As Labor Day has passed us by and we scramble into the fall semester, it seems appropriate to stop and reflect on the meaning of this seldom-celebrated holiday. Too often Labor Day is just another long weekend, the last chance to get away before the leaves begin to turn. But in addition to being a chance to fire up the grill, Labor Day presents us with a time to recognize the long and continuing struggles of workers, in our own Tufts community, around the U.S. and around the world.
After all, though seldom acknowledged, the labor movement has fought for and won many rights and social and economic benefits that Americans now take for granted. These rights include but are not limited to the 5-day, 40-hour workweek with mandatory overtime pay, minimum wage, unemployment and workplace disability insurance, social security, workplace safety standards, the prohibition of child labor, free public education, and the right to form unions.
In spite of all its accomplishments, today labor rights are under assault from big business, union-busting law firms, "conservative" and anti-labor lawmakers and judges. Furthermore, globalization has fostered an intense race to the bottom that encourages competing firms to throw unionized workplaces overboard as they seek out cheaper - non-union - labor-power abroad, often in Third World countries where tyrannical political regimes and right-wing paramilitaries systematically repress labor rights. (Such films as Michael Moore's Roger and Me have detailed the local effects of this de-industrialization of America's union heartland.)
Indeed, recent decades have seen a dramatic decline in union membership in the U.S., with predictable repercussions for American workers and U.S. society. At present, only around 15 percent of private sector workers are union members, down from around 40 percent in 1960. This fall in union membership has precipitated a fall in real wages in the U.S. for a majority of wage-earners, as well as a dramatic increase in the percentage of Americans without health insurance, a lengthening of the average American work-week, and a rise in work-place injuries. (It has also, I should note, been accompanied by sky-rocketing stock prices and corporate profits.) More generally, the increased exploitation of non-union labor has fueled an unprecedented polarization of American society into rich and poor, with the top five percent of households possessing over 60 percent of the country's total wealth.
The decline in unionism has in turn opened the door for depleting the hard-won rights of workers, like overtime pay, minimum wage, and the ability to form unions in the first place. Recent years have also seen a steady co-opting by big business of government agencies such as the Labor Department, the Occupational Safety and Health Agency (OSHA), and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Thus, more and more workers in their attempts to unionize now encounter not only corporate threats to move operations off-shore, not only high pressure and often illegal employer anti-union campaigns, but also long bureaucratic delays that serve to postpone laborers' rights even longer.
Hence, today many employers get away with such illegal tactics as intimidating and even firing union activists and sympathizers. Other employers, including our own Tufts administration, have endlessly appealed union elections to prevent having to recognize a democratically elected union.
Indeed, universities in this country have been far from innocent bystanders in this wholesale rolling back of labor rights. Increasingly conscious of cutting costs, university administrators have done much to undermine unions. At Tufts for instance, several years ago our administrators "out-sourced" janitorial work, firing many of the long-time employees and bringing in an outside contractor to maintain the campus for radically reduced wages and without offering Tufts-employee benefits. This new corporate employer, UNICCO, slashed worker wages and benefits dramatically. While the workers, their union, and Tufts' Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM), have made marginal gains in the treatment of our workers, Tufts' janitors are still making less in real wages for their service today than the Tufts-employed janitors were making 10-years ago.
Tufts administrators, of course, would like to wash their hands of the matter, claiming that they do not actually employ the janitors any more at all and that the issue of the janitors' conditions is strictly between employees, their union, and their employer OneSource. Meanwhile, hundreds of mostly immigrant Tufts/One Source custodians work two or three different jobs to make ends meet, all the while fearful that if they raise their voices too loudly for workplace rights they will be fired or even deported.
Such national university efforts to cut costs by cutting employees harm more than just janitors. Indeed, as educational institutions strive to lower labor costs wherever they can, they have been increasingly replacing full-time, full-benefit, and tenure track professorships with part-time, low-paying and often no-benefit, one year renewable adjunct positions or graduate students. Recent studies have shown that more than half of all the face-to-face teaching hours performed at U.S. universities are now being performed by either adjunct faculty or by graduate students, not by full-time, or tenure track professors.
Stay tuned for the continuation of this viewpoint, to be run on Wednesday, September 15.
Joe Ramsey is a PhD. student, a grader in the English Department, and an organizer for ASET/UAW, the Association of Student Employees at Tufts/United Auto Workers, the group working to form a graduate student employee union at Tufts.
