BGLTSA, Union Join to Support Staff

Leadership from the Student Labor Action Movement and the Harvard-Radcliffe Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transsexual, and Supporters Alliance declared their support for the dining hall staff union’s efforts to strengthen the anti-discrimination language of their contract at an open meeting last night.

The two student organizations also plan to campaign to broaden the scope of the university’s anti-discrimination policy to include all workers.

Students met with four dining hall workers to prepare a reaction to allegedly anti-gay remarks made by a manager in a dining hall a few weeks ago.

According to the president of Unite Here Local 26, the union representing Harvard’s dining hall staff, a dining manager asked two female dining hall workers, “What are you, lesbians?” Union president Janice Loux said the two women were chatting, and the manager may have wanted them to stop their conversation.

As an immediate reaction to the remarks, BGLTSA and SLAM leaders are planning to raise awareness of the incident.

“We would feel a lot stronger if we see strong student support,” said Edward B. Childs, Adams House cook and the union’s chief steward, at the meeting last night.

Rainbow gay-pride pins have been available in bowls at some dining halls over the course of this week, but the students at last night’s meeting sought to do more.

Suggestions included encouraging students to fill out dining feedback cards expressing their support for the staff, mass e-mailing student organizations and House lists to raise awareness, and covering a dining hall table with a rainbow flag as a tablecloth.

“People will use the excuse of layoffs to get rid of problematic employees,” SLAM leader Alyssa M. Aguilera ’08-’09 said last night. “As students, we can yell outside Holyoke Center, and we’re not going to get kicked out of Harvard.”

In the long-term, the union members and SLAM said they want to draft stronger anti-discrimination language. Aguilera said she wants to use the dining hall incident to prompt a broad anti-discrimination policy that would extend to all workers at Harvard, including those who aren’t in a union.

She and others at the meeting plan to draft an initial version of the new language this week and discuss it at a meeting next Thursday night.

“All workers and students should be able to guarantee these principles and tenets that have been drafted by the community itself,” Aguilera said.

Childs said he sees the incident as just one example of increasing intolerance, especially after the passage of Proposition 8 in Calif.

“We’re a membership of mostly immigrants, mostly women, mostly people of color, and as upper management likes to say, ‘the lowest on the totem pole,’” Childs said. “If they can beat up on us, it leaves the door open to beat up on anybody.”

—Staff writer Danielle J. Kolin can be reached at dkolin@fas.harvard.edu.