S.U. Employees Need to Unionize—All of Us

Though the Women’s Movement has shown that there is a way in contemporary society for women to give primacy to women’s networks while still challenging the gender division of labour, the reconciling of the desire to retain one’s sex/affective bonds with women and yet to challenge male dominance is only possible under certain sorts of historical conditions - those in which the institutions which reproduce male dominance are themselves in crisis or change.

— Ann Ferguson, Blood at the Root, pp. 81-82

SU employees need to unionize — all of us. Now, the time of crisis and change at SU, is the time for us to establish the collective voice we so desperately need to defend our interests. If we don’t establish that voice, no one else will speak for us. In 1986, during the most recent union organizing drive, Joan Carpenter, in violation of university regulations, sent letters to all employees warning us that we didn’t want a bunch of steelworkers making our decisions for us. Leaving aside her misrepresentation of what a union is (even the USWA), let us look at the alternative left to us. Since we have never been allowed to speak for ourselves, we have been left with Carpenter, Tom Boyd and the rest of the administration speaking for us. What hath they wrought? In salary, we make nothing. In terms of autonomy, we have nothing. And in the eyes of SU, we are nothing, save a vast array of interchangeable and easily replaced cogs in the stuttering machinery that is this university. It is, to coin a phrase that seems to have worked pretty well for a couple of bubbas, time for a change. That change won’t happen without a union.

Now that we’ve experienced a year of downsizing, Buzz Shaw and Total Quality Management, these unsettled times may be the perfect opportunity for us to examine the issue of respect in relation to the culture on campus called “staff” and to how we as this culture fit into the larger framework of Syracuse University’s community.

Some might wonder how we can define ourselves as a culture, although one of the American Heritage dictionary definitions of that term — “the breeding of animals or growing plants to produce improved stock” — might describe how the administration sees us. We can define ourselves in a couple of obvious ways: we as non- exempt staff are predominately female, and our pay scale indicates that Syracuse University subscribes to the traditional “pin money” understanding of women’s wages (they don’t pay us enough to support ourselves or our families because they expect we’ve all got a man to take care of the major expenses). In general, however, we are a fractious group and know little about each other. Quick, now: how many (exempt and non-exempt) are we? How diverse and representative of the greater Syracuse population are we? What are our ages and gender configurations? How many of us take advantage of the educational benefits (remitted and dependent tuition) offered as implicit justification for near poverty level wages?

Relax. It’s not your fault that the answers don’t come easily. The very difficulty we have in accessing information about ourselves, in finding guidelines for the duties we perform — in gaining access to each other — is in fact by design. It might be difficult to prove that the administration has a history of consciously and overtly fostering intra-university ignorance, but there is no need to prove it to the staff since we experience it daily. Our invisibility, our facelessness is not accidental. We are generally one-, two, three-person offices scattered and fragmented across campus with limited access to one another and no common, informal space designated for our shared use.

As downsizing continues and our numbers are further trimmed, we staffers will continue to be on the front lines and behind the scenes, serving as liaison between the administrators and educators/faculty and students. As the largest non- teaching expendable body on campus, we will continue to be exploited. It is, therefore, imperative that we know about ourselves now.

There will be no initiative from the administration to treat us fairly. Twice during University Senate proceedings last Spring, Chancellor Shaw was presented with concerns about remarkably low staff salaries. On each occasion he indicated that this was simply not a significant concern on the part of the administration. In private conversation, we asked him what concrete steps we might take to bring SU clerical/secretarial salaries more into line with the market level of the surrounding area. He first questioned whether SU salaries in fact lagged behind the going rate (a point of which we assured him but about which we urge everyone else to enlighten him as well). He then warned us not to expect SU to be a leader in the community in this regard, because the money just isn’t there. Syracuse University’s “Mission and Vision” working document in May states that by 1996 SU wishes to “be a university whose five core values of quality, caring, diversity, innovation and service are pervasive and evident among all its members”; and to “have a workplace environment that attracts and retains a superior and diverse faculty and staff who motivate, educate and serve students.” These statements imply that we as staff will see a new dawning, a new respect for all- involved with TQM; we are skeptical since that is a respect that has been historically absent at SU and which we will have little or no voice in defining for the future.

We need a collective staff voice: a union. The administration has demonstrated repeatedly through its actions — the most obvious example being the obscene wage freeze of two years ago — that it will not grant us any measure of fair treatment unless we take it. As noted, we have had failed attempts to organize clerical staff into a collective bargaining agreement before, the most recent being thwarted by administration actions which violated university rules and probably federal law. We have a Vice President for Human Relations who has stated publicly that one of the reasons she was hired was to keep unions out. However, we are also in the midst of a major transformation of Syracuse University. We have history on our side in recent organizing examples such as the successful drive at Yale.

As SU redefines downsizing to rightsizing and tries to redefine the institution, to identify what it will be in the coming years, we have the chance, and arguably the obligation, to aid in that change, by proactively defining our role and our identity within the institution and by demanding the respect we deserve and the participation we offer. As the song goes, solidarity forever — the union makes us strong.

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