Graduate Student Council Passes DoubleTree Resolution

The Graduate Student Council unanimously passed a resolution Wednesday evening pledging to support workers at the DoubleeTree Suites by Hilton Hotel Boston if they decide to call for a boycott of the hotel, which is housed in a University-owned building in Allston.

The resolution, which is nearly identical to one passed by the Undergraduate Council earlier this week, calls upon the graduate body to urge relevant Harvard administrators to support fair process as workers decide whether or not to unionize.

According to Gabriel H. Bayard ’15, a member of the Student Labor Action Movement who spoke at the regularly scheduled GSC meeting Wednesday evening, some DoubleTree workers plan on asking potential patrons to boycott the hotel on March 27.

“I think the resolution itself was well composed, completely sound, and reasonable,” said Summer A. Shafer, president of the Graduate Student Council.

Bayard said that he was “ecstatic” at the outcome of the vote.

“We think this symbolizes that the Harvard community is behind [the Student Labor Action Movement],” he said.

 

SLAM’s next step is to solicit support from more student groups, according to member Zoe A. Onion. A SLAM press release Wednesday said that the GSC joins 16 other student groups in endorsing the DoubleTree workers’ demands.

The group said it plans to meet with Harvard Labor Relations Director Bill Murphy within the next month to discuss the matter.

After the resolution passed, Shafer applauded the council for its action.

“I think everyone in this room should pat themselves on the back,” Shafer said to a crowd of more than 70 people.

The resolution was presented to the council after a speech by DoubleTree worker Sandra Hernandez, who discussed her personal financial situation with those in attendance.

Hernandez, who spoke to the group with the aid of a translator, described her own inability to afford healthcare for members of her family on her current salary. She said she has worked at the hotel for 22 years.

“I think having a worker present made it a living, breathing issue and not an abstract intellectual exercise,” said Shafer, who teared up while reading the resolution aloud. “It affected me very personally and deeply because what they’re doing is incredibly brave and what they’re facing is incredibly harsh.”

The meeting also featured a number of smaller discussion items, including the formation of an ad hoc committee on Dudley Cafe and the approval of funding for graduate student groups.

UC Debates DoubleTree Labor Dispute

The Undergraduate Council passed legislation relating to a labor dispute between workers and DoubleTree Suites, gender-neutral housing, and the transparency of the UC budget during its general meeting on Sunday.

 

During the meeting, members from the Student Labor Action Movement group and workers from DoubleTree Suites asked the Council to openly support future efforts to create better working conditions. Although Harvard owns the DoubleTree building, Hilton Hotel Boston runs and manages day-to-day operations.

 

According to undergraduates from SLAM, DoubleTree workers are planning to boycott the business in an attempt to affect change.

 

The legislation presented asked the Council to inform UC grant recipients that it would support a boycott and to pressure administrators to support the workers’ requests. The proposal also requested that the UC send a mass email to undergraduates asking them to stop patronizing the hotel if Harvard does not publicly support the demands of the workers by April 1.

 

UC representatives were not immediately sure whether they had enough information to hand down a decision on the labor dispute or whether it was even within their purview to support the measure.

 

According to SLAM member Gabriel H. Bayard ’15, University President Drew G. Faust has denied that Harvard has any ties to the management of the hotel. Bayard, however, said he disagreed.

 

“We know that Harvard has a deep relationship with the DoubleTree hotel,” Bayard said after the meeting.

 

After an extended question and answer period, followed by an open debate, the UC eventually called the question to vote. The Council added an amendment insisting that the UC would only support a boycott if the majority of DoubleTree workers do so as well. A second amendment clarified language pertaining to the goals of the workers.

Both amendments passed with broad support.

 

The deliberations, however, prompted disagreement among Council members. Cabot Representative Tyler W. Creamer ’16, an inactive Crimson business editor who voted against the measure, said after the meeting that the labor issue is not under the jurisdiction of the UC, though he supports the workers and feels they might deserve more compensation.

 

“The UC’s purview is mostly to focus on student issues, and I don’t think this counts as a student issue,” Creamer said.

 

UNITE HERE Local 26 is pleased to endorse Dan Ryan for State Representative

UNITE HERE Local 26 is pleased to endorse Dan Ryan for State Representative of the Second Suffolk District. As District Representative for Congressman Mike Capuano, Dan worked with Local 26 to ensure hotel and food service jobs were good jobs.  Dan knows that the economic development we see downtown needs to translate into economic development for the working families of Charlestown and Chelsea. That is why Local 26 is proud to endorse Dan Ryan for State Representative.

Please VOTE TUESDAY, MARCH 4. Polls open 7 AM to 8 PM

For more information call  Jaimie McNeil at 617 832-6643

Lesley University rebrands with creativity, but not much responsibility for its workers

Lesley University is rebranding! It has a new logo and advertising campaign and an exciting new reputation for paying slave wages.

