Georgetown Students and Janitors

Last week a group of students at Georgetown University staged a hunger strike to protest the minimum wage for janitors at the school; they wanted it raised to a "living wage," of $14 per hour. Yesterday the school agreed to the demands of roughly two dozen striking students. Don Boudreaux offers his thoughts at Cafe Hayak:

I have nothing against Georgetown U. raising the amount it pays to its janitors. But the full picture of this little episode is different than the cropped snapshots that I see in the newspapers and hear on the local radio stations. The pop image is of selfless, concerned students making a noble sacrifice to help voiceless, hapless janitors get a better deal from a penny-pinching University bureaucracy.

Boudreaux correctly points out that Georgetown currently gets all the janitors it needs at the current wage, and offering more would be "charity," which although a nice gesture, it's far from being morally obligatory.

Now there’s nothing wrong with charity; I applaud it (when it’s done wisely). But why, in this case, did the hunger-striking students single out Georgetown University as an alleged malefactor? Why was the janitors’ employer targeted for its failure to extend charity?

Why didn’t the hunger-strikers demand that George Mason University or Catholic University extend charity to Georgetown University’s janitors? Or why didn’t these strikers demand that all merchants in Northwest DC extend charity to these janitors?

An additional problem I have with Georgetown caving to the students' demands is that a tiny minority of students are allowed to establish the "appropriate norms" for wages. Whose to say that $50k is reasonable instead of $100k? This exercise in socialism is appropriate to foster students for life in Cuba or even Scandanavia, but not for life in the U.S.

When tuition rises and/or fewer janitors are hired next year, I don't want to hear anyone complaining.