Harvard students liberals "living wage campaign" does not mention international proletariat Petition in support of Vietnamese workers proves a litmus test Harvard University, Cambridge, MASSACHUSETTS--On April 22nd, the "Living Wage" campaign spearheaded by the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM), which occupied the administration building on the 19th held a rally of about 100 people outside the building still being occupied. MIM attended the rally and gathered 47 signatures for a petition to support the Vietnamese workers in American Samoa.(1) The petition reads as follows: "We the undersigned asked Chair Robert Ulrich of Target Corporation, S. Robson Walton of Wal-Mart and Arthur C. Martinez of Sears to make sure that the Vietnamese workers on the island of American Samoa at the Daewoosa Samoa garment factory receive their back pay and protection of their safety, food supply and transportation. We understand that workers making clothing for them did not receive minimum wage or overtime pay as promised." Upon arrival, MIM found police blocking the way to the protesters inside. MIM wanted building occupiers to see the April 15th MIM Notes and article about Vietnamese workers in American Samoa. The students inside the building felt very obliged to the police, who were letting in food, and two separate students were unwilling to let MIM give them newspaper and petition material across police lines when the police were not there. One went so far as to say it was important not to violate the police orders. MIM also sent the protesters inside the building the petition by fax and they were unwilling to endorse it. The building take- over has succeeded in hastening Democratic Party attention to the issue. Senator Ted Kennedy had stopped by earlier to endorse the rally. Julian Bonds of the NAACP, Jesse Jackson Sr. and Jr. both endorsed it as had the AFL-CIO, Ralph Nader, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, Howard Zinn, Henry Louis Gates and Cornell West in Afro-American Studies, Duncan Kennedy of Critical Legal Studies and Government professor Stanley Hoffman. It is clear that the students are hanging their hopes on the Democratic Party and big-name endorsements. Outside the building take-over, the situation was different. Many people including the "Living Wage" organizers outside signed the petition. Many had worked in the campaign against sweatshop labor before. The support for the rally inside the building took very predictable lines. Some random crackpot reactionaries including a business student ran their line against it. A proctor who also lives in the administration building complained in a letter to the student paper and an anonymous building tenant started a crusade against the building occupation and referred to the demonstrators as "uncouth," in a fashion befitting Harvard as a finishing school for the elite. The student newspaper "The Harvard Crimson" opposed the building takeover while supporting a "Living Wage." As organizers at the rally pointed out, the Crimson had forgotten that the activists had tried so-called rational persuasion since 1998. MIM believes that those talking about "rational persuasion" hold a naive view of how the world actually works in almost all political issues. Charity workers of the Phillips Brooks House (PBHA) also endorsed the rally, but not as an organization. The University administration had recently attempted to take them over. Some charity workers described seeing Harvard workers in soup kitchen lines. MIM spoke with one persyn who claimed to belong to an organization that could not support the sit-in, because it was "inappropriate." Nonetheless, she supported the sit-in herself and would not support the Vietnamese worker petition. When asked why she did not support the Vietnamese worker petition while she supported the sit-in, she gave what we are afraid are some fairly typical reasons along the powerless "think locally, act locally" line of reasoning. First of all she said that she did not know the Vietnamese struggle but she did know the Harvard local struggle. Secondly, she had bought some bourgeois Liberal propaganda: "some of those things they did in China were unacceptable. . . My parents were Socialist Party members and they tried to tell me what to think." MIM would say that in civilized families and societies, parents raise children to value survival rights above private property. If that is "telling someone what to think," then so be it. She kept returning to the parochial view that we should "do what we can in our" conditions and she kept referring to the workers on Harvard campus as "our" conditions and "our" workers. She left out all the other people that Harvard was exploiting globally with its $19 billion endowment. We reminded the womyn that with that approach, most of the world's poor workers would be ignored, because they are not local. She agreed and stuck to her position, thus demonstrating that for some people opposition to the international proletariat is a very conscious decision. The rally in the late afternoon had all the "politically correct speakers. There was a member of the Black Students Association, someone from Taiwan, the Haitian Alliance, a Latino graduate student group, a queer student organization leader, a male leader of the "Coalition against Sexual Violence" and of course various charity and liberal organizers. The Haitian student leader claimed that most of the workers