Part of Harvard’s money in the early aughts went to accumulate land in nearby Allston for the development of a science-and-engineering complex. There was no reason for Harvard to think that the purchase of Hilton DoubleTree Suites, conveniently located near this campus-in-the-making, would be different from any of its other investments. It was profitable in 2006, and by 2014 it would be bringing in millions. Since Harvard is a less experienced producer of hotels than of endowments or future presidents, Harvard Management Corporation kept Hilton on to manage it (Hilton has about hundreds of these owner-operator agreements worldwide). The hotel hosts innumerable Harvard events, mostly for the nearby Harvard Business School.
Which brings us back to all those strange
Harvard Crimson corrections, appended in 2013 and 2014 to articles dating back to 2005. Each one reads: “An earlier version of headline of this article and statements in the article stated that the DoubleTree Suites hotel is Harvard-owned. To clarify, the company is housed in a Harvard-owned building.” Harvard’s sudden reticence to claim its property stemmed from a straightforward labor dispute that would last three years and, in the end, lay bare the tension between a burgeoning corporate feminism and the rights of working-class women. A battle with 60 housekeepers at the Boston-Cambridge DoubleTree Suites by Hilton Hotel offered a startling view into the perverse role of feminism within 21st-century capitalism when they asked Harvard’s first female president for help, and for one of Harvard’s most famous graduates, Sheryl Sandberg (BA 1991, MBA 1995), to lean in with them.
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Part of Harvard’s money in the early aughts went to accumulate land in nearby Allston for the development of a science-and-engineering complex. There was no reason for Harvard to think that the purchase of Hilton DoubleTree Suites, conveniently located near this campus-in-the-making, would be different from any of its other investments. It was profitable in 2006, and by 2014 it would be bringing in millions. Since Harvard is a less experienced producer of hotels than of endowments or future presidents, Harvard Management Corporation kept Hilton on to manage it (Hilton has about hundreds of these owner-operator agreements worldwide). The hotel hosts innumerable Harvard events, mostly for the nearby Harvard Business School.
Which brings us back to all those strange
Harvard Crimson corrections, appended in 2013 and 2014 to articles dating back to 2005. Each one reads: “An earlier version of headline of this article and statements in the article stated that the DoubleTree Suites hotel is Harvard-owned. To clarify, the company is housed in a Harvard-owned building.” Harvard’s sudden reticence to claim its property stemmed from a straightforward labor dispute that would last three years and, in the end, lay bare the tension between a burgeoning corporate feminism and the rights of working-class women. A battle with 60 housekeepers at the Boston-Cambridge DoubleTree Suites by Hilton Hotel offered a startling view into the perverse role of feminism within 21st-century capitalism when they asked Harvard’s first female president for help, and for one of Harvard’s most famous graduates, Sheryl Sandberg (BA 1991, MBA 1995), to lean in with them.
...
A month and a half after declaring their intent to form a union, and a few weeks after cleaning the rooms of the very W-50 attendees whom Sandberg urged to stand up for themselves at work, the DoubleTree workers
filed charges of unfair labor practices with the National Labor Relations Board, accusing Hilton of interfering in their unionization process. Instead of allowing for what unions call a fair process, Hilton wanted a ballot-box election. The problem with such elections is that they can be held on the premises, and the employer can keep out supportive workers on the day of the election. Without a fair-process agreement, the employer can also show workers anti-union propaganda and engage in threatening behavior like speaking to them individually about the harm that a union will do to their jobs
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One month later, with the boycott ongoing, one of the union organizers heard that Sheryl Sandberg would be coming to give a speech at Harvard’s class day on May 28. Lemus headed up a petition effort to persuade Sheryl Sandberg to lead a Lean In circle with the DoubleTree workers, all women who hoped to better their working conditions with many of the benefits Sandberg had demanded for herself—maternity accommodations, wage increases, and so forth. The DoubleTree housekeepers made a lo-fi video in front of the hotel: “Sheryl!,” they say, “we are leaning in!”
The Boston Globe covered their plea, as did the
Crimson. The housekeepers figured that if Sandberg talked with Harvard administrators, they might listen to one of their most famous graduates. According to the union, Sandberg said she didn’t have time. Or, in Lemus’s blunter assessment: “Maybe she wasn’t going to have a moment for those of us who are just workers in the lower classes. She had more important things with people from upper classes.”
Sandberg
spoke at class day, charmingly. She thanked the crowd for being there “given the weather, the one thing Harvard hasn’t figured out how to control.” Meanwhile, two City Council members
boycotted graduation, noting that they were “ashamed” of Harvard’s resistance to a fair process for DoubleTree workers
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What the majority of women want has, in many ways, not changed—economic security, good and accessible childcare, freedom from violence, the pleasures of life with enough education and leisure time to allow us to flourish. But intractable problems remain: Pregnancy is penalized by lack of time off, or time off for women but not for men, which exacerbates the wage gap. Childcare has been deemed unaffordable by the Department of Health and Human Services in every single state. Ninety-eight percent of women in abusive relationships are subject to financial abuse, and a woman without an income has a hard time getting away—a topic that was the subject of Sandberg’s own undergraduate thesis, “Economic Factors and Intimate Violence.” Luckily, we actually know quite a bit about how to fix these things. In Sweden, women
and men are motivated to take parental time off (if the man doesn’t take his time, they both lose some), ensuring family time and a smaller wage gap. We know that universal childcare, as organized in Norway, produces happy kids and greater gender equity. In fact, America
almost had something comparable in 1971, when a bill for universal childcare passed both houses, only to be vetoed by Nixon under the influence of a young Pat Buchanan.
Lobbying for universal childcare, unionization, or any of the other things we know help most women would mean making enemies in a way that advocating for “empowerment” or “banning bossy” never would. It would mean a fight not just with Republicans (Sandberg gives money mostly to Democrats, although she has paid into Olympia’s List and Facebook’s PAC, both of which have supported several Republicans), but with Democrats, too, and maybe even some of Sandberg’s pals on the Davos circuit. It would mean being political, and it would not serve her as PR. It would not help Facebook. But it would place her considerable resources in the service of women. Without solidaristic feminism, in the words of Osorio, “you haven’t solved the problem. You’ve just solved your problem.”
When I asked Lemus what she would have Sandberg do, she offered that Sandberg had enough money to make the government listen to the needs of women. Osorio noted that Sandberg might listen to women who are unlike her. The problem is not that women like Sandberg and Faust have failed to be saviors; as the DoubleTree workers have shown, working-class women are leading their own movements and stand at the head of their own struggles. It’s that women like the DoubleTree housekeepers
are doing the concrete work of increasing equality, and women like Faust and Sandberg are thwarting instead of helping them. It is possible for a woman to sound like a feminist, and serve the function of The Man. We don’t need them to lead us, but if they aren’t going to express solidarity, they can at least get out of the way.
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