 "Photo: Courtesy of The Brown Daily Herald")
College and university campuses across the country are coping with a certain climate of panic and mounting dissent about the best ways to confront budget cuts, layoffs and structural changes to their institutions. There is, of course, the University of California crisis; the California Board of Regents announced on Nov. 19 that it would increase tuition by 32 percent at all schools in the UC system, which set off protests and demonstrations throughout the Golden State. But the University of California is an extreme case—the Board has eliminated nearly 2,000 jobs in the past year and there are still 2,000 more to be cut.
But even in less extreme cases, college students are joining together with faculty and staff to challenge administrative decisions regarding layoffs and contract negotiations. Most of these efforts have followed a rudimentary model, with coalitions of faculty, staff and students with a focus on demonstrations and teach-ins. They follow a structure similar to that of Vassar’s Campus Solidarity Working Group, which was formed in early October in response to the administration’s handling of budget cuts and its effects on the community. Although the Working Group has been called “radical” and “self-righteous” on online message boards and in public forums on campus, its efforts do not significantly differ from those seen at other schools.
There are a few exceptions. Amherst College, for example, has not had a significant student protests and demonstrations in response to its financial situation (the Amherst endowment lost 25 percent of its value in the 2009 fiscal year). Last spring, however, 92 percent of student respondents in an Association of Amherst Students survey voted to donate $70,000 of the Association’s reserve funds back to the College. The students chose to allocate $50,000 of that amount for financial aid and the remaining $20,000 went directly to the College’s lowest-paid employees to preserve their salaries. But what of the groups at colleges that,like the Working Group, are organizing and protesting against their institution’s authority?
Taking on the boss-man: Union contract renegotiations at Brown
At Brown University, students and staff organized together in support of the Brown Dining Services workers, whose union-negotiated contract expired on Monday, Oct. 12. The administration had proposed a new contract that, according to campus organizers, would scale back workers’ pensions and health care plans, and would not offer the retirement benefits in place to new hires. More specifically, according to The Brown Daily Herald, the University revised the stipulation that Dining Services workers pay for six percent of their health care premiums, proposing instead that they be subjected to a “sliding scale” in which higher-paid workers were responsible for a higher proportion of their health care costs.
In turn, Brown campus workers and representatives from the Service Employees International Union asked the Student Labor Alliance and a number of other activist groups to participate in a series of demonstrations to show support for the workers. In a Daily Herald online video of one of their rallies in late September, a student spoke to the crowd, saying, “What we keep hearing from Brown, right, is that, ‘Oh, we lost all this money from our endowment.’ So, who lost the money from the endowment? It probably had something to do with the people managing the money, not the people that they’re now trying to make pay for the money that was lost!”
In the fiscal year 2009, Brown lost an estimated 23.1 percent of its endowment, or about $740 million, as compared to Vassar’s loss of 18.1 percent of its market value. The Building Brown website, a guide to the University’s “robust program of facilities renovation and new construction,” lists at least six significant construction projects that have undetermined completion dates. The organizers at Brown clearly took offense at the University’s apparent judgment of the more important budgetary allocations. At a rally on Thursday, Oct. 8, five demonstrators carried an oversized “boss-man” puppet with wads of bills stuffed in his hands; students and staff approached the figure, demanding answers. “Why are you still building while you want to take away your employees’ health care?” asked one student.
The Student Labor Alliance also organized a number of public street theater performances meant to parody what one Brown student referred to as the University’s “patronizing attitude” toward “worker sacrifice in hard times.” The Oct. 8 rally included close to 200 participants and culminated with the Alliance delivering a petition with 1,155 signatures against the health care adjustments directly to Brown University President Ruth J. Simmons.
After nearly a week of negotiating and a 48-hour extension to the contract expiration, the school and the workers reached an agreement at 2 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 15. The new contract allowed for a seven percent payment towards premiums for all workers as opposed to the sliding scale, approved a two percent increase to all wages for all three years in the contract and secured retirement benefits for new hires.
