more faith than we do in the powers that be were like, “But this is our administration. I’ve talked to

these people, I’ve worked with these people for over twenty years and I can’t believe they are doing this.” Then

we’d shown them our documentation of how we’d gone and sat and talked to them, that workers had gone and



65

talked with them, that unions had written them letters, that all these different people had gone and talked to

them, and they still hadn’t moved on this seemingly simple and moral issue. So it brought a lot of legitimacy to

that.

A living wage campaign is not just having a sit-in, it’s not just starting a sit-in and saying, “We demand a living

wage.” You have to build up to it.

Amy: I guess I would modify what Roona is saying with that meeting with the administration is useful only for

rhetorical purposes. That’s the absolute only use that it has. There is no progress. There was none here that

could be made, and we knew it from the minute we started. We knew that nothing was going to come from

meeting with administrators except that we would be able to say that we had met with them, that we had tried

to talk with them and that they refused at every turn. One key to convincing the community that dialogue offers

no potential for change was not only demonstrating that we have met them and this is what they’ve done, but

showing that not only had they not responded, but they had actually worsened working conditions, consciously

and deliberately.

Our understanding really was that Harvard would only change its policy through public embarrassment and

pressure. It became unsustainable and that was our goal: to publicly humiliate them until they had to agree.

Roona: Doing activism on-campus is a transformative process for most people. Although Amy does say that a

lot of people took an oppositional stance from the very beginning, there’s a wide diversity of radicalism and

militancy in our campaign, and also people change a lot over the course of doing activism. Within both the

public that aren’t so actively involved and those who are actively involved, a lot of people do have faith in

administrators and for “rational dialogue” to come to a productive conclusion. But since there’s no democratic

process at this university and most private universities and corporations, where stake-holders have the ability

to say things and have their opinions make a change, just that moral imperative does very little. The university

really has no incentive to follow through on that.

Do you have any other advice for the students worki ng on Living Wage campaigns elsewhere?

Amy: Organizing a political or community campaign isn’t a check-list—there aren’t three steps. It involves

being in a particular community, knowing that community, then beginning to think about what are your

resources and what are the abilities of the group that can be called on.



66

Roona: To do community organizing of any sort you need to learn about the diversity of people and talents

that you have in that community, and try to engage and use people in their diversity of talents. In engaging the

powers that be, really the stance that you need to take is in opposition, because in most places you are not

going to be working with a democratic structure. I don’t know if waxing rhetorically is that effective.



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Nick Rutter

Student Activist at Brown University

Questions:

How did you first get involved in the living wage campaign?

What were the highlights of the campus campaign?

What advice do you have for other students working on the living wage campaign?

How did you first get involved in the living wage c ampaign at Brown?

When I first got to Brown in my freshman fall, which was the fall of 1998, I joined the International Socialist

Organization. To be honest, I joined more out of interest or curiosity than anything else. I have an older brother

who went to college and sort of exposed me to leftist ways of thinking, Marxism, and that sort of stuff, but I

really didn’t have a grip on it. But I didn’t last too long in that group, mainly because they were very cynical—

yeah, can you believe it?—and essentially everything is an act of hypocrisy after a while, at least that’s how I

got to feel. Whenever I did anything fun, whenever I spent any money on anything that was not an essential

means for survival, I felt bad.

After that, in the fall of my sophomore year, I joined the Student Labor Alliance, which I’ve been a member of

since. The Student Labor Alliance, when I first joined, was heavily involved in the sweatshop issue, mainly

foreign sweatshops. The summer after my sophomore year and during that sophomore year, I did a lot of stuff

on sweatshops. I actually got a grant to live in New York City and research sweatshops in New York, textile

factories in New York. It was fascinating, because you realize how really these shops aren’t a secret and they

are not trying to hide themselves from the public eye. I mean, they are to some degree, but the fact is that no

one wants to go visit them—no one’s interested, so they do whatever they want for the most part and nobody

really knows. Sure, the Department of Labor comes knocking every once in a while, but the Department of

Labor is stretched so thin that they can only do these cursory once-overs.

The Living Wage became the big issue for us, the Student Labor Alliance, because sweatshops sort of fell from

the scene: Brown, for example, was the first school to sign on to the Worker’s Rights Consortium. The problem

with that is that we have become, I think as a result, sort of apathetic about keeping tabs with what’s going on

with the sweatshop issues. In part, because we focused so much on the local activist scene: stuff like the

Living Wage and graduate students trying to unionize here at Brown, which is sort of a landmark case.