Last month in was adjunct professors who came before the City Council seeking support for unionization efforts. The university’s full-time faculty makes up as little as 37 percent of its actual teaching staff, with adjuncts making up the rest for just a few thousand dollars per class – and, as teachers testified – subject to last-minute cancellations that can waste hours of preparation and leave them scrambling.

On Monday, the complaints were coming from workers for Bon Appetit, which does food services for Lesley, who spoke of earning as little as $9 per hour, resulting in the need for second jobs and 80-hour workweeks.

“This is the first job I’ve taken where I feel they don’t care about the workers,” said Randy Wright, 53, who testified to earning less than $20,000 per year and having no option but to live in a rooming house in the worst part of Dorchester. “I don’t feel safe, but I can’t afford to live anywhere else. I would love to live in Cambridge, but I can’t afford it. I love cooking, I love my job, but I need to be able to support myself and live in dignity.”

No comment …

While talks between Bon Appetit and the workers’ union drag on into their 11th month, Lesley takes a hands-off approach. John Sullivan, director of communications for the university, said Tuesday, Lesley had no comment “out of deference to the collective-bargaining process.”

“Lesley University respects the collective-bargaining process between the two parties, and any comment about that process and the status of those negotiations should come from either or both of those two parties,” he said.

That approach isn’t pleasing Lesley professors such as Eleanor Roffman. “To be a silent witness to damage to people who provide our food for us every day is really an injustice,” Roffman said, even more bluntly calling it “remaining silent in the face of injustice.”

It’s also not working for students such as senior Theresa Powers, who noted:

It’s really difficulty to be proud of a school whose actions don’t line up with the values that they preach. I think that it’s absolutely ridiculous and appalling that these workers are suffering and are feeding me every day but can’t afford to put food on the table for their own families.

Tuesday brought the announcement that adjunct professors voted 359-67 to unionize, following part-timers at Tufts. They could soon see a serious boost to their bargaining power if faculty follow their example at enough other institutions throughout Greater Boston, where adjunct faculty makes up 67 percent of teachers, according to the Service Employees International Union.

Sullivan has said Lesley supports adjunct faculty’s right to union representation in their working relationship with the university. That non-position is essentially the same as Lesley’s non-answer about Bon Appetit, in that both distance Lesley from the struggle of workers on its campuses as though the school was powerless. This is nonsense, and city councillor Marc McGovern – who also spoke an a campus rally for the workers Feb. 13 – was absolutely right to call the university on the offensiveness of this line of reasoning, which he said he’d heard straight from two Lesley officials even before Sullivan’s statement:

Lesley’s position is that ‘We subcontract to Bon Appetit, and these workers work for Bon Appetit, so it’s not our problem.’ Well, if you hire someone to do a job for you and that person that you hire is mistreating their employees, you absolutely have a responsibility to get involved. You are paying that contractor with university funds, and they are blatantly mistreating their workers. So Lesley hiding behind collectively bargaining … is absolutely an incomprehensible position, and I find it very frustrating they’re not willing to step up to the plate on this.

… but new marketing

Can marketing make up for this?

Lesley’s new logo (see it below the old, at left) is a simple pair of tilted, three-dimensional “L” for “Lesley” shapes formed into mirrored less-than and more-than symbols suggesting a cube and unfortunately reminiscent of an optical illusion. (There’s also a new typeface.) In the weird, effortful language of marketing, this is described in a press release this month as “the culmination of months of research and conversations with thousands of of university stakeholders [into an] eye-catching logo [that] captures the creative, collaborative community of freethinkers, educators, artists and counselors who make up our alumni, students, faculty and staff. It is designed to communicate Lesley’s commitment to creativity and interdisciplinary instruction.”

Bizarrely, nowhere in the 500-plus words it takes to explain the sheer excitement one should feel looking at this logo does it mention that the symbols making it up are also arrows, even though that’s blatantly their use in the video that introduces the concept:

The university also makes it weird when it comes to moving the marketing into the real world in giant signs at the Harvard T stop on the red line.

The idea is to take immediately identifiable phrases and replace a key word in it with the word “creativity,” which Lesley says it’s now all about.

This may be okay when a sign urges you to “Commit random acts of creativity” but gets awkward fast when you see that “We hold creativity to be self-evident” and that “Creativity is worth a thousand words.” (Also: “Nobody puts creativity in a corner”? Why not “Creativity, James Creativity,” or “I love the smell of creativity in the morning”?)

Cowardice and complicity in human misery is probably not what President Joseph Moore was thinking of for a rebranding. But the university’s name is getting increasingly dirtied by its inaction, and new font and some curious slogans aren’t going to correct that in the long run – especially when the amount of thought going into a logo and font choice doesn’t match up with the thoughtlessness of Lesley’s approach to its workers.

