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Policies Embraced by Harvard Profs Led to Dining Services Strike

Policies Embraced by Harvard Profs Led to Dining Services Strike

“Who cares if you’re paying more than minimum wage?”

https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/161020-harvard-protests-feature.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=664&h=441&crop=1

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone at Harvard that the very financial policies embraced and pushed by its faculty have brought the school to its present state.

Naomi Schaefer Riley writes at the New York Post:

Harvard’s minimum wage protests was caused by its own professors

It’s always fun to share in the struggle when you get to skip out on class. According to an account in the Crimson, “After chants of ‘No justice, no peace!’ subsided, [professor] Timothy P. McCarthy ascended the steps of University Hall to address the crowd, which had reached hundreds of people. McCarthy announced to cheers that he had ‘cut short’ his lecture in ‘American Protest Literature from Tom Paine to Tupac’ to walk out with his students.”

Harvard’s undergraduates clearly see the plight of its dining-hall workers as the latest story of oppression in American history. But they seem not to see that Harvard professors actually support the very policies that have put the university in this bind.

In 2014, 10 Harvard scholars sent a letter to Congress insisting that an increase in the minimum wage would not negatively affect employment rates.

Indeed, former Harvard Law professor and current Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has testified before Congress in favor of a $22 minimum wage…

The assumption of these liberal scholars is that the rich who run corporations (or “nonprofit” institutions in this case) are simply hoarding money. If we want the poor to get more money, employers of these workers should just pay them more. And if they don’t, we should get the government to mandate that they do.

Who cares if you’re paying more than minimum wage? If you have more money, fork it over. Why shouldn’t dining-hall workers make as much as English professors? The laws of supply and demand simply don’t enter into the thinking of pointy-headed students and faculty.

The real sticking point in negotiations with the dining-hall workers is rising health insurance premiums. The cost of health insurance has gone up somewhere around 20% nationwide because of the Affordable Care Act. Insurance companies are canceling plans left and right, and the pool of insured people are older and less healthy than forecasters projected — meaning that it’s going to get worse.

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Comments

A victim of Obamacare.
Gruber? Gruber?…..Gruber?