The Somerville City Council passed a resolution in support of a contract for Tufts full-time lecturers in a meeting on Feb. 13. The resolution was sponsored by City Councilor at-Large Willie Burnley Jr., who also participated in the union’s walkout in January. Two full-time lecturers were invited to speak at the meeting, where council members expressed overwhelming support for Tufts FTLs.
“Somerville City Council would like to see Tufts negotiate in good faith with all of their employees and their unions,” Matthew McLaughlin, Ward 1 city councilor and Tufts alumnus, said.
Tufts FTLs, represented by the Service Employees International Union Local 509, remain in the bargaining process with the university and are scheduled for their next meeting with the university today.
“The university continues to engage in good faith collective bargaining with SEIU toward a third contract for the bargaining unit,” wrote Patrick Collins, Tufts’ executive director of media relations, in a statement to the Daily. “Currently, the two sides have a disagreement over compensation and workload. We look forward to continuing to work with SEIU to arrive at an agreement.”
Councilor Jake Wilson said that, although the Somerville City Council cannot contribute to the negotiation efforts directly, it is still important to share its support.
“What we can do is highlight the issue. The city council is a platform, and we have definitely done that,” Wilson said. “We can lend emotional support and stand in solidarity with workers who we feel are not being given a fair shake, like these Tufts lecturers.”
McLaughlin also noted that Tufts has “never really negotiated in good faith” with the city of Somerville.
“Tufts has a really big endowment, so they don’t pay taxes to city, state or federal governments, but they do pay, to Somerville, a payment in lieu of taxes, which is called a PILOT,” McLaughlin said. “They’ve never really paid the amount that they agreed to, which I think is 20% of what they would pay if they were a regular institution.”
The university affirmed that they have negotiated properly with Somerville and makes its PILOT payments annually to Somerville as well as Medford and Grafton.
“Any suggestion that the university has not fully paid its PILOT payments to the city or that it has not negotiated in good faith over PILOT payments is factually incorrect,” Collins wrote. “The university met extensively with the city, neighbors and key stakeholders during negotiations in 2018, voluntarily increasing its annual PILOT payment to Somerville by 64 percent to $450,000. The university continues to make that payment every year in June.”
Tufts is currently operating on a merit-based system of salary adjustments that, according to Professor Ted Simpson, distinguished senior lecturer in the theatre, dance and performance studies department, does not keep up with the rising cost of living in the Greater Boston area.
“The truth of the matter is that if you come to a job and you work your job, and you do everything you’re supposed to do at your job, your employer should be able to help you keep up with the cost of living, but Tufts does not believe in cost of living adjustments for some bizarre reason,” Simpson said.
“That’s really challenging when you are asking a lecturer to earn a cost of living that is necessary to function within this city, within this environment, but calling it merit and asking people to work above the workload in order to be able to live,” Professor Brenna Heitzman said. Heitzman is a senior lecturer in the Department of Romance Studies.
The walkout that took place at the end of January did not mobilize the negotiations, and according to Heitzman, there are no plans for future walkouts at the moment. However, parents, according to Wilson, could make a difference.
“I would be writing to the Tufts administration and expressing my disappointment in their approach to compensating these folks and urging [Tufts] to do better and to do right by the lecturers who are teaching my kid,” he said.
Simpson believes that the merit-based system has “cultivated a work culture at Tufts, where just to keep up with the cost of living, you have to go above and beyond at your job.”
He believes that a raise based on the cost of living would be much preferable to the merit-based system; however, he says “it’s very unlikely” that Tufts would change its system.