How about a little less creativity and a little more responsibility?

Fast-food workers need organizers, advocates

In nearly a decade of working at the Burger King across from the Boston Common, Kyle King’s hourly pay has risen from $8 to $8.15. Unable to afford rent on a place of his own, the 46-year-old lives with his brother in a small Roxbury apartment. Fed up, King decided to join a one-day nationwide strike of fast food workers last August and told the Globe as much. Things at work then went from bad to worse for King.

The day after he appeared in the newspaper, King arrived at Burger King for a scheduled shift only to be told to go home; he wouldn’t be needed that day. In the weeks that followed, he saw his 20-hour schedule whittled down to fewer than nine hours per week.

About 4 miles away, Georgina Guiterrez, a prep cook at the Burger King on Washington Street in Dorchester, believes she has faced similar payback. She says the owner of that franchise called workers who chose to strike “traitors.” Guiterrez earns $8.25 an hour after four years on the job; she received a 25-cent raise in August when the owner was trying to persuade her not to strike. She did anyway, and since then has seen her hours halved from 38 to barely 20 some weeks. That has been devastating to Guiterrez, who supports her disabled mother and three nieces and nephews with her Burger King pay. (Neither the chain nor the franchisees in question responded to requests for comment.)

According to the US Department of Labor, fewer than 2 percent of food service workers are unionized. It shows. Employees like King and Guiterrez are at a major disadvantage when demanding better pay and working conditions. Average wages in the sector have stagnated at just above the federal minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, for two decades. About 13 percent of fast-food workers have employer-sponsored health benefits, compared with 59 percent of the workforce as a whole. Whether through traditional unions or some other vehicle, one of the quickest ways to improve the lot of most restaurant employees would be for them to band together.

Larger unions often have trouble making inroads into restaurants because of the small-scale nature of the business, with its mom-and-pop eateries and franchised fast-food outlets. Fortunately, less conventional advocates for workers are filling the gap.

One promising example is New York-based Restaurant Opportunities Center United, which recently expanded its efforts to Boston. The advocacy group is probably best known for a $5.25 million settlement it helped win against celebrity chef Mario Batali in 2012 after servers at several of Batali’s famed restaurants alleged their employer had violated the Fair Labor Standards Act, in part by pocketing gratuities. Beyond its workplace justice campaigns, however, ROC-United offers its 10,000 nationwide members benefits such as free job training and an affordable health plan. In Boston, this work should complement local immigrant worker centers, which already help collect unpaid wages, connect employees to enforcement agencies, and provide multilingual education on workers’ rights.

To see the impact that better organizing can have, one needn’t look much farther than Boston’s college campuses. Traditional unions have had the most success organizing food service workers at large institutions, such as hotels, hospitals, and universities. Boston’s Unite Here Local 26 has negotiated collective bargaining agreements on behalf of food workers at several local schools, including Harvard, Northeastern, Brandeis, and MIT. “What we found in non-union settings were pay rates that ranged from $9 to $11 and health benefits with premiums, co-pays, and deductibles so high the employees couldn’t afford them,” says Brian Lang, Local 26’s president.

With Local 26’s help, Lang says, pay has risen significantly, employees’ share of their health coverage has dropped to as little as $4 a week, and workers are ensured regular schedules, including set days off. As union members, they also have access to legal help, low-interest loans to buy homes, and educational initiatives such as English lessons and GED prep.

Up to now, unions have generally shied away from trying to organize fast-food workers one independently owned franchise at a time. But what if they set their sights higher? Chains like McDonald’s, KFC, and Burger King already dictate many details of franchise operations, from staff uniforms to marketing to the prices they can charge for certain menu items. If they wanted, national fast-food chains could also insist that franchisees abide by collectively bargained wage standards. The main thing preventing the chains from negotiating such agreements is the likely rise in worker salaries.

Fortunately, the National Labor Relations Board came to Kyle King’s aid. Under the Obama administration, the panel has recognized that, even though the might of labor has declined, workers’ rights still need protection. It has emphasized key parts of the National Labor Relations Act that allow for any employees to join together and seek better terms, with or without a union, says Boston labor attorney Louis Mandarini, who filed a complaint with the board on King’s behalf.

Because King was exercising his right to contact the media about inadequate working conditions, the NLRB complaint prompted the owners of the Burger King franchise where he works to settle with King. He will have his pay reinstated for the day he was sent home after the Aug. 29 strike, and Burger King has committed to upping King’s weekly hours significantly.

But it’s crucial to note who connected King to his legal representation: MassUniting, a local labor group financed in part by the Service Employees International Union. As King put it, “I wouldn’t have even known I had these rights if someone hadn’t been there to tell me.”