Op-Ed: Members of the class of 1994 support dining workers

Dear President Monaco,

We are alumni of the Class of 1994. We are writing to express our concern with how the university is reportedly conducting labor negotiations with the Tufts Dining Services staff.

According to a report in the Spare Change newspaper, employees who have been with Tufts for more than a decade are still making minimum wage and can barely afford health insurance. One worker reported living in Lawrence, Mass. to afford housing. From reporting by the Daily, it appears that the university is employing individuals full-time, for long periods of time, and yet classifying them as "temporary" to avoid providing them benefits. Both news outlets reported that workers were treated disrespectfully — like commodities — in the workplace and that the university appears to be dragging out negotiations as well as treating the workers with disrespect while negotiating.

None of this is acceptable at a university that instilled an ethic of community engagement, mutual respect and service in its students. When we were at Tufts, the focus of our education was not only on our coursework but on preparing us to be members of a global community. Tufts recently introduced a major focused on civic engagement, and we find this especially problematic given the reporting we have read on labor negotiations with Tufts Dining Services staff.

Of course, we recognize that every story has two sides and that the university may have a story to present that we have not seen reported. We would like to think that Tufts, given the values the university endeavored to instill in us when we were students, would do the right thing: Negotiate in good faith; provide workers with a wage that allows them to live near where they work and with benefits; and classify full-time employees as such and not as "temporary" workers without benefits.

The university, which in 2017 reported a $1.8 billion endowment, can absorb these costs. There is no reason to externalize them onto those who are least able to bear them.

Rebecca G. Pontikes (LA '94), Madhu Unnikrishnan (LA '94), Haruko Matsuda (Katsurai), (E '94)