68

What were the highlights of the campus campaign?

I remember what we were really psyched to do was to try to get out to workers a survey that I actually wrote

up. It was just some basic questions that we wanted to ask Brown employees, such as “What are you paid?”,

“Have you been offered a raise?”, those sort of bread and butter questions, but also, “What is your relationship

with your employer? With your boss?” and those sorts of questions. So we tried to go out en masse and ask as

many employees as we could, and I think we got quite a few surveys back. I can’t really give you a concrete

number, but I would think it was somewhere between 50 and 100.

A lot of their responses were really compelling. They had things to say that were surprising. I remember having

some pretty amazing discussions with people about stuff they had heard of—a lot of it was second-hand, sort

of “Oh, well my cousin had this happen to him: he wasn’t getting benefits, and then was fired right before he

would have qualified for a full-time spot, and then rehired.” There was that kind of stuff, which is the standard

story, but is nonetheless shocking that it is that thought out on the part of the administration.

The next step of it, beyond asking these questions, was of course to try to get these employees to take part

together with us, a student group, in some sort of organized protest against this. So we tried to hold a few

dinners. For example, we just got pizza and sort of hung out and wanted to talk with as many employees as

would come by. And the results of that were very disappointing. I think our gross turnout at one was two

people, another time a maximum of three people would come.

We tried to hold on to those people that came, but what I remember happening was the gradual realization

that, boy, employees at this school don’t want to make a stir. In part it was because so many of them have

waited so long to get jobs here, that this is really considered the acme, in terms of jobs, in Providence. It is the

best job you can get, the best job security and the best benefits. The problem, of course, is that it’s the best

benefits for those that actually get the benefits. What we were trying to deal with was the issue of temporary

labor, specifically in the cafeteria and food services, and to some degree in facilities management, janitorial

staff, and that sort of thing.

The campaign definitely sort of petered out before we really sat down with the administration and hashed a lot

of this stuff out. That was my impression. Once again, I was gone last spring, and when I left it was that critical

moment where we were going to move from having done this sort of question-and-answer thing, and trying to

attract people to these dinners, to trying to really organize employees. I don’t know if you’ve had this



69

experience, or heard people echo this at other schools, but one thing we had a lot of trouble with was not only

organizing around particular issues with other student groups, but trying to bridge this huge, giant gap between

the students and employees, or students and faculty, to really create a coalition effort to say, for example, "we

need need-blind admissions at Brown." Everyone agrees we need it. Why don’t we all just do something

together? Or staff wages at Brown.

I don’t know if you heard about this, but Ruth Simmons, who is Brown's president, issued announcements a

couple weeks ago about these dramatic changes she wanted to make at Brown: hiring a hundred new staff, for

example, and improving graduate student stipends. One of these things was raising the minimum wage of staff

by a dollar—which still leaves us definitely far behind the better paying schools, but it was a step in the right

direction. It did strike me as a little odd, because it was raised something like from $9.00 to $10.00. I was

sitting there saying “Huh?”, because I know plenty of people I talked to last fall who were making well under

$9.00 an hour. It definitely seemed to skirt around the issue of temporary labor.

What advice do you have for other students working on Living Wage campaigns?

Well, I would say you have to look to Harvard and at what they did. I think they’re the model at this point. I

haven’t yet seen this documentary they made ["Occupation"], unfortunately. It is crazy we don’t have it

because we definitely want to show it this semester.

I guess the thing I would have to say about Harvard is that they sat-in for three weeks—three weeks, which is

intense. What I don’t know, and what I’m really curious about, is what kind of relations they did have with

Harvard employees. I know, for example, at Yale the activist students are incredibly involved with the unions

on campus, and sometimes that has caused conflict within the student activist movement. Some people agree

with the union, and some people don’t and that causes conflict. But I know here at Brown, we definitely don’t

keep in touch with unions as much as we’d like to.



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Anissa Weinraub

Student Activist, Brown University

Questions:

What are the effects of the Living Wage campaign in Providence?

What is the best role of students in the living wage campaigns?

What advice do you have to students beginning other campaigns?

