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Lambert here: Nice to see the Democrat nomenklatura putting on their comfortable shoes and walking the picket line, especially the college administrators and the big non-profit CEOs. No? Maybe it’s because the Harvard cafeteria workers aren’t women or people of color. Oh, wait…
By Michael Arria, an associate editor at AlterNet and AlterNet’s labor editor. Originally published at Alternet.
The United States’ Ivy League schools are commonly associated with old money, the offspring of the country’s ruling class and a certain symbolic power that inevitably drifts into the rest of the culture. Yet the last few months have been full of worker agitation at the most elite private institutions. Here’s a list of recent Ivy League labor fights.
1. Union bid at Columbia gives graduate students at private universities the right to unionize: In August, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that graduate research and teaching assistants are entitled to collective bargaining under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The ruling came in regards to a unionization attempt by grad students at Columbia University and it reverses a 2004 ruling (handed down in regards to Brown University) that determined teaching assistants and research assistants were not employees.
Writing about this huge ruling at In These Times, David Moberg explains how the decision could reverberate far beyond New York City:
[The ruling] could increase the rights and rewards of an important group of often underpaid workers in a growing sector with significant economic importance. Higher education depends increasingly on a vast infrastructure of contingent employees. In many cases, the declining standards for those lower ranks erode standards for tenured faculty. Together with student unions, these potentially newly-organized forces could pressure schools toward a more democratic American education.
2. Cafeteria workers at Harvard strike for better wages: The New York Times reports that there’s “no end in sight” in a dispute between Harvard University and the employees who work in its cafeterias. The 750 workers are represented by Local 26 and are seeking to be paid at least $35,000 a year, which would be a $5,000 increase from their current $30,000-a-year rate.
It’s hard for Harvard to claim poverty as the Cambridge school had a $36 billion endowment and a $63 million operating surplus last year. Harvard is currently putting out calls for unpaid volunteers to scab for the striking workers. In fact, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean of Administration and Finance Leslie A. Kirwan sent an email requesting staff help out in the dining hall:
“The dining halls are being staffed by HUDS [Harvard University Dining Services] managers, supplemented by Harvard colleagues from around the University who are pitching in to help with a shift or two. If you, or exempt staff [staff that aren’t paid hourly or eligible for overtime pay] in your department, are able to suspend some of your regular duties and instead lend a hand to HUDS, I know they would be most grateful.”
Tiffany Ten Eyck, a spokesperson for Local 26, told the Daily Beast: “Dining hall workers feel like they have really modest demands. Especially because Harvard has the resources that it does.”
3. Yale’s unions fight for a new contract: Yale’s clerical, technical and maintenance worker unions have spent the last six months fighting for a new contract before the January 20 deadline. Workers say that the campus is expanding but the rate of union jobs hasn’t been congruent with the development.
An article in Yale Daily News quotes Pamela O’Donnell, vice president of Local 34 and registrar of the economics department: “Job security for us means growing while the University grows in every area. And we would like to make sure that we get back some of those jobs that we had lost in 2008 because a lot of us are really overworked through attrition.”
Watch footage of a union protest on campus below:
12 comments
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The call for volunteers is particularly galling. “Lend a hand” Ugh.
I’ve seen this so many times. Departments inculcate a sense of (false) solidarity by constantly insisting “we’re all in this together” so that the peons never stop to think about the fact that their immediate bosses get paid six times what they do.
+1
Makes me want to vomit!
Me too. My dad taught English at Yale for 42 years. Prof. Richard B Sewall. Taught a great course on tragedy. Was the first Master at Ezra Stiles college in the late ’60’s. Wrote a biography of Emily Dickinson that won the National Book award. He died in 2004. He would be appalled to see what Yale is charging for tuition these days. And sickened at how the university is shortchanging its support staff.
Shame on Yale, including the profs who see their salaries soaring but don’t give a damn about the people who actually keep the university going.
Good luck strikers! Richard B Sewall would be out there with you on the lines in his tweed jacket as he was for civil rights in the 1960’s. I’m sure there are others like him at Yale today.
This NLRB ruling in August is indeed important. Hopefully, it will make things easier for the graduate research and teaching students attempting to unionize at Cornell’s Ithaca campus:
Across town at Ithaca College, the labor activism is even more intense:
http://ithacavoice.com/2016/10/ithaca-college-faculty-union-walks-out-on-bargaining-session/
Fortunately, many of the dining-hall, custodial, and clerical workers at Cornell have seen their interests ably defended by UAW local 2300 for many years now:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2016/08/cu-reaches-five-year-agreement-uaw-local-2300
It is unconscionable that an institution like Harvard, with literally more money sloshing around than it knows what to do with, would continue “nickel-and-diming” these workers, who contribute so much– to the life of the University and to the wider community of Cambridge. I encourage any NC readers with Crimson ties to exert whatever pressure they can bring on their alma mater to do the right thing!
I neglected to provide the link to the article in which Mr. Malina is quoted:
http://www.ithacajournal.com/story/news/local/2016/08/23/labor-board-decision-impacts-cornell-graduate-students/89206550/
I don’t mean to be a sourpuss, but the next place where this fight has to take place is with lecturers/adjuncts, because, as can be seen already at public universities where grad students have been organized for some time, adjuncts are being used to squeeze grad students. As more and more grad students become unionized, colleges will use non-unionized adjuncts to do an end run around them. It’s also generally harder to unionize adjuncts, though not impossible, since they are far more transitory, often working single term or single year contracts, which is not really much time to organize.
This is exactly the fight taking place at I.C. right this moment!
Friend of mine had to work as an adjunct at three widely separated colleges/university in NYC. Plus, she had to commute in from western NJ.
The travel was hell.
No sick leave, of course. No travel reimbursement, of course.
Eventually she had to quit and take a lower paid, but less stressful job in NJ as a community college. But it had taken her several years to even get a nibble for the academic jobs she’d applied for throughout.
https://www.suny.edu/campuses/cornell-als/
SUNY grads are unionized already. CWA, I think. Curious how that works/worked within SUNY Cornell.
Cornell has a long history of wanting the state subsidies, but not any of the traditional benefits to the people of NYS.
I just love saying SUNY Cornell too.
I can hear the tweed twiddling its thumbs, terribly. Got an adverb in at the end too….Good day.
Of course, these situations are nothing new for one of our leading candidates for U.S. president, who back in 1971 showed her contempt for low-paid workers at Yale:
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18841/hillary_rodham_bill_clinton_and_the_1971_yale_strike
What a sorry excuse for a “leader!”
“Yet the last few months have been full of worker agitation at the most elite private institutions”
It’s natural. The undergrads are the group rife w/favoritism, preferred alumni access. and also if you’re a first-generation, merit-based elite college undergrad, you are not likely to rock the boat.
The grad students are the ones who do the heaviest lifting in academia—-smartest indentured servants in the history of mankind.