For the past two weeks, dining hall workers at Harvard University have been on strike. Reportedly, their average hourly wage rate is $22. They and their union want to make that $24.
Harvard makes a tempting target. With a $35 billion endowment, the nation's most prestigious university appears to be able to pay pretty much any rate the strikers can force upon it.
The strikes have the support of SLAM, the Student Labor Action Movement. SLAM points out that an assistant professor at Harvard earns about $144,000 on average, almost double the national average for faculty at that rank.
Harvard counters that the dining hall employees make substantially more than Cambridge's $15 minimum wage. And the school's proposal to raise health insurance contributions would be the first such boost since 2008.
In a sense, the Harvard labor dispute is a microcosm of the disparities in the American economy at large. The rich keep getting richer. The poor take what they can wrest from the rich. In professional sports, it's the difference between the quarterback and hot dog vendor. In corporate America it's the gap between the CEO and the stiffs on the shop floor. At Harvard it's the administrators and faculty v. the blue collar workers. Market justice says that the former get the lions' share while the latter get the crumbs... albeit, larger-than-average crumbs at Harvard. Social justice, ala SLAM, suggests a more equitable division of the wealth despite market forces.
It's an age old issue that Robert Lane, a political scientist at another pretty rich school, Yale, outlined masterfully in his book "Market Justice, Political Justice," way back in 1985. And to a large extent, it's what this year's national election is all about, too.
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