Cutting jobs at a hospital and building an $80 million library at the University of Chicago
At the University of Chicago, the student group Students Organized and United with Labor (SOUL) has held a series of demonstrations and protests similar to the efforts of the Working Group here at Vassar. Last January, the University’s Medical Center announced its plans to trim about seven percent of their budget—$100 million—and eliminated nearly 450 positions in February. Nathan Wilmers, a senior at Chicago who is a leading organizer for SOUL, explained to The Miscellany News that the majority of those cuts affected “clerical, service and maintenance, and engineering workers at the hospital.”
“SOUL has been around for almost 10 years,” Wilmers wrote in an e-mailed statement. “[We hold] student-staff lunches, meetings, and [run] campaigns with workers and their unions. All of this has contributed to strong bonds between concerned students and staff.”
The organization’s website says that its members believe that “as students at a wealthy university, we are in a crucial position of power to support on-campus worker struggles to make a decent living and win respect and dignity in their workplace.” When the hospital announced its layoffs in February, SOUL, along with other University, student-activism groups, collaborated with the Teamsters Local 743 Union and protested the layoffs. Wilmers said that SOUL had also helped organize “several rallies, a teach-in, two mass meetings and a national call-in day” in response to cuts. Over the summer, for example, the University administration drastically reduced the Teamsters Local 743 workweek from 40 to 35 hours, which constituted a eight percent pay cut for all employees in the Residential Halls & Commons management division.
As with student organizers and workers at Brown, SOUL cried foul as the University continued to go forward with its construction and renovation projects, such as repaving the main quad and expanding the faculty. The University is also continuing construction on a new state-of-the-art, glass-domed library, which will cost the school nearly $80 million—a cost somewhat moderated by a $25 million alumni gift.
SOUL, along with student organizations including Graduate Students United, has been working closely with Teamsters representatives this fall and has held regular open meetings designed to educate the community about the issues at hand and how workers are being affected. In late October, SOUL sent a letter to the University administration (President Robert Zimmer, University Chief Financial Officer Nim Chinniah and Vice President for Campus Life Kim Goff-Crews) criticizing the hourly workweek reductions. The trio responded that the change, along with four related layoffs, was made to retain staff. The Chicago Maroon reported the letter’s content, which said the cut was necessary to “keep as many people as possible employed with full-time benefits.”
Wilmer explained that SOUL had met with administrators last Wednesday, Dec. 2 “to demand an end to cuts that target the lowest-paid workers on campus. So far, however, the University has refused to reverse any of its lay-offs or cutbacks.” He also added that, in his experience, the administration will “rarely respond with real actions to address student concerns,” such as campus worker layoffs.
In a Nov. 17 letter to the editor, Duff Morton, a graduate student in the Anthropology and School of Social Service Administration, calculated that the “19 top-paid administrators brought home a combined total of $9,772,226” in the last fiscal year. He continued, “By my very rough calculations, an eight percent cut in these administrators’ pay would have been enough to prevent 208 workers in [Residential Halls and Commons] from losing their five hours a week.”
“Get Well Soon” cards for Harvard
Harvard University, which has long had one of the top endowments of any private institution in the country, was scoffed at in the press this year when it announced in dramatic fashion that it would discontinue free breakfast in the dormitories and free cookies for its faculty. Be that as it may, the Harvard administration has made its fair share of controversial decisions in the past year, and students and workers have responded.
In late June, Harvard, the second-largest private employer in the greater Boston area, announced that it would eliminate 275 jobs in administrative and professional positions as well as clerical and technical jobs—all to be carried out within seven days after the initial warning. About 500 employees also left through a voluntary retirement program, and 40 employees had their hours reduced or were constricted to an academic-year work schedule.
The layoffs represented about 2.4 percent of the University’s non-faculty workforce. When the Harvard administration announced plans for downsizing personnel, a student organization called the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) held rallies against the layoffs using the slogan “Greed is the New Crimson”—a play on the University’s sustainable campus efforts, which used the phrase, “Green is the New Crimson.”