What are the effects you see of the Living Wage cam paign in Providence, RI?

In Providence, initially, the wage itself will effect a pay-raise for under one thousand people. But ideologically or

philosophically, that can mean a lot as a catalyst. I think most people that are part of the campaign know this. It

is a continuation of the work teacher aides started years ago, who were mostly women of color (a lot of Latina

women). It has gotten a lot—a lot—of people throughout the city, throughout different communities to

communicate with one another. People know the steel workers are on strike from Providence Gas, or that thirty

people are out of money because thirty Latina immigrants lost their jobs at the fishing docks.

People are becoming very connected. People who wouldn’t even know who their city council-person was are

now coming out together to call their city council-person, to come down to city hall, to make big posters, to talk

with their neighbors, to talk with people who aren’t their neighbors, to talk to people who live across town and

they would never have seen. So I feel like it is propelling something, even if it’s just an increase to $10.19

(which is nothing to laugh about.)

What do you think should be the role of students wo rking on city or campus campaigns?

As students, we’re not trying to speak for anybody. We’re trying to go and talk to constituents of the city

counselor so that they can be more informed and can tell their elected officials to vote for this. We’re not here

to speak for any worker at all, in my opinion—because if we are, then that’s really disgusting. Which is why,

obviously, we’re not in any place at all on this campus to have a Living Wage on campus or have that kind of

campaign.

We don’t have enough contacts. We don’t have any sense that this is a fight that the various unions on campus

want to do. Which is why the Student Labor Alliance, in years past, did a lot of Code of Ethics work for



71

temporary workers, and did a lot of administrative or policy oriented stuff. Which is also the reason that it was

seen as very liberal—meaning bad liberal. Liberal, clean-cut kids talking to administrators doing policy. So it

wasn’t seen as an activist group: it was just like boys in ties. There’s nothing wrong with the public policy

approach, but just be very honest about what you as a group, or you as an individual, are.

What suggestions do you have for other students wor king on Living Wage campaigns?

I think that activists don’t quite know what a coalition is and think that it’s really just the same activist people

getting together under another name--but that's not what it’s about. It’s really about delegates from different

organizations coming together to build a coalition that they then take back to their separate organizations. It’s

not “Hey, do you guys want to come to our thing?” Rather, it’s “How do we want to create this together

because we all have an interest in getting this thing passed?”

If you are going to do a coalition for the living wage or stop police brutality on your campus, it's important you

don’t just get folks out because they want "to be a part of things." You get folks out because everyone’s going

to be committed in a certain way. While you have your own take on it and perspective on it because of the

group you’re coming from, you’re all going to be committed to it. Coalition building is really important. People

might want to look at Organizing for Social Change: Midwest Academy Manual for Activists, or just the chapter

on coalition building.

In the city campaign, it is not or nor should it be about us. We are here to support in any way, to do any kind of

leg-work or any other sort of work in this ward (Rita William’s ward, the local city councilwoman) to get folks on

the side of the living wage. You do the foot work and you do it well, and be committed. Don’t flake out, because

this is really important.



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III. Organization Profiles

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Harvard is home to one of most successful and longest running campus living wage campaigns. The

Progressive Student Labor Movement's efforts established a "parity wage" university policy and a worker's

center, and strengthened union presence on their campus. In addition, their campaign convinced many other

student groups around the nation that campus living wage campaigns could succeed in changing universities’

employment practices.

Interviews:

Elaine Bernard - Director of the Harvard Trade Union Program

Dan Dimaggio - Student activist

Madeleine Elfenbein - Student activist

Lawrence Katz - Professor of Economics

Roona Ray & Amy Offner - Student activists

Links:

The Harvard Living Wage Campaign Portal : the site for the Harvard living wage campaign, and an excellent

resource for information on their campaign.

"'Joe Hill " Goes to Harvard" : an article from The Nation on the Harvard sit-in and campaign.

"Occupation" : the website for a documentary film made about the Harvard sit-in. Expensive to buy, but the

online preview is definitely worth watching.

"Low-Paid Workers at Harvard" : the final report of the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting

Policies (HCEP), also known as the Katz Committee.

Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA


http://hcs.harvard.edu/~pslm/livingwage/portal.html

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010702&s=manners&c=1

http://www.enmassefilms.org/

http://hcs.harvard.edu/~pslm/livingwage/hcecp_final_report.pdf


73

Students from Swarthmore College, a small liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, rallied together to advocate for

a living wage. Students discuss the various ways the university attempted to derail the process, as well as the

difficulties of organizing without a union presence.

Interviews:

Sam Blair - Student activist

Kae Kalwaic - Staff activist

Links:

SC Living Wage and Democracy Campaign : the home page for the Swarthmore living wage and labor

campaign

"Living Wage Democracy Campaign" : good overview article on the campaign from the college paper, The

Phoenix.

Brown University, Providence, RI

The living wage campaign at Brown University has faded, and a city campaign set in Providence has taken its

place. Students and organizers reflect on the success and failures of the Brown campaign, the importance

(and difficulty) of working with workers, and how city campaigns differ from campus campaigns.

Interviews:

Peter Asen - Student activist

Matthew Jerzyk - Director of Rhode Island's Jobs With Justice

Nick Rutter - Student activist

Anissa Weinraub - Student activist

Links:

The Brown Student Labor Alliance website : the now defunct homepage of the former Brown living wage

campaign.

Rhode Island's Jobs With Justice : the homepage for an organization helping lead the campaign for a

municipal living wage and code of conduct policy in Providence, Rhode Island.


http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/org/living_wage/index.html

http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/org/phoenix/2001/2001-02-15/indepth/10702.html

http://www.brown.edu/Students/Student_Labor_Alliance/

http://www.rijwj.org/


74

Stanford University, Stanford, CA

The Student-Labor Action Coalition is an active coalition of students and student groups at Stanford that has

led campaigns for a living wage, code of conduct, and for supporting union contract negotiations. In the Spring

of 2003, students staged a public hunger strike to pressure the university to change its hiring policies and

rehire a fired worker. Currently, SLAC is pressuring the university with staff and unions to adopt a "code of

conduct" for employment policy.

Interview: Anna Mumford - Student activist

Links:

Student Labor Action Coalition : a very complete and up-to-date homepage of the SLAC group. Includes

history of the group, links to articles on the campaign, and everything else you would want to know about.

Presidential Committee on Workplace Policies and Pr actices : the committee formed in response to the

student hunger strike in Spring 2003 to report on labor issues at Stanford. Their final report is available here.

The Economic Policy Institute, Washington, DC

EPI is one of the most respected liberal policy institutes in the United States. They publish research and

opinion pieces on the labor market, with a focus on improving the welfare of low and middle-income families.

[Note: Do not confuse this institute with the anti-living wage public relations effort, the "Employment Policies

Institute." For more information on this group, see "A Warning: The ‘Employment Policies Institute’ and Public

Relations Nonprofits" below.]

Interview: Jared Bernstein - Senior Economist

Links:

EPI Living Wage Issue Guide : good overview of the issue and (supportive) economic research behind the

living wage movement.

"Making a Living: How the living wage movement has prevailed" : an article by Jared Bernstein

(interviewed here) of EPI on the successes of the living wage movement.


http://www.stanford.edu/group/slac/index.htm

http://workplacepolicies.stanford.edu/

http://workplacepolicies.stanford.edu/presentations/docs/Report_Final.pdf

http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/issueguides_livingwage_livingwagefacts

http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/123/makingaliving.html


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ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for R eform

Now)

A large association of organizations representing low and moderate income families, ACORN has been at the

forefront of supporting both city and university living wage campaigns. They have also been leaders in efforts

to improve healthcare, housing, and workers’ rights, as well as other campaigns.

Interview: Jen Kern – Director of the Living Wage Resource Center

Links:

ACORN's Living Wage Resource Center : probably the best overall website on the living wage. Lots of

information on both college and city campaigns.

ACORN Homepage : the homepage of ACORN, with information on their various campaigns.

A Warning: The “Employment Policies Institute” and Public

Relations Non-Profits

The Employment Policies Institute was founded by Rick Berman, a long time restaurant industry lobbyist and

CEO of Berman & Co., a premier public relations firm. It is part of a movement of "PR nonprofits": nonprofits

created by public relations firms, hired by corporations to change public opinions that affect their bottom line.

