Like the city of Cambridge, Harvard also reexamines wages every year, Price says. Raises are based in part on the increase in the cost of living. Additionally, Price says, union contracts make provision for annual adjustments.

As for the oft-cited concern that adopting a living wage will force an employer to alter its entire wage scale?alled wage compression?ardner says that Cambridge considers raising workers?wages on a case-by-case basis, and the city does not automatically raise everyone? wages when the living wage figure is adjusted annually.

?e had to make some adjustments, because of the need to make differences for people with different levels of responsibility,?Gardner says. ?t has an expense and some administrative complications, but it? working.?Price says it would be possible for the University to adjust wages like Cambridge, on a case-by-case basis, without wholesale raises based on the implementation of a living wage.

?hat happens a lot now already,?she says, noting that when the University negotiates a contract, the wages of managers and supervisors will often be adjusted as well.

Case Study: Johns Hopkins University

Though PSLM gets its living wage figure from Cambridge? calculations, because there is no set standard for calculating the living wage, an employer can implement a wage floor without complying with city ordinances.

Johns Hopkins University, for example, put in place a $7.75 wage floor in 1999, independent of the city of Baltimore? own living wage figure.

In response to student campaign for a living wage, the Johns Hopkins administration agreed that all direct and subcontracted employees would not earn less than $7.75 per hour by 2002. While the figure was close to Baltimore? then-living wage, the University administration chose not to adopt the mandatory wage floor Baltimore city officials had defined, nor did they label their figure a ?iving wage.??his was not related to any broader city-wide ordinance or movement,?says Dennis OShea, executive director of communications and public affairs. ?e chose not to tie ourselves to a moving target. It would be irresponsible for the university to tie its fiscal well-being on something we could not predict.?Before the university? resolution in 1999, 762 full-time workers and 246 part-time workers made less than $7.75 per hour. Currently, all workers except the subcontracted workers at the Hopkins Health Center are earning wages above the mandatory level.

The move toward bringing all workers to the mandatory wage floor was stymied somewhat by the decentralization of the University. Not only is the University composed of an undergraduate and graduate schools, but it also includes a completely separate medical center.

The administrative difficulties resulting from the decentralization have proven the biggest stumbling block in implementing a $7.75 per hour wage floor, OShea says.

But student activists said they felt that the wage increases were moving too slowly and staged a sit-in last spring that resulted in the Johns Hopkins administration promising to accelerate the move to $7.75.

OShea said that Johns Hopkins has not conducted any studies to see whether the raise in wages has caused wage compression or resulted in an above normal level of lay-offs. The autonomy of each of the schools makes the figures simply too hard to calculate, he says.