This year twelve thousand UNITE HERE hotel workers are taking on Marriott, the largest and wealthiest hotel company in the world. They are fighting to make one job enough to live in the cities where they work, to support their families and to be able to retire with dignity.

With its annual operating budget of $4.5 billion, Harvard University is a major customer of Marriott hotels.

Like Harvard, Marriott sets a global standard for its peers, with its net worth of $47 billion just barely exceeding Harvard’s $44 billion net assets.

We call on Harvard, a major customer of Marriott, to sign the One Job Should Be Enough pledge supporting Marriott workers.

We endorse workers’ priorities of safer working conditions and compensation proportional to the rising cost of living. We view as unsustainable a status quo under which cocktail servers like Courtney Leonard “commute over 100 miles every day to work at Marriott because I can’t afford to live even remotely near my job in South Boston, where I was raised,” and housekeepers like seventy-one-year-old Mei Leung “can’t afford to retire, in part because she needs the money to pay for her husband’s prescriptions.” In Boston alone, Harvard has at least four events scheduled at disputed Marriott properties over the remainder of 2018.

Marriott’s profits have increased by 279% since the last recession, while American hotel workers’ wages have risen only 7% over the same period. By any measure—its annual revenues exceed $22 billion, its 1.2 million hotel rooms, its 177,000 employees—Marriott is the largest hotel company in the world, with all the moral obligations that title entails.

Our statement of values reads: “Whatever our individual roles, and wherever we work within Harvard, we owe it to one another to uphold certain basic values of the community. These include respect for the rights, differences, and dignity of others, [and] honesty and integrity in all dealings.”[1] We urge our fellow community members to speak out for these basic values by standing for Marriott hotel workers and against unsafe conditions and financial insecurity.