While Tufts has a long-standing dedication to international public service, one group on campus is bringing the university's creed a little closer to home by devoting itself to community outreach within dorms and campus buildings.
The Jumbo Janitor Alliance (JJA) is a completely student-run group working toward bettering relations between students and janitors on campus.
"Our overall goal is for [the janitors] to be integrated into the Tufts community," JJA founder and Co-chair Kevin Dillon said.
JJA Secretary and Treasurer Max Goldman, a sophomore, said that one of the major goals of the group is to promote responsible treatment of dorms by students. By asking janitors how students can help make their jobs better and what issues the JJA should be targeting in their campaigns, the group is able to research the student-janitor relationship.
"What all of us really want to see is for the workers to get any help they need," Goldman said. "Really, it's just responsibility. It's just to get kids to realize that people are cleaning up after them. It's not right to have [the custodians] cleaning up a huge mess."
Coming from backgrounds of labor rights activism, both Dillon, a junior, and fellow JJA Co-chair Emma Mayerson, a sophomore, established the organization last spring. The JJA gained recognition as an official student group last semester.
But attempts to interact with the janitors face some barriers. On holidays, the JJA attempts to facilitate twenty-minute get-togethers between students and janitors where they can meet and chat in a casual environment as friends. Because many of the janitors work two jobs, often full-time, meetings are difficult to schedule.
Language differences have also created potential difficulties, as many of the workers are native Spanish or Portuguese speakers. The JJA has attempted to break down this obstacle by obtaining the aid of student translators.
The group has tried to impact students using hands-on methods to raise awareness. This past weekend, the JJA organized a dorm clean-up in which students went into the dorms and helped janitors clean.
Goldman said this was designed as a more effective way to make students aware of what Tufts janitors do.
"Not only does it show solidarity with the workers, but it also shows that people really have to clean up after [the students]," he said. "I think it's big if a kid sees another kid taking out the trash they made." With only fifteen students participating in this weekend's clean-up, the group is looking for involvement to keep growing.
Much of the JJA's work contains a strong social component which extends beyond the Tufts campus.
Professor of Sociology Paul Joseph said that movements like the JJA represent a larger trend.
"We live in an era where some students are particularly concerned with globalization and the fact that jobs go overseas, or the threat to take jobs overseas, means that wages lower in the United States," he said. "We're a community on the top of a hill in Medford, but we're reflecting globalization and wage standards across the world."
The JJA plans to start screening informational films on workers' rights in order to raise awareness of what is happening on a national, as well as a local, level. Using a research team to investigate wage disparities, the group has been meeting with union officials to better understand the janitors' contracts.
"When you say community, in one part it's social: face-to-face, talking, sharing. But there's a structural relationship as well: wages, health benefits, protection. And it's not students' responsibility to organize the structural aspect, but to be aware of it," Joseph said.
There are also members of the JJA working to publish interviews with the janitorial staff in an effort to share their life stories with the community.
The Jumbo Janitor Alliance has been surprised at some of the cultural outcomes of their work.
"There's a dual aspect to the group that we didn't anticipate. It's mostly a community-building process but it's also become an anthropological experience," Mayerson said. "A lot of our events are holidays, and the janitors have been teaching us how they celebrate holidays where they're from."
Currently, the JJA has approximately 300 registered supporters, but the group is working toward 1,000.
"There are all these directions we want to go in, but we need more people," Dillon said. "If you thank your janitor, you're in the alliance, but we're looking for more people to get involved."
