Tufts' Students Protest Labor Policy

MEDFORD, Mass.—Sporting handmade T-shirts and waving union flags from the end of a broom, about 100 Tufts students, custodians and union representatives gathered yesterday afternoon to protest that university’s labor policies—joined by about 15 members of Harvard’s Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM).

The rally was the third of the year organized by the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM), an unofficial Tufts student group formed over the summer, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 254, the same union that represents Harvard custodians.

Emilio Flores, a Tufts junior and SLAM member, said the group’s main goal is to raise awareness of the custodial contract. Tufts employs its 170 janitors through OneSource, a private company, and SEIU and OneSource are in the process of negotiating a new contract.

Conducted in both Spanish and English, the rally began slightly after 2:30 p.m. outside of Tufts’ Tisch Library.

The demonstrators later marched to Ballou Hall, the seat of the college administration. Ballou sits opposite Bendetson Hall, which was occupied by protesters last year.

SEIU objects to the present contract, which they say does not provide for sick days and family benefits and is inadequate to meet living expenses in the Boston area.

According to a press release, their objectives in negotiation include a “living wage, family health insurance, full-time work opportunities, pensions and job security.”

Tufts, which has no direct role in the ongoing negotiations, privatized its custodians in 1994 and switched to OneSource in 1997. The current contract may save the university as much as $1 million per year, the Tufts Daily reported Sept. 21.

“The only way you will get more money is by increasing the costs for the students,” former Tufts President John DiBiaggio told the Daily.

But SLAM and SEIU members say that privatization has diminished worker salaries—according to figures released by SLAM, the salary of a beginning custodian has declined from $10.34 per hour in July 1993 to $9.20 in July 2001.

And although other maintenance positions have seen salary increases of approxmately 27 percent, according to a SLAM release, the purchasing power of that money has been eroded by increases in inflation and the Boston area cost of living.

“We have to keep in mind that this is not a passive thing that just happened. Tufts has attacked its workers’ ability to support themselves,” Joe Ramsey, a graduate student in the Tufts English department, told the crowd yesterday.

SEIU and SLAM endorse a wage floor of $14 per hour for all Tufts workers—which they claim would cost the university $625,000 per year.

This wage floor figure is larger than the $10.25 living wage defined by the Cambridge City Council.

Both Somerville Alderman Denise Provost, whose city shares the Tufts campus with Medford, and Democrat State Representative Patricia D. Jehlen, spoke at the rally.

Provost said she planned to bring a resolution of support before the Somerville Board of Aldermen, while Jehlen said that she and colleagues in the State Legislature had written to Tufts President Lawrence Bacow.

The recent appointment of Bacow, a Harvard alumnus who joined Tufts this year from MIT, has not altered the administration’s stance, according to Gustavo Arias, a custodian at Tufts since 1995 and member of SEIU’s negotiating committee.

“We thought it would be different, but we see no response, nothing positive,” he said.

The Tufts news office did not return calls for comment.

Joining the demonstrators were about 15 members of PSLM.

Roona Ray ’02 spoke briefly on the “direct connection” between the Harvard and Tufts communities.

“It’s a struggle that’s being replicated around the country as the movement for workers’ rights really grows,”she said.

SLAM’s co-founder, Tufts senior Iris Halpern, is a veteran of the PSLM’s sit-in in Mass. Hall.

According to Benjamin L. McKean ’02, “The Tufts students were a huge help for us. It’s a matter of returning [their] support.”

Despite the precedent set last year at Bendetson and at Harvard’s Mass. Hall, and an initial meeting with Bacow that Halpern said she “[didn’t] think was promising,” Flores said that the group hoped that a disruption like that at Harvard last spring would not be necessary.

“[The Mass. Hall sit-in] helps to scare the administration because they don’t want it to come to that. Neither do we,” Flores said. McKean, who is also a Crimson editor, concurred that last year’s sit-in had changed the landscape for groups like SLAM.

“It’s certainly true that the [Mass. Hall] sit-in raised the visibility of these efforts and made it easier for people to look at doing something like this,” he said.

And according to McKean, SLAM is only one among a several new student groups pursuing living wage issues, as the ranks of these groups have swelled nationally from 20 last spring to 55 this fall.

—Staff writer Ross A. Macdonald can be reached at jrmacdon@fas.harvard.edu.