It's a centenary year for our University. The light on the hill has shone for 150 years. Hopefully, many of us presently enrolled at Tufts will live to celebrate the 200-year anniversary of our school. Undoubtedly, much will have changed by then. One thing I hope will not change is Tufts reputation for free, open, and honest discussion, for therein lies our strength. Our community rightly demands the highest standard from all connected with this institution, and when a member of our community fails to live up to that standard, it is the responsibility of the rest of us to remind them.
I've been at Tufts since 1998. I have been president of my department's Graduate Student Organization and have been a member of the Graduate Student Council. And since last year I have been involved with ASET/UAW, the graduate student group working to form a graduate employee union. Of late, I've been disturbed by the administration's recent response to our unionization effort, which has focused solely on who should be part of the bargaining unit, and thus entitled to vote in the union election. Their mantra, that we have sought to exclude some graduate employees, has been repeated often and in many ways. I'd like to explore the administration's claims in some detail. The issue isn't particularly complex, but it's not exactly soundbite material either, though that's what the administration is trying to reduce it to. All along, we of ASET/UAW have sought to form a union to represent graduate student employees on the Medford/Somerville campus. Graduate employees at private universities have been following in the wake of public universities in creating bargaining units to negotiate pay and benefits. That's what is happening here. We will be the first private university in Massachusetts to unionize (the member schools of the University of Massachusetts system have had unions for varying lengths of time), though we certainly won't be the last.
I want to talk about three documents distributed by the administration in the week before spring break. In a letter distributed to graduate students, Provost Sol Gittleman claimed that ASET/UAW sought "to exclude graduate student assistants in Engineering, Fletcher, Nutrition, and other areas of Arts and Sciences from the bargaining unit." He suggested that readers of his letter look at the ASET/UAW legal brief for proof of this. This same letter is reproduced on the administration's anti-union website with an addendum added, an addendum that provides no less than ten quotes from the transcripts (NOT the legal brief) of the Labor Board hearings that took place in January and February. Two days after the Provost's letter, the administration took the trouble to follow it up with an e-mail saying the University "stands by the veracity of every statement in the Provost's letter and the authenticity of the quotes." But statement and quotations, as we all know, taken out of context, do not equal veracity or authenticity. As a member of this University, it has been personally devastating for me to see senior office-holders of this fine institution play fast and loose with context and truth and attempt to turn logic on its head by pulling quotes out of their equally important factual context.
The administration claim that ASET/UAW sought to exclude RAs was wrong the first time they made it, and no amount of ad hominem quotations can change that. On March 15, I spoke with the Provost on the telephone about administration claims that ASET/UAW seeks to exclude "lots of graduate assistants," and pointed him to the concluding section of the ASET/UAW brief, which categorically demonstrates the error of their claims. This is the section from the conclusion of our brief which I read to the provost: "For all of the foregoing reasons, the Regional Director [of the NLRB] should find that the petitioned-for Teaching Assistants, including Graduate Assistants and Graduate Teaching Assistant, Graders and Research Assistants, are statutory employees entitled to collective bargaining." I should also mention, by the way, that almost exactly the same phrasing is used twice in the first two pages of the brief, both times referring to our requested bargaining unit. Surely, Provost Gittleman has read the ASET/UAW brief from which this quote is taken. How strange then, that neither his letter, nor the addendum to his letter, or even the e-mail standing by the veracity of his letter, bother to quote this or anything else from our brief, the central document and culmination of our legal position. Ten quotations from the hearing transcript and not even one quotation from the brief? You might ask, why are there numerous quotes from the hearing transcripts and none from the briefs? No one doubts the veracity of the quotes from the hearing transcript used by the administration, though their manipulation of them is certainly suspect. Important as the hearing were, they were primarily a fact-finding exercise for the NLRB. And it's essential to note that it is the NLRB, not ASET/UAW, who will decide, based on the information gathered during the hearings, who will or will not be part of our bargaining unit. That's another crucial piece of context ignored by the administration.
One more point about the hearing transcript: even a casual reading of the hearing transcript will show clearly that the ASET/UAW stance has remained the same. As ASET/UAW has stated openly since the beginning of our campaign, we didn't expect certain categories of Research Assistants to be part of a bargaining unit here because at NYU and Brown University certain RAs were excluded from the bargaining unit because they worked exclusively on their own dissertations. Tufts' administration testified that RAs in the departments Provost Gittleman mentions worked exclusively on their own dissertations, and at that time we agreed because that was the legal precedent during the period of the hearings (however, as I discuss below, the legal precedent changed after the hearings ended). Gittleman's letter hypocritically suggests that it was us, ASET/UAW, who specifically invoked the precedent and actively sought to enforce it, when it was actually University testimony that invoked it. Whether in the labor board hearings, or in our initial petition last fall, or in our legal brief, we requested a union that would represent all graduate students deemed by existing labor law to be employees of the University. This much is clear even from the truncated and out-of-context quotes offered in the Provost's letter and the addendum to it.
Labor law in this country is based on precedent, something that is obvious if you read the arguments presented in our brief or the University brief. Above, I italicized the phrase, deemed by existing labor law, because between the ending of the Labor Board hearings and the submission of our briefs, the Labor Board gave a ruling on Columbia University graduate employee unionization that broadened the definition of graduate student employment to include Research Assistants working exclusively on their own dissertations. Our brief welcomes and utilizes this new ruling, urging that the Board consider it in their decision at Tufts. Disingenuously the administration overlooks this crucial detail, and then accuses us of changing. We did not change; labor law did! Allow me to reiterate: In December of last year we petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to allow us to form a union for Teaching and Research Assistants and Graders on the Somerville/Medford Campus. We sought then to include all graduate assistants recognized as employees by the laws of the United States, and we still do today.
James McCrea is a graduate student in the English Department and a member of the organizing committee of ASET/UAW.