SLAM has had a significant presence on the Harvard campus since early last spring. The group has aligned itself with the worker unions to demand fair treatment and has written letters demanding “that Harvard treat its workers with dignity and respect.” The students also compiled a list of “concrete financial steps Harvard can take to prevent layoffs” and distributed the flyers around campus and throughout the Cambridge neighborhood. SLAM also delivered a sheet directly to Harvard University President Drew G. Faust.
The flyer laid out a carefully compiled, three-step plan for an alternative approach to the financial crisis, which SLAM estimated would save Harvard about $79 million per year. The first suggestion was for a graduated pay cut: Employees paid in the $100,000 to $200,000 range would take a five percent cut, those in the $200,000 to $300,000 a 10 percent cut, and anyone earning $300,000 to $1 million or more a 15 percent cut. With an average of an 8.5 percent decrease in pay, SLAM estimated that Harvard would save $50 million. They also proposed a “slight reduction in retirement benefits for employees making more than $100,000,” a $2 million saving and a reduction in paid vacation days for that same group—a $27 million saving.
In an open letter dated April 14 and addressed to President Faust and members of the Harvard Corporation (in a package that included a “Greed is the New Crimson” T-shirt), SLAM also made demands for the University to “[suspend] layoffs and [recall] all workers, full-time and part-time, who have been fired since October 2008” and requested a “meeting with the President, the Corporation, University administrators, members of [SLAM] and other relevant groups” no later than April 30, 2009. On May 6, 21 days later, Director of Labor and Employee Relations Bill Murphy, who had no say in determining layoffs, made the first public response to the letter. President Faust has never followed suit.
In September, union activists and students marched through campus and delivered a “gift bag” to President Faust at his office in Massachusetts Hall. The pouch, labeled “Get Well Harvard,” was filled to the brim with “recommendations for a healthy Harvard”—namely, how to avoid additional layoffs and reductions in hours to its janitorial staff. Afterwards, about 50 protesters gathered outside of Holyoke Hall with picket signs chanting, in Spanish, “Harvard, escucha, estamos en la lucha!” (Harvard, listen, we are in a fight) and “No justice, no peace!” This past week, SLAM and a group of Harvard security guards protested a sudden spike in their health care premiums in Harvard Square.
A national movement
Student organizations such as the University of Chicago’s SOUL have begun to share resources through the nationwide grassroots organization United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and its subcommittee, the Campus Community Solidarity Campaign (CCSC). Georgetown University recently hosted a CCSC retreat for campus labor organizers representing a number of colleges and universities undergoing similar budget cuts and layoffs.
Jamie Stevenson ’10, a student member and lead organizer in Vassar’s Working Group, said that she had exchanged e-mails with Wilmer, of SOUL, and had sent inquiries to the USAS.
“I was interested in finding out about the themes [USAS] sees emerging among similar campus movements and what they think could be achieved by organizing on a national level rather than a local level,” explained Stevenson, who said that the e-mail was sent from her own perspective and was not representative of the Working Group’s intentions. “I’ve organized against the war and against more abstract things that don’t organize people as immediately as this. I’ve never been so involved in something so integral to the community before, and there are lots of challenges going into it. I was hoping I could learn from their experiences,” she continued.
According to the USAS website, the CCSC mission is to form “viable and strategic coalitions to win union-organizing drives and improved contracts, fight against furloughs and layoffs, and to demand that our schools prioritize quality education over increased profits.” Its hope is to attract and centralize the efforts of more college organizations across the country, such as Vassar’s Working Group and Harvard’s SLAM. On a national scale, the road ahead is certainly daunting—the campaign likely has a few items on its agenda before it takes on reinstating free hot breakfast—but, in concert, these campus organizations could make more significant demands of their administrations and perhaps, as Amherst chose to do, of their student bodies.
Stevenson said that when she spoke about the USAS efforts at a Working Group meeting, members expressed concern that aligning with a national organization might undermine their localized concerns. At the time of printing, she had not yet heard back from USAS leaders.
“On my own, I thought it seemed like a really beneficial thing,” Stevenson said. “But something that never occurred to me was that it could also be detrimental—that making our local grievances national grievances might affect our ability to achieve our own goals here, or might even alter our goals, period. Still, I wanted to know their recommendations for strategy, as they are what amounts to a national authority.”
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