Poverty at this University might not be so shameful if it were not so needless. We attend the richest university on the planet. Harvard fund managers take home up to $10 million a year--that's 800 times as much as our subcontracted dining hall worker makes working two full-time jobs. Harvard's annual budget exceeds that of the United Nations by about half a billion dollars.
What our community has been saying for the last year is that we believe there's an obvious and a just way to use a tiny portion of this money: Give it to workers. It would cost Harvard $10 million, or three-fifths of one percent of its budget, to implement a living wage. This cost would be unnoticeable amid the extraordinary expenses that the University assumes without complaint. And yet it would profoundly change the lives of at least 1,000 families in our community. We believe that this is a price worth paying.
Amy C. Offner '01, a Crimson editor, is a history concentrator in Lowell House. She is a member of the Living Wage Campaign.