A note to those who are not from the University of Massachusetts at Boston (UMB). This is one of a series of items on greed and related issues, in particular how these subjects are manifested at UMB. All persons and references are, if not given here, identified in the earlier items, titled Greed 001, 101, 102 and 103, which are also on my website. Other notes are either in progress or planned.

      In my last note, Teaching Hierarchy, I dwelt primarily on the academic and administrative parts of the UMB hierarchy. However, the overall hierarchy at the university contains another part, and it too has an instructive role. On "our" campus, in addition to students, faculty, administrators, librarians and other technical staff, there is also a group of people who are accorded essentially no recognition, people who, in the eyes of what Penney likes to refer to as members of "our community", are largely unseen--invisible.

      They are the people who do the real shitwork, picking up trash, cleaning the toilets and urinals, removing graffitti, and so on. In hierarchical status, they are even "below" the students, beneath recognition, and although this is not formally incorporated into the syllabus of any course of which I'm aware, students learn to not see these people. Students learn, as most of us have, that although they do honest work, they "don't count", in the eyes of the academic "community."

      I was reminded of their existence one Friday afternoon (4/11/97) when I got a phone call alerting me to the planned removal of all "unauthorized" postings outside of my office within a day or so by the cleaning crew. A few weeks earlier I had gotten a memorandum saying this was going to be done in order to conform with the fire code. It angered me at the time, because I suspected it was just an administration ploy to restrict communication among faculty and students, supposedly justified by reference to the city fire code.

      Now removal was imminent. So I telephoned L (previously I used K, B, and Z for persons I preferred to leave unnamed), and asked for a copy of the Boston Fire Ordinance. L, claiming 35 years residence in Boston and familiarity with the code, did not offer to provide a printed copy, but told me that in fire egress corridors the requirement was: no more than 10 per cent of the total surface area--floors, ceilings, walls, doors--could be covered with combustible materials.

      At my office there was clearly no question of violation. No carpets in the corridor, some papers posted on my door, and a bulletin board opposite. L agreed this area was below the 10 per cent, and said bulletin boards were exempt, which I hadn't heard before.

      L explained to me the reason for exempting bulletin boards. It was an ad hoc way of conforming with the 10 per cent limit. Cleaning is done through a contractor, who hires the cleaning crew. Of about 25 crew members only one, L said, speaks English. They are mostly hispanic, and are capable of understanding instructions to remove everything except postings on bulletin boards. It was a way to have "illiterates" do the job. More complex instructions would be incomprehensible to them. The idea of instructing them in Spanish never surfaced.

      I was angered that the university hires a contractor, who undoubtedly pays the workers miserably, but L claimed they are paid what they're worth, at the same rates other contractors pay. That same argument--if people are paid at the market rate, it's fair--can also be used to justify American manufacturers who pay Haitian women 11-12 cents per hour to sew clothing (see Greed 101).

      L, whose annual pay is $66,625.00, after saying the crew members are ignorant people who can't read [English], later claimed the university is very supportive if one of them shows initiative and wants to learn English. It would be interesting to find out the extent to which this is true. I am skeptical: more likely it was a statement L made, in the course of a somewhat heated exchange, to defend the university's policy of contracting out the cleaning.

      There's no doubt the administration uses contract labor to do the cleaning simply because it's the cheapest way to get it done. The fact that people forced by economic circumstances to work for low pay are also human beings who have the same needs and desires as all of us is not something the administrators take account of. Their paramount goal is to cut costs, except their own pay and benefits. The existence of a hierarchical structure gives them the power to exploit other people's honest labor. And the ideology of hierarchy allows them to feel justified because the other people are "worth less." Down with hierarchy!

Sharon Penney Livingston 161,950.36 chancellor UMB

Jean F. MacCormack 133,250.00 vice chancellor administration and finance and deputy chancellor

Michael F. Luck 128,124.88 vice chancellor for development

Louis Esposito 127,304.32 vice chancellor for academic affairs and provost

Betty Diener 127,177.95 professor of marketing and management and exec. direc., EBC-N.E.

Eric Wylie Hayden 120,820.96 dean of college of management

Edmund C. Toomey 112,380.84 executive assistant to chancellor

Edward C. O'Malley Jr 109,489.64 vice chancellor for external relations

Charles F. Desmond 108,932.72 vice chancellor for student affairs

Brenda S. Cherry 107,495.44 dean of college of nursing

Christine Armett-Kibel 105,061.32 dean of sciences faculty

Donald D. Babcock 103,912.12 senior associate vice chancellor for administration and finance

Barry A. Bluestone 103,785.24 professor of political science

Robert L. Woodbury 102,499.80 director of McCormack institute

Joseph J. Cooney 100,485.84 professor of environmental science

Bernard W. Harleston 100,052.16 professor and director, doctoral program in higher education administration

Total of the above 1,953,456.43

      If the annual pay of each of these individuals was reduced to $50,000, the $1,103,456.43 thereby "found" could go toward eliminating the extreme injustices at the low end of the pay hierarchy. I believe that in all likelihood it would entail no real hardships, especially because persons in the 100,000-or-more income brackets normally have portfolios of stocks, bonds, and other paper instruments, the income from which would not be affected.

