Dear President Bacow,
I appreciate deeply the amount of effort you have put into the custodial issues plaguing Tufts since long before you came here. You were not here in 1994 and 1997 and cannot be held accountable for the past administrative blunders that have proved Tufts a merciless and disgusting employer to the more racially, ethnically, economically varied constituency that makes up labor on this campus.
For this I can only say, and I think we agree, that our past needs to change and that together we're attempting to solve this problem, so that you can start your tenure here at OUR university with a not only shining, benevolent, economically intelligent, but moral record.
We have met many times over this issue, finally culminating in your statement of purpose, printed in last Friday's Tufts Daily. Since you gave me a version early and appeared to request my opinion concerning it, I shall proceed to do so with honesty and brevity for the sake of our continued communication and both of our time constraints.
I am tired of having numerous meetings with you and other administrators bent on placating us and waiting us out. It will not work, and just as I'm sure you do not fall for my soft words, nor do I fall for yours.
You keep asking the students to "trust" the administration, but how can we do so when after 1,500 supportive signatures, several rallies and teach-ins, expressive support from publicly elected officials, numerous Viewpoints and news articles, public demonstrations during parents weekend in which hundreds of parents signed support, visual display presentations, faculty petitions, supportive phone-calls, and numerous meetings with all types of administrators, OneSource, and dozens with the workers later, we see from you in actuality nothing but vague, simplistic, and polarizing words?
Your statement assures nothing in terms of decent treatment to the workers on our campus and who are part of our community. I feel it is a blatant attempt at circumventing the issue, constructing the administration as currently powerless when we both know for a fact that this is not true. It also seeks to target the weak points of students and faculty, talking about tuition hikes and faculty salary cuts etc. when once again we both know that it does not need to come from there.
And even if it does for example need to come at the expense of rising student tuition (which does so enormously every year) you forget to mention that it would be an increase of $37 a year per student, barely anything, and I and many other students are willing to pay in order to be part of a respectful diverse community.
I've talked to faculty and they too have said the cuts in their pay would be so marginally incremental that they would not be adverse to it. Yet time and time again you specifically coach it as a drastic altercation in these fields, even if it must come from one of them, which as a matter of fact, it does not need to since over the past few months there have been numerous examples of wasted finances pointed out to you that have nothing to do with these priorities.
Also, you repeatedly insinuate that the kind of money needed to treat our workers right is too massive for our budget to manage. The money we are talking about for increased decent wages and family health insurance and sick days is only .007 percent of our annual budget (not even endowment).
These are tough times and I understand the economic instability of this university. I spent my freshman year telefunding to raise our endowment and fully understand the economic constraints we suffer under. But even with this full realization, the legitimacy of our concerns needs to be addressed in more than just politically savvy words that say and produce nothing.
We are fully committed to this issue and will not be waited-out or appeased with pretty words. Actions speak louder than words and we have seen absolutely no action so far. We want to trust you, and will do so as soon as you prove that our trust is not displaced and make an honest concrete effort to remedy the situation of poor labor standards on this campus.
Lest I need to remind you, and your statement happens to forget, these are people, human beings, with dignity and lives and families. These are wonderful people you won't even go to a meeting to talk to. They are not numbers, they are not theory. They are people who work for you on this campus through the contractor OneSource that you ultimately control and draw up contract with.
Custodians are not temporary work here either. They will be needed and are intricate in our university's functioning forever. I'm afraid to say that I am sad today. I will never understand why I see people and the administration does not. It treats the custodians like invisible beings, like dirt. There's something wrong with the world today... look all around. People do not care about or even think about other people. The administration may feel that they are covering their "ethical" standards by sitting back and waiting years for the next contract to come up, leaving workers in suspense for yet more of their lives.
I do not feel like those are my ethics or the ethics of the 1,500 signatures we got from Tufts students, faculty, staff, and parents. I can't go to bed feeling ok with myself until I tokenly improve the labor conditions on this campus in June 2003 (maybe we still have no written assurance pertaining to particularities even in this), I don't know why others can.
For a final time I implore you to take this issue seriously and do something about it - something serious. You have expressed moral and ethical standards and I can only pray that you do follow through on them more concretely than this statement in the future. I don't know what else to say except that I am being honest in saying, and though I solely write this Viewpoint and would never speak on behalf of others without their permission, I feel I can safely say on behalf of many, we can't and won't understand why respect of humanity is falling by the curb-side for .007 percent of our annual budget. It is truly depressing and I'm sure it saddens you just as much as it does so me.
Iris Halpern is a senior majoring in women's studies and English. She is a student leader of SLAM.
