The Medford City Council unanimously passed a resolution in support of a contract for Tufts School of Arts and Sciences full-time lecturers in their meeting on Tuesday. The resolution was brought forward by City Council Vice President Kit Collins (LA’15), a Tufts alum. Two lecturers presented at the meeting.
The resolution states, “Tufts leadership has continued to offer bargaining proposals that prioritize budget austerity over workers’ health and livelihoods, and has continued to reject proposals to increase salaries and make modest improvements in the direction of a living wage without adding to the burden of already-unmanageable workloads.”
Contract negotiations have continued since the walkout. Penn Loh, a distinguished senior lecturer and union member, said after the meeting that the union is still continuing to negotiate with the university.
“The university has presented a substantial compensation proposal intended to address both merit and market-based increases,” Patrick Collins, executive director of media relations at Tufts, wrote in a statement to the Daily. He added that the university looks forward to reaching an agreement with the full-time lecturers as part of the Service Employee International Union.
For Kit Collins, the resolution is about holding Tufts accountable.
“With a large, ostensibly not-for-profit that is such an outsized presence and an outsized footprint in our community, I think it’s the least that we can do to say we must participate in holding you accountable to treating all workers with fairness, and at the very least, participating in good faith with efforts to collectively bargain,” Kit Collins said at the meeting.
City Council President Zac Bears was present at a rally held by the full-time lectures on Jan. 27. During the city council meeting, he condemned how Tufts has treated Hillside neighbors, students and other unions.
“Very often when we talk about Tufts University, it feels like they are trying to disembed themselves from our community,” Bears said at the meeting. “I think Tufts University itself is a community issue.”
“We would all do better if Tufts administration did better,” Bears said.
During the meeting, Helen McCreery, a union member and full-time lecturer in the biology department, said that she would not be able to live off of her Tufts salary and live near campus.
“I have one kid in daycare, and with groceries and a credit card bill, my paycheck on a good month maybe covers that, and that’s about it,” she said. “Tufts faculty should not be required to have a highly-paid partner or other independent financial privilege to live in the community in which we teach.”
Loh said during the meeting that the full-time lecturers have been teaching more students than they have before.
“The bottom line is that we have been increasingly overworked and underpaid. And the situation has been going on long enough that we have been getting very frustrated,” Loh said during the meeting.
To Loh, Tuesday’s vote is a meaningful step forward for the union.
“For me, this is just affirmation that the community is behind us, that they support and see that we’re underpaid and overworked and that we deserve a fair contract,” Loh said after the meeting. “To have Medford City Council back us up … provides us a lot of hope that many voices will convince the administration that they can pay us a fair contract.”
McCreery highlighted the vote itself as a demonstration that both students and local neighbors care about the negotiations.
“It was a unanimous vote. And the process of negotiations is exhausting,” she said. “Any chance that we get to hear from our students, from other community members, from people who haven’t been as close to these negotiations, it’s been giving us a reminder that what we’re asking for is not the moon — it’s reasonable.”
City Councilor George Scarpelli made an amendment to the resolution, which became a B-paper, saying that the Medford City Council supports the local unions in negotiations with the mayor and Medford City Hall.
Loh said that while union solidarity is important, he believed a clean resolution to show would have more impact on the Tufts administration. The B-paper was passed 7–0.
