Senate vote supports RA union organizers

by Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff

he Faculty Senate voted to support students fighting for recognition of the residents assistants' (RA) union after some debate at its May 9 meeting. The vote came in the wake of two weeks of demonstrations by students and others seeking recognition of the union by the University. One of the protests, on April 30, ended with the arrest of 35 pro-union supporters following a sit-in in Whitmore Administration Building.

     The RAs voted March 5 to join United Auto Workers Local 2322, which also represents the Graduate Employee Organization. The Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission conducted the election, but campus officials have declined to bargain with the RAs in order to force a court review of the MLRC ruling that RAs are employees entitled to unionize.

     The senate passed a motion urging the campus administration "not to spend precious funds and good will in fighting the recently elected, legally recognized RA union," further urging them to begin immediate discussions with RA representatives and to refrain from additional punitive actions against RAs and other students fighting for the "union recognition that is rightfully and legally theirs."

     Senator Brian O'Connor expressed concern that refraining from enforcing the picketing code in this instance would make the code ineffective.

     "While I do support the RAs in general, I have a problem with the last sentence that's a little different," said secretary Ernest May. "The last phrase 'that is rightfully and legally theirs': that's expressing a legal judgment, which I don't think [is] within the purview of the senate to judge. The path which the administration is taking is in fact a legally sanctioned path. The law is extremely complicated, and I don't think we should set ourselves up as judges here."

     "What we really need to decide is whether we really want to continue this dispute and harden the dispute, or whether we want to urge the administration to back off," said Roland Chilton, chair of the Rules Committee.

     "The National Labor Relations Board has consistently been viewing students who are workers as workers, so our labor commission is doing nothing that is at odds with what is happening at the federal level," said senator Jane Giacobbe Miller. "It seems to me that it's a tremendous waste of money because we are in fact utilizing private legal counsel to fight something that has been pretty well established at both the state and federal level."

     Ron Story, president of the Massachusetts Society of Professors, introduced the motion, which was not on the senate's agenda, and urged its support, he said, in order to maintain recently galvanized unity on campus. Students, faculty, other staff, and alumni worked together to garner support for the campus during the budget crisis in the current fiscal year. Story said he feared those relationships could be jeopardized by the union standoff.

     "Feelings are running very high on the campus on both sides," Story said. "We're really urging the administration to look past their immediate irritations and to look to the longer-term health of this campus, and I think dealing with the RAs and the union would help in that respect."