This is disgusting. For any institution and any job. If you can’t pay your people a living wage, you deserve to go out of business. Society should not be in the business of subsidizing businesses in this manner.
All employers should be paying living wages. I said as much in my first post.
But they won’t pay them enough to be able to feed themselves?
At the current minimum annual salary of $40k, a single student wouldn't be eligible for SNAP amyways, the income threshold for a household size of 1 is $29,160.
You'd need a household size of at least 3 to be eligible, with total household income under $49k. So you, a spouse and 1 child, or you and two children, etc.
This feels deliberately obtuse. The second half of the submitted article headline is "Even Though It's the Richest School In The World With A $53 Billion Endowment". Obviously people think Harvard should pay its graduate students more so that they wouldn't need food stamps.
The benefit of doing that instead is it would help approximately 1000 times the number of people than raising Harvard grad student pay would.
It's worth noting that Harvard grad students are the ones getting attention here, and not the average person getting squeezed by rent. Are you going to whack-a-mole every single employer in the Boston MSA to pay at least $60k? Even if you did this, the increased pay would just go to inflated housing costs.
The underlying problem is a scarcity of housing, you can't fix that by giving people (in aggregate) more money. It will just bid up the cost of the scarce good.
And none of this really affects whether or not grad students should be encouraged to apply for whatever government benefits they are eligible for. Harvard doesn't control where the federal government sets the income cutoffs for benefits.
Nevertheless I'm sure highlighting this is a good way to grab attention.
This is a single article, and a single article can only usefully highlight a single issue. If news articles could only talk about the worst problems in the world, then perhaps every news article in the world would be about climate change. Which perhaps wouldn't be a bad thing! But still, this is a red herring, because other news articles do in fact talk about the average person getting squeezed by rent.
> Are you going to whack-a-mole every single employer in the Boston MSA to pay at least $60k?
Not every employer in the Boston area has a $50 billion endowment.
Harvard's minimum pay is almost 3x that amount. If we assume a 40 hour work week, it comes out to $19.23/hour. That is well within the range for what most advocacy groups are calling a living wage. For example, this site pegs it at $18/hour for Suffolk county in Massachusetts: https://livingwageforus.org/tier-i-certification/
"The average rent for a Boston one-bedroom is $3,215 a month. Ljunggren said it’s not uncommon for students to be paying $2,000 a month for a studio apartment, or living with multiple roommates to cover a $4,000-a-month two-bedroom." https://www.vice.com/en/article/93kwaa/harvard-tells-grad-st...
Perfectly nice Somerville 2BR units appear to be available for a bit above $2k/mo, and they quite a bit more conveniently located to Harvard than most of Boston is.
A more robust estimate suggests that the living wage is actually $22.59 in this area.
The federal minimum wage is highly politicized and the 'right'/'Republican's'/'business' have always lobbied to keep it low. To have cheap labor.
But Food-Stamps/Welfare is driven by what is the minimum to live.
In a perfect world, yes the Minimum Wage should be high enough to match what it takes to live. Then there would not be a need for Welfare (if working). Minimum Wage should match the maximum for qualifying for Welfare.
But since different groups have different goals in driving the two programs, they do not match.
That attitude speaks very poorly of Harvard, but is not surprising. Just another data point that they only want the brethren of the rich, they don’t want smart but poorer talent.
Does this institution deserve any USG grant money?
Correct me if I am wrong.
Legacies are a subset of that 30%.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/us/politics/harvard-admis...
Of course Harvard (one of the best universities in the world) deserves USG grants.
From the government perspective, is better to have someone making low income with food stamps then entirely unemployed and relying on more social benefits.
Businesses raise wages when no one will accept the job at that wage. Social benefits like food stamps allow individuals to take jobs at lower wage, and therefore drive down the price.
> Social benefits like food stamps allow individuals to take jobs at lower wage, and therefore drive down the price.
So subsidizing corporate workforce exploitation with taxes. Terrible idea.
This is why programs like food stamps and disability support take into account the situation of the individual
Walmart doesn't pay a wage that would allow its employees to be housed, showered and fed as they report to work and yet, they get employees that are and all the benefits that come with it. They should be hiring exclusively from the homeless at the rate they wish to pay.
Why not underpay people if the taxpayers will pick up the slack?
Why not dump waste in the rivers if the taxpayers will clean it up?
