Miss Glazer, who works in the East House kitchen, said that Mrs. Bunting's count of how many students cat there is wrong. "There are 250 eating in Cabot and another 100 in Whitman. Mrs. Bunting's figure of 250 eating in East House dining rooms just dropped from the sky." she said.
The SDS students are demanding improvements in kitchen working conditions and an end to the wage differential between first cooks (women) and chefs (men).
Britton said that the differential is partly based on the different capacities of house dining rooms. "North House, where the chefs work, has a capacity twice that of either East or South House," he said. When a girl from North House told him that the Holmes Hall dining room is never filled, he said, "That's beside the point."
Demonstrators accused Britton of repeatedly changing his explanation of the differential. "First it's the amount of training, then it's quantity of work, and now it's the number of chairs in the dining room." Ellen J. Messing 72, and SDS co-chairman, said.
The demonstrators maintained that the wage differential is a form of "male chauviaism." Ginny Vogel 70 told Britton, "According to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this sexual discrimination is illegal." When she and other students asked Britton why all the chefs were men and all the cooks women, he said, "There's a long tradition of male superiority."
Union Negotiations
He also told the students that both wages and the differential will be negotiated with the union when the contract runs out. He added that, until negotiations with the union two years ago, the differential was even greater. "We consider any differential too great," a demonstrator answered.
After the demonstrators challenged him and Mrs. Bunting to a public debate sometime before Dec. 4, Britton agreed to collect the figures on the number of students acting in each dining room. But he reined to present them directly to a public meeting. "I will give them to Mrs. Bunting, I think that's more orderly," he said.