Rosa Ines Rivera had had enough.
She had cooked meals for students in Harvard University’s dining halls for 17 years but found it increasingly difficult to make ends meet for herself and her own two young children. Then, during labor-contract negotiations this summer, Harvard resisted a proposed raise for its food-service workers, telling negotiators for Unite Here Local 26, the labor union representing the workers, that it needed to raise their health-care costs even more.
“That sparked a little bit of a flame” among her co-workers, says Ms. Rivera (above, left), “and we decided to add fuel to it.”
She gave voice to struggling campus service workers.
Hundreds of dining-hall workers at Harvard struck on October 5, the first such action at the university in more than 30 years. The strike lasted for 21 days, generated national headlines, and focused attention on income inequality at one of academe’s wealthiest and most elite institutions — a contrast that resonated for many in an era of social-justice protests. Ms. Rivera became the public face of the strike, and of the paradox at its heart.
Ms. Rivera, 41, grew up in the Boston area with the dream of becoming a lawyer, but that dream hasn’t come to pass — yet. She worked as a hairdresser and as a dispatcher for a security company before joining Harvard University Dining Services in 2000. She works as a cook in the T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The people who made a mark on higher education — for better or worse.
Harvard pays its dining-hall workers well compared with other food-service jobs in the Boston area, and it offers benefits that most other such jobs don’t, including health insurance, vacation, and tuition reimbursement.
But Ms. Rivera says she struggled as the cost of living in the Boston area soared. She also felt that she and her co-workers were never really welcomed as full members of the Harvard community, and were “basically treated like we don’t have an opinion on things, like change won’t affect us.”
When negotiations between the university and Unite Here sputtered to a stop, Ms. Rivera made her voice heard not only on the picket line but also through an essay in The New York Times. She wrote about losing her apartment this summer when she fell behind on rent. She discussed how her trouble affording health-insurance co-pays led her to weigh which medical costs to incur — a hearing test to rule out surgery for her 8-year-old daughter versus an appointment to check out a spot on her own lung. She also put her liberty on the line, at least temporarily, when she was arrested during a sit-in in Harvard Square.
She says she was especially frustrated that her employer, the wealthiest university in the world and an exemplar of intellectual capital and humanist ideals, would fail to reach an initial deal with its lowest paid full-time employees. “That’s just what I couldn’t get through my head,” she says. “Why are we even out here? This is an institution that has the best brains in the world, and they can’t come together to solve this?”
The union and the university eventually reached a deal that met worker demands for a minimum full-time salary of $35,000 and no increase in health-care costs. Ms. Rivera is back at work, and cautiously optimistic about how the deal, and the strike, will improve life for low-income workers at Harvard and elsewhere. “I think we sent a message to the world, not just Harvard,” she says. “I’m more than a lunch lady.”
Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.