affected by the call for a $10.25 an hour wage are Haitians. Haitians are "most of the workers who clean up the bathrooms, clean up after the students," he said. Unfortunately not a single speaker at the rally mentioned the international proletariat. All of them focused only on those workers hired directly by Harvard in Boston and Cambridge. For this reason, MIM believes it was especially important to bring the petition for the Vietnamese workers in American Samoa. While some of the activists had done work on sweatshop labor, it is perhaps true that these students have not yet pieced together their own activism in a consistent way. Thus when someone like Ted Kennedy endorses the movement for a $10.25 wage plus benefits for workers in Boston and Cambridge, many of the activists back off from their alliance with the international proletariat in a bid for respectability. The student organizers have demonstrated incredible energy in the past week by sustaining their pace of protests and events. MIM hopes it does not all get wasted in a reformist channel for the labor aristocracy. We hope the students will return to the issues of the international proletariat and organize from the true bottom up. Who doesn't have a living wage? Earlier, on April 19th, 37 students staged a sit-in demonstration at Harvard University's Massachusetts Hall, the administration offices to support the "Living Wage" campaign. Through the night, dozens of protesters showed up outside to support the occupiers and there was a good response to MIM Notes, which sported a headline on Vietnamese workers' struggles in American Samoa. In contrast, about 300 participants at the "Take Back the Night" candle-light vigil 10 days earlier at Harvard seemed rather quiescent, and unwilling to take any literature. The Harvard students' liberal monthly called "Perspective" supported the demonstration by issuing a special edition. However, the 11x17 flyer front and back mentioned no international demands of the proletariat. The campaign for a "Living Wage" is something of a misnomer, because it does not really target Harvard for what it truly is--a private capitalist institution with $19 billion in endowment assets (stocks and bonds). Harvard regularly accrues surplus labor from the Third World, where wages average 50 cents an hour, but the "Living Wage" campaign only addresses Amerikan workers who work on Harvard property in Massachusetts. The campaigners point out that other universities and the City of Cambridge already pay the living wage while competitor Harvard does not. Yet unlike the City of Cambridge, Harvard exploits far more workers abroad than it hires at home by the nature of its assets. The campaign for a "Living Wage" misses this point. Without challenging imperialism and its exploitation and super-exploitation of workers internationally, the "Living Wage" campaign gathers the support of the Democratic Party. Senator Paul Wellstone and more importantly, Democratic National Chair Terry McCullough both endorsed the campaign. Organizers say, and they are probably right, that 70% of students support a "living wage" for Harvard's local workers. Behind the student outreach to the top Democratic Party bosses is a typical student miscalculation regarding power. One student said, "of course this school is not a democracy, and in negotiations student power is very limited," in "Perspective." MIM sees the student activism on this subject as an attempt to take on a system at what seems to be a manageable level--the local one. What students should do instead is mobilize with the international proletariat, with confidence in its long-term power. University officials and Democratic Party bosses are only too willing to pour some of the international gravy of super-exploitation into the trough of Amerikan workers-- especially if it will visibly quell some would-be activists. While the minimum wage of the United $tates is more than 10 times the average wage of the Third World proletariat, the campaign is in effect seeking to make that gap more than 20 times with its $10.25 plus benefits demand. That is the gap that is tied to Amerikan imperialism's ability to justify its military support of dictatorships and death squads to repress labor organizers in the Third World. Thanks to the much higher living standard which averages 40 times the Third World living standard, the people within U.$. borders connive with Uncle Sam. When students have food, shelter and clothing, while they study, they can thank the Third World proletariat for making that possible for next-to-nothing. Likewise, in the Harvard Medical School and hospitals, large resources go to elaborate care for Amerikans. The care itself may be paid for locally, but it would not be possible to have such a large health and health research sector if it were not for super-exploited Third World labor making the necessities of life cheaper, so that privileged imperialist country people may work in other sectors like health, research and high-tech. While there is a big hoopla lately about "intellectual property," what really needs addressing is how it is possible to have "intellectual property," unless productive sector workers have already done the work for food, shelter and clothing. Labor organizing should start from the bottom up, not the top-down. The real bottom is not Harvard's workers, but the Third World proletariat. Notes: 1. See MIM Notes 230 15 Mar 2001 and MIM Notes 229 1 Mar 2001.