by Allie Martin and Jody Brown
(AgapePress) – A student newspaper at one of the nation's most “progressive” universities is using Third World labor for a massive project. Ironically, the publication regularly runs editorials encouraging school officials to pay campus workers a living wage.
The Harvard Crimson, the nation's oldest continuously published college paper, is setting up a free Internet archive going back to its first edition in 1873. In order to complete the $500,000 project, the Crimson is hiring about two dozen Cambodian workers to typeset the 19th-century editions of the newspaper.
According to the Boston Globe, each Cambodian worker is paid about 40 cents an hour — a slight raise over the minimum wage garment factory jobs they held before.
C. Matthew MacInnis, a Harvard senior and the Crimson's president, admitted the project put the paper at odds with a protest movement under way campus-wide which calls for U.S. businesses to stop exploiting low-wage, Third World workers as a source of cheap labor. Still, MacInnis said it would be impossible to complete the project otherwise.
“Are we getting cheap labor? Of course,” MacInnis said. “But you can't employ someone in North America to do this kind of job at this cost.”
The report in the Globe indicates student activists on the Harvard campus are upset at what one described as the “same kind of shenanigans as the university.” Another said it was “morally reprehensible” for the Crimson to sidestep paying a living wage after it endorsed a recent protest on campus demanding the school pay its employees a living wage of $10.25 an hour.
(This update courtesy of Agape Press.)
