The committee’s report adopted strong language—similar to that employed by PSLM’s living wage campaign—criticizing labor practices on campus.

Steep declines in the real wages of Harvard’s lowest paid service employees—a 13 percent drop over the past seven years for some custodians—“distressed” the committee, and members heard “powerful and often troubling” testimony from employees about the experience of working at Harvard.

“The committee heard accounts of lower-paid service workers at Harvard being unaware of their rights on campus, being uncertain how to assert them, or being fearful that asserting them would result in retaliation from management,” the report stated.

Harvard, the committee concluded, has an “obligation to be a good employer.”

“A good employer should work to ensure that its lowest-paid and most vulnerable workers share in economic prosperity and do not disproportionately and inappropriately bear the brunt of adjustments to economic and financial hardship,” the report stated.

The committee called on Harvard to adopt a code of workplace conduct and urged Summers to issue a “strong” statement about workplace expectations.

“All employees on the Harvard campus should be treated with dignity and respect by supervisors, fellow workers and other members of the Harvard community and enjoy rights to the highest levels of freedom of expression consistent with the University’s goal of being a beacon of intellectual inquiry and learning,” the report stated.

Making It Work

The committee urged Harvard to “raise pay immediately”—but to do so through the means of collective bargaining.

Harvard must reopen its contracts with its service unions to negotiate for higher wages.

The report said committee members “expect” Harvard and its service unions to agree on wages that do not fall below the range of $10.83 to $11.30 per hour—a range defined by the recently negotiated contracts of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW) and Hotel Employee and Restaurant Employee (HERE) Local 26.

The lowest-paid HUCTW employees currently make $10.83 per hour and lowest-paid HERE workers bring home $11.30 per hour, according to the report.

In addition to boosting wages of Harvard employees, the University must also raise the pay of subcontracted employees to equally high levels, the report recommended.

Currently, about 400 Harvard employees and 600 outsourced workers earn less than $10.68, the figure established by Cambridge as its living wage.

As part of the compromise that ended last spring’s sit-in, the custodial workers union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 254, is due to have its contract up for renegotiation in four weeks.