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One Year Later, A Sit-in’s Legacy

Living wage campaign looks to future

“She came to our first meetings along with a union representative from SEIU 254 and a BC custodian to explain the custodians’ contract, but now has helped in so many other ways in suggesting guidelines on how to get a campaign going,” Previtera writes in an e-mail message.

On campus, PSLM members have extended their role beyond the living wage campaign to become involved in other progressive movements.

After Enron’s fall, HarvardWatch, a monitoring group revived last year by members of PSLM, began putting pressure on Herbert S. “Pug” Winokur ’64-’65, a member of the Harvard Corporation and the chair of Enron’s Finance Committee, to resign from his post at Harvard.

And while PSLM and the living wage issue have become nearly synonymous, PSLM originally encompassed both the living wage campaign and Harvard Students Against Sweatshops.

In fact, there were two central demands of last spring’s sit-in—for Harvard to adopt a living wage and also to join the Worker’s Rights Consortium (WRC), an apparel manufacturing monitoring agency.

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While the living wage campaign took priority then, PSLM members may now have more time to spend on the unaddressed half of last spring’s demands.

Today, PSLM will stage what McKean described as a “protest/fashion show” in front of Mass. Hall, to call on the University to join WRC.

“PSLM started before the living wage campaign,” PSLM member Erik Beach ’02 says. “In the long term, not having to focus as much on the living wage allows us to broaden some of our focus.”

—Staff writer Joesph P. Flood can be reached at flood@fas.harvard.edu.

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