      The figures are from Faculty and Staff Salary Listing, dated 11/18/96, supplied to me by the Dept of Human Resources. They are shown as "annual rate[s]"of pay. A copy is available at the Reserve Desk of the library.

      Because my preliminary draft of Greed 104 relied in part on my recollection of our telephone conversation, I sent L a copy for corrections of any inaccuracies it might contain, and included as well the earlier items in the Greed series. Rather than trying to incorporate (or contest) parts of L's response, particularly because it has not substantially altered my view, I made only one minor correction (20 years -> 35 years, in the 5th paragraph), and for fairness include L's entire memorandum. --8/17/97

      Your recent note asked me to review the article for inaccuracies and such and I have done so. I resent the article from several perspectives.

      1. It does contain at least one inaccuracy -- I do not believe that I ever said that our janitorial services people are "ignorant" -- at least not the way you presented it. I did say that because they have not yet learned English, they have limited marketability in an English-speaking country. But that is a far cry from ignorant. To put this in context, I would not expect to receive an $80,000 salary if I moved to Costa Rica and could not speak Spanish! Nonetheless, it is generally factually accurate -- though in substance horribly wrong.

      2. I actually claim 35 years residency in the Boston area. Virtually all of those years have been spent in close working relationships with various municipal fire departments.

      3. I do not consider it to be part of my job to provide you with copies of BFD's and the Commonwealth's fire regulations. For you to imply that something was wrong with my lack of compliance with your request is misleading and improper. If the topic is interesting enough to you and you feel that you cannot believe me, please show some initiative and get copies for yourself. The university does not pay me to do research for you.

      4. I think you misunderstood the role of bulletin boards. They are not exempt under the fire codes: they are merely part of an enforcement strategy. This information was explained in the earlier campus community announcement.

      5. The concept of "paying workers miserably" is ill-informed. It is not my job to teach you Economics, but briefly, a worker is "worth" what he or she can negotiate for his/her services from an employer who is not acting under duress. Your concept of "to each according to his needs" is socialistic and unworkable. Reading Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, or Frederich Hayek would be helpful to you on this point. Frankly, I do not have the time (nor does the university pay me) to explicate this point fully, but your views on wages and worth are horribly flawed and you should be embarrassed to expose them in public.

          6. I resent your implication that I am not "worth" $66K. I am torn between defending myself (my credentials, my experience, my salary history, and my real-world accomplishments) and my inclination to let people alone. Oops. The latter won.

      7. For your information, 2% of our in-house workforce are Hispanic and 2% are Portugese. I have encouraged several of our most diligent contract janitorial services staff to apply for current openings. I don't like being called a liar.

      8. Of course, the university tries to obtain all necessary services, including janitorial services, at the lowest possible cost. Anything less would be evil vis-a-vis the taxpayers (most of whom earn under $30000 and have families to feed) or the students.

      I am offended that you think that "greed" is a serious motivator for me: I was "greedy" (just another word for saying that I want my son to have an education and my mother not to have to sponge off the (often poor) taxpayers and that I'm willing to pay the freight to make sure that they get good services from people who are well paid and want to provide education and health care to others) when I was young and had a child to educate and a family to support but, in my current old age, I am financially secure (two pensions and a sizeable nestegg of hard-earned savings) and am working at a fractional salary (in previous lives I earned up to $160000 per annum) because I enjoy making a positive impact on students, faculty, administrators, coworkers, and taxpayers. Your misunderstanding of my motivation can only be ascribed to your "projection" of your own greed on me.

      To move away from defense, I think that you have a couple of good points but you are exuding envy and greed. If you are so unhappy in this environment, you are educated and you do have options and I would encourage you to make the most of your time and talents and find an employer who is willing to give you the salary that you are "worth".

      Finally, you seem unaware of the fact that I am, politically, an anarchist (My favorite bumperstickers are "TANSTAAFL" and Black Flags.). I do not however believe that hierarchical relationships are necessarily evil; they are only evil when coercion or fraud is the basis of the relationship. Unhappily, some people are more talented, attractive, intelligent, diligent, innovative, athletic, or whatever than others and it is appropriate (and in the long run good for society) that those people be paid more than folks who offer less to their employers. Do you also begrudge Dennis Rodman, Mo Vaughn, Dustin Hoffman, or Oprah Winfrey their salaries! Let's go for it -- everybody gets $30 per annum and no one will do anything including production of food and shelter and medicine and transport!

      Don't mean to sound so bitchy -- actually, I am in a relatively good mood and don't want to dump on you, but you did ask for it. Communism has failed in Russia and China; Mercantilism will fail in the United States and Western Europe within the next 50 years or so. Onward and upward.