The Employment Policies Institute has been a high-profile sponsor of research and arguments against living

wage and minimum wage policies. It began its life with a grant from Philip Morris & Co., and has since been

supported by undisclosed corporate donors. It generally advocates against any legislation that threatens to

raise labor costs and cut into the profits of the restaurant industry—such as living wage policies.


http://www.livingwagecampaign.org/

http://www.acorn.org/


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It's no coincidence that the Employment Policies Institute adopted the same acronym as the liberal Economic

Policy Institute (EPI). It is consistent with their history of attempting to mislead the public. (See “Berman & Co.:

'Nonprofit' Hustlers for the Food & Booze Biz” for more information from PR Watch.)

Unfortunately, it is a common strategy of PR firms to form "non-profits" with the exclusive mission of boosting

the profits of their financial backers. These organizations, hiding behind their "non-profit" label, often pose as

groups of concerned citizens but generally represent no wider concern than their own self-interest.

Everyone has a right to free speech. But when organizations speak only to make money for their financial

benefactors, the public deserves to know and treat them with the due skepticism. And when those

organizations hide their financial allegiances, they do not participate in our democracy, but attempt to hijack it

for their own purposes.

For more on this disturbing trend, see the publications of PR Watch, the premier "watchdog" of the public

relations industry. (For the more adventurous, I have also written a paper on conflict of interest in non-profits,

available on The Campus Living Wage Project website, entitled “If Not For-Profit, for What?”.)


http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2001Q1/berman1.html

http://www.prwatch.org/

http://www.livingwagestories.org/nonprofits.htm


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IV. Reflections & Conclusions

In this final section, I've collected some of my thoughts on activism and the living wage. In particular, I’ve

written on: (1) the difference between organizing and advocacy; (2) the limits of "rational dialogue"; and (3) the

personally transformative power of living wage activism. These themes provide insight into the social impact of

living wage campaigns, beyond its effects on wages and employment.

(1) Organizing versus advocacy . Nearly every activist mentioned the importance of coalition building to the

success of Living Wage campaigns. However, many activists found a deeper purpose in community

organizing: to give the least-advantaged a lasting voice and power in the decisions of cities and universities.

What Matthew Jerzyk calls "old-school organizing" represents a return to the ideals of more democratic control

over local policies. Instead of speaking for employees, activists tried to ensure employees had their own voice,

and the power to make others listen.

When researchers, the media, or even activists focus only on the living wage as a policy proposal, the deeper

purpose and goals are missed. The deeper purpose is the long-term enablement of low-wage employees to

speak and bargain for themselves. Advocacy alone cannot accomplish these larger goals of empowerment.

(2) The limits of rational dialogue . In defending their decision to sit-in during the spring of 2001, Harvard

activists took pains to explain that no other option remained: that "rational dialogue" had failed to produce the

changes they wanted.

More broadly, all activists eventually concluded that reasoned discourse couldn't work alone. The Living Wage

campaign disputes pitted individuals with very different levels of power: students versus universities,

employees versus employers, community organizations versus city legislatures. In each of these relationships,

formidable power differences remained, and no ethical or economic argument alone could convince the

powerful to heed the requests of the less powerful.

The myth of effective “rational dialogue” was a myth all activists—from Swarthmore to Harvard to ACORN—

abandoned during the course of Living Wage campaigns.



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(3) Transformation and the Future . Finally, many students described the Living Wage campaign as a

transformative experience. Activists in the Living Wage campaigns learned about the world and themselves in

a radically different way than they had in the classroom. Social inequality, power relations, and the ideals of

democracy became more real for the students involved.

The non-student activists also spoke of a transformation in the students they worked with. In the students,

some saw the beginnings of a larger social transformation in American society. As Elaine Bernard pointed out

during our interview, when was the last time "Ivy League" students were concerned about the low pay of

university staff? The living wage campaigns are the result of an enlargement of a social conscience. It's my

hope that this social conscience will continue to guide the activists involved in these campaigns into the future.

While I do not believe that the activists and the campaigns featured here are perfect, I do believe that these are

the people and the ideals that will move our society forward.



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Acknowledgements

This research project was generously funded by the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University, and

supported through the efforts of Kent Koth, Renato Rosaldo, my family, and many friends and kind strangers. I

grew up in Santa Barbara, California, and owe a great deal to my family, teachers, and friends who supported

me there.

For more information, contact:

© Adam Stone, 2005


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