This week, HUDS workers are striking for affordable healthcare and a sustainable yearly income. They’re on the defensive, fighting to keep their current coverage as Harvard proposes massive cuts. It’s about economic justice and how Harvard treats the lowest-paid, hardest-working folks on campus. And it’s also so gay. Gayer than brunch, probably.
Time and again, dining hall staff members have gone to bat for queer students and workers. In an old Crimson story, Adams House chef Ed Childs remembers the harassment endured by queer students before housing assignments were randomized in the late ‘90s. Adams became a target because it was known as the queer dorm. “[Anti-LGBTQ students] pissed into the dining hall through the windows,” Ed explains. “It was our workers that chased them away.” At one point, when anti-LGBTQ sentiment was especially high, Adams House dining hall workers wore shirts that said, “We’re All Gay.”
Dining hall workers also won one of America’s first sexual orientation non-discrimination provisions. “In the eighties,” Ed told me in an interview, “we said…this anti-discrimination clause has to be in the package, or we’re striking.” And, he added, HUDS workers are fighting for non-discrimination protections based on gender identity in this year’s round of negotiations.
But that’s not the only reason to say, “Yaaaaas, queen” to the HUDS strike. HUDS workers are fighting for affordable healthcare and a sustainable yearly income, and those issues are as queer as it gets.
Queer and trans people are disproportionately low-income because they are kicked out of their homes, denied jobs by discriminatory employers, and marginalized in schools. In a 2012 study, 29 percent of queer people reported experiencing a time “in the last [year] when they did not have enough money to feed themselves or their family.” Almost 20 percent of children living with female same-sex couples and 25 percent of children living with male same-sex couples are in poverty (that’s true for only 12 percent of children living with married different-sex couples). And transgender people are four times more likely to live in poverty than Americans at large.
Queer Americans are also more likely to be people of color than non-queer Americans, and they experience heightened economic marginalization at the intersection of racism, heterosexism, and cissexism. A third of black trans people and 28 percent of Latinx trans people make less than $10,000 in annual household income, and a full three quarters of queer Asians and Pacific Islanders have experienced discrimination at work. Queer young people, especially, are often forced into poverty because the harassment they face in their homes, schools, and workplaces makes it impossible to find stability or meaningful economic opportunity. Queer people are prevented from acquiring wealth on the basis of our queerness. That’s why economic justice—including HUDS workers’ right to a livable yearly income—is queer.
Access to healthcare is an especially queer issue. Right now, HUDS workers are on the defensive, fighting to keep their current healthcare plan. Harvard’s negotiating team has proposed sweeping cuts that would ratchet up co-pays so workers have to pay more out of pocket. HUDS workers are already some of the hardest-working and lowest-paid folks on campus. They can’t take a hit like that.
The proposed co-pay increases would devastate queer and trans workers in particular. When we make healthcare unaffordable, we keep queer and trans people from accessing gender-affirming treatments, like hormone therapy and gender-confirmation surgery. This is a queer issue, and the cuts proposed by Harvard are anti-LGBTQ.
Economic justice is inseparable from queer liberation, and that’s why supporting the strike—by joining the picket line near your House, bringing food to workers, and encouraging your friends to get involved, too—is very queer indeed. Let’s come out for economic justice.
Ted G. Waechter ’18, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Quincy House.
