{shortcode-5300b75e94d8c0dad1fdb1be1fd32849e458939e}

With Harvard facing extraordinary financial headwinds, the University has proposed a novel idea for how to reduce the fiscal strain: a yearlong wage freeze for custodial workers.

One of the proposals Harvard offered the custodial workers’ union, Service Employees International Union’s 32BJ, would give employees “a small bonus in the first year, followed by 2 percent wage increases in subsequent years.” With annual inflation around 3 percent, Harvard is asking custodial workers to effectively accept a future pay cut. They deserve better.

Harvard’s solving its financial challenges on the backs of low-wage, likely largely minority custodial workers would be wrong in any case. But when one considers how Harvard’s diversity bureaucracy has exploded in recent years, their treatment looks cruelly hypocritical.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Black people and Latinos make up 67.7 percent of “maids and housekeeping cleaners” and 52.4 percent of “​​janitors and building cleaners.” Harvard’s DEI policies — marketed as efforts to uplift societies’ most vulnerable – reek of vanity when, in these lean times, it seeks to throw those workers, who are doing some of campus’s toughest jobs, under the bus.

It goes without saying that custodial work is not an easy job. According to a study in the National Library of Medicine, cleaning workers face a multitude of chemical and biological hazards on the job and are at high risk of developing respiratory and dermal illnesses.

The study also found that in addition to a litany of physical dangers, custodial workers face significant psychological risks, too. Workers reported a near universal sense of demoralization on account of a “lack of regard” from employers, and almost all participants expressed outrage that “neither their work nor their humanity was valued or respected.”

There is no denying that Harvard needs to make cuts somewhere. Harvard’s administrators can reasonably argue that payroll makes up one of the University’s largest recurring expenses and that a temporary wage freeze (rather than layoffs) may seem like the least harmful way to manage financial strain. But I am hard pressed to believe that our custodial workers — who are among Harvard’s lowest paid workers — are where we must turn.

If Harvard is truly looking to reduce the cost of its payroll, there are other, more obvious places for cuts to be made. For starters, there is cruel irony in making cuts that hurt Harvard’s most vulnerable employees while the University maintains its extensive diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy, much of which was institutionalized only in recent years.

From my count on the Dean of Students website, the euphemistically-named Harvard Foundation (formed in part out of the ashes of the Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations) currently employs two directors, two assistant directors, an associate director, and a senior director. Does the Harvard Foundation really need six “directors”? After all, Glassdoor reports that the average administrator at Harvard makes between $79,000 and $131,000 per year, averaging $47 an hour – far more than a custodian.

The bloat extends well beyond Harvard College. A 2020 message from the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education detailed a series of new “investments” in its Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging programming, including the hiring of multiple additional staff members. “While careful stewardship of our resources has never been more crucial,” she wrote, the expansion was “urgently needed.” Are such measures worth more than the livelihoods of our custodians?

I do not intend to say that there is no role for administrators at Harvard — the University could not function without them. Nor am I arguing that Harvard must cut all DEI positions. But the University’s administrative excess is painfully clear: The Crimson reported in 2023 that Harvard had increased the number of full-time administrators by 43 percent since 2004. In the same period, the size of the faculty rose by just 11 percent.

In this new era, Harvard faces difficult choices, and it will have to make some trade-offs. Harvard has already made cuts to research, Ph.D. admissions, fellowships, and more. Cutting initiatives like language study programs means that students will miss out on valuable educational opportunities. That’s a significant loss, but it’s not the same as freezing the pay of workers already likely to be living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Administrative and custodial worker pay is not a zero-sum game. Nonetheless, it is ironic that in the aftermath of the 2020 national reckoning on race, Harvard expanded its diversity initiatives, but now, when something must give, Harvard is responding with a de facto pay cut for its most vulnerable, likely largely minority employees. That is not only moral hypocrisy; it is a betrayal of the equity cause Harvard has spent years championing.

In the words of 32BJ Executive Vice President Kevin Brown, “What it says on these gates is ‘Veritas, Veritas,’ truth.”

“Well, Veritas, Veritas, now it’s time to pay us.”

Charles M. Covit ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Economics and Modern Middle Eastern Studies in Lowell House.