Welcome to the occupation

Maple Razsa, an organizer from last year's living wage sit-in at Harvard, talks about his documentary on the event, snooping administrators and Oprah's take on poverty.

By Chris Colin

Jun 3, 2002 | Harvard University is stunningly rich. It's the wealthiest nonprofit in the world after the Catholic Church. It lives off the interest of its $18 billion endowment, which has doubled in the last six years. And tuition could be eliminated without harming a single leaf of the school's ivy. But all those facts had a way of disappearing when it came time to pay campus service workers. Until this past year, the school got away with employing janitors, guards and dining hall employees at embarrassingly less than a living wage.

It was May 2001 that the Harvard Living Wage Campaign ended its 21-day occupation of the building housing the president's office, the longest sit-in in the university's history, and certainly one of the most effective. The campus group had been working for years to convince the school to begin paying workers a wage appropriate to living costs in the area. Over 1,000 campus employees were said to earn less than $10.25 an hour, the minimum wage in Cambridge, Mass. -- in many cases much less. Despite petitions, rallies and meetings with the administration, the group saw no results.

The sit-in was supposed to last about five days. But when support began to build (parallel protests outside became a tent city; Democratic Massachusetts Sens. John Kerry and Ted Kennedy came to voice solidarity; and most importantly, campus workers disregarded threats from employers and instead came to rally with the students) the protesters hunkered down.

Police maintained a constant presence in the occupied building, waiting for the students to slip up and surrender any of their seized territory. "I will resign before I will negotiate," said Neil L. Rudenstine, Harvard's president at the time. Three weeks after the protest began, Rudenstine changed his mind and agreed to form a committee of students, professors, administrators and union employees to review campus labor conditions. "These movements represent a new moral consciousness," Robert Reich said at the conclusion of the occupation.

Maple Razsa, one of the campaign's organizers, borrowed a digital video camera for the sit-in, and in the months after the protest, he directed and co-produced "Occupation," a documentary of the event. Narrated by Ben Affleck, whose father was a janitor and stepmother a cleaning woman at Harvard, the film has begun to attract attention. Historian Howard Zinn called it a "wonderful gift," and scenes from "Occupation" were recently shown on "Oprah." The film has been screened in small venues around the country, and in July will run at New York's Pioneer Theater.

I talked to Razsa recently (full disclosure: Maple is an old friend) about the living wage movement, life inside the sit-in -- there was one bathroom -- and Oprah's strange take on poverty.

How did you respond to critics who said, "These janitors don't have to work at Harvard. If they don't like their wages, why not let someone else take the job who actually wants the $8 an hour"?

You have to counter that by asking, why are people working two or three jobs? Are they foolish? Have they just not thought about all their options? If they thought they could get more money somewhere else, they'd have gone somewhere else.

Look at what's happened to low-paid workers around the country over the last 15 years. The minimum wage hasn't kept pace at all with the cost of living, so people end up working two or three jobs just to get by, whereas a single job as a janitor 15 years ago was much closer to being a professional position. You could make $40,000 a year as a janitor.

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