It's not like there is a penalty for doing so, beyond the occasional slap in the wrist.
As other comments have noted there are income limits for SNAP. A single person working at Walmart full time would make too much for SNAP. So would a family of two with both people working at Walmart. It looks like same for a family of two adults working at Walmart that has 2 kids (who do not work). A family of two adults with no kids with only one adult working would be right near the boundary.
Without more information on the distribution of family size and type among Walmart workers the Sanders numbers aren't very useful. To illustrate how much family composition can matter, I've known Mormon families that would have qualified for SNAP if the working parent had taken an entry level engineering job at Google, and no one would ever seriously say that an entry level Google engineering job does not pay a living wage.
To compare this with an area HN is more familiar with, the equivalent to a grad student would be a junior developer fresh out of college in their first 3-5 years. Of course they don't know everything yet and they need some education and mentoring. But that doesn't mean it isn't a real job they do.
The job grad students do is roughly the same they'd do later if they stay in research.
You're expected to perform atleast 40 hours of research, often if not 1.5x more. Experimental research involves setting up and conducting them, while theoretical research involves standardizing the set of rules that one should seek in an experiment: modeling. All kinds of work involve literature review, writing, designing plots, coming up with scientifically sound creative ideas. All that with tight deadlines too.
I don't see why this should be any less than a job.
I agree, which is why I'm not sympathetic if "AI" ends up driving most of the creative occupations (stereotypical destitute artist, replacable office drone, etc.) to extinction.
This framing doesn't make any sense. People need to eat regardless of whether they work for Harvard or not. If they didn't work for Harvard the government still need to pay for the food stamps. Therefore it's not really clear how we're suddenly "subsidizing" Harvard if the person in question decided to work for them.
in other words, the gov't is subsidizing the cost of said person, who in turn, is "subsidizing" harvard. So by the transitive rule, the gov't is subsidizing harvard.
But other companies are also doing this, Walmart being biggest example.
If there is entire group of people that is subsidized labor, then yes all the companies are benefiting. Harvard just seems like extra disgusting because they are a rich institution of learning, and should do better. While for Walmart, we kind of expect them to use slave labor, it is expected.
https://www.mic.com/articles/104994/walmart-workers-have-a-b...
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/walmart-mcdonalds-larges...
This is a bizarre argument. Harvard graduate students aren't doing it for graduate student pay, as if they couldn't get better paying jobs. Graduate school is just a temporary gig, a pit stop for the sake of their much higher life ambitions. They wouldn't be on food stamps if they weren't grad students.
If you're putting it that way, being an undergraduate is even worse. Like graduate students, their program is "just a temporary gig, a pit stop for the sake of their much higher life ambitions", but unlike graduate students you don't even get paid. Should we also be mad that undergraduates are on food stamps?
That's because they aren't doing work for the university, unlike graduate students.
> Should we also be mad that undergraduates are on food stamps?
Yes? Of course! It's strange that you didn't seem to anticipate this answer.
If GM isn’t paying a single mom enough that her kids don’t earn out of receiving Pell Grants, is the Department of Education “subsidizing” GM?
Social Security is a net payout win (i.e. a transfer payment, long term) for most lower-income workers. Is it subsidizing employers?
The “living wage” argument is really an argument that the government should turn over the responsibility of running the social safety net to private businesses (e.g. Harvard must pay a single mother more—enough to level past food stamps). I don’t think this is actually anyone’s desired end-state.
While I understand your argument and it's not factually wrong, it misses a few key details - chiefly the one that private businesses continue to try to lower costs by any and every means necessary, including seeking out and taking advantage of cheaper labor, and by participating in regulatory capture. Both of these are highly counter-productive to the overall health of the country's economy. If private businesses insist on being able to pollute, engage in anticomptetive practices, corrupt our lawmakers - all to ensure that they make more money, we have to as a society insist that yes, they MUST pay more to their laborers, especially if the businesses insist that they continue to pay their C-Suite an inordinate amount of money for no particular reason.
A system where corporations take on government responsibilities in return for monopoly powers and other market barriers is something like the worst of all possible worlds.
Regulatory capture sucks, but good luck telling a congressman that they can't accept ~bribes~ donations or promises of cushy future employment situations (or jobs for their relatives) in exchange for favorable legislation. Those who are uniquely positioned to end the problem are also uniquely positioned to reap tremendous rewards from ignoring the problem.