Dear Friends,

In just a few days the Oberlin College administration will eliminate the decent paying jobs of 114
unionized food service and janitorial workers and replace them with low-wage contractors.
These workers will be cast aside in the middle of a pandemic in a town with a pre-virus 23
percent poverty rate. (See below the memo to the faculty written by an Oberlin professor familiar
with the bargaining)

As alumni, parents, faculty and friends, we have tried again and again to reason with the
administration and the trustees. We’ve urged them to go back to the bargaining table and
secure a contract fair to all. We have sent in petitions, written letters, engaged in private
conversations with board members and administrators, but to no avail. Even after 2,300 alumni
and parents signed a petition saying we would withhold donations until the matter was amicably
resolved, we received no response at all.

Therefore, we are setting up a non-profit, charitable 1833 Just Transition Fund to​ support
workers if they are let go, or support the college if the jobs continue through a collective bargaining
agreement with the union.

We believe it is necessary to demonstrate to the administration and board that their desire to save
money by casting aside 114 workers will be offset by the resources we will direct to the 1833 Just
Transition Fund.

We are taking this step to achieve the following positive goals:

·​ ​Securing the jobs, wages and working conditions of 114 Oberlin workers;

·​ ​Halting the destruction of the local union;

·​ ​Preventing more damage to the town of Oberlin that has a 23% pre-pandemic poverty rate;

·​ ​Contributing to the mending of the growing rift between Oberlin and the town;

·​ ​Contributing again to the College as it faces the pandemic crisis; and

·​ ​Protecting the Oberlin progressive traditions which connect us all to each other and to
generations who have worked so hard for social justice.

In a very real way, those 114 jobs now depend on how much we can raise for the fund and how
quickly we can do it.

To make your pledge, please go to

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfv5KlcheAOKwKWnbLkGKObiUrObmsE6Qlipzfcgy
sP5UUhjQ/viewform?fbzx=3276168307482338314
So many thanks for all who have and will contribute.

Colleagues,

I apologize in advance for the length of this post.

In a book that I assign in one of my labor classes, Thomas Geoghagen, a Chicago-based labor lawyer,
argues that trade unions and collective bargaining are more alien to most Americans than Abbie Hoffman
and the Yippies. Unions operate by seemingly arcane rules, are heavily regulated by law, privilege
collective rights over individual rights, fiercely protect internal solidarity and are steadfastly skeptical of
market outcomes. By now, when only about one in ten Americans belongs to a union, it is no surprise that
most of us don’t understand the intricacies of collective bargaining or what is at stake in bland and often
opaque contract language. This world is, for better or worse (I often think worse), what I have made the
focus of my work in the time since I arrived in Oberlin 30 years ago. It is what I teach and it is the core of
my scholarship. I had in fact just arrived here when Oberlin workers first chose the UAW to represent
them, and subsequently went right to the brink of a strike to obtain a first contract.

This is the context in which I find the negotiating stance of the College over the last four months to have
been profoundly problematic, and the communication we have received from the College administration in
the last two weeks to be misleading. There is a lot one could say, but my concerns are both with the
process and the substance of the College’s actions since mid-February when it first announced the
possibility of outsourcing custodial and dining services, but claimed itself willing to bargain in good faith to
avoid that outcome.

First the process. Collective bargaining is a long established process, established both in past practice
and labor law. It begins with each side setting out its maximal position in a first set of contract proposals.
In these initial offers each side explains to the other what it would take to reach agreement. Subsequent
rounds of bargaining narrow the gap, reach agreement in some areas but not others, and come as close
together as possible, at which point the union will take the product of negotiations to its membership for a
vote. None of this happened in bargaining with the UAW. The College never produced an initial contract
proposal, nor subsequent ones; its last proposal was also its first. This meant that for four months, the
UAW was negotiating in the dark, negotiating with itself essentially, making offers and concessions, with
no sense of what the magic number was, or indeed if there was a magic number. This does not meet any
definition of bargaining in good faith.

Worse, when the College finally issued a take-it-or-leave-it proposal less than two weeks ago, it entirely
shifted the terrain on which bargaining had been taking place. It: 1) simply announced that the dining
service workers would be outsourced regardless of the outcome of bargaining; 2) suddenly insisted that
new categories of worker beyond dining and custodial workers (the remaining third of UAW members in
the skilled trades and transportation pool) be covered by its terms; 3) fundamentally re-wrote the
management rights sections of the contract (see below). And throughout the entire process, including the
final proposal, the College still refused to guarantee that workers would not be outsourced in the near
future. In other words, it insisted that the UAW agree to a contract containing massive concessions on
wages, benefits and worker rights without even the guarantee that it would save the jobs, which was the
entire point of the bargaining process.

And in a final indignity, it insisted that the UAW immediately take a vote on its final offer, in the middle of a
pandemic, without the ability to hold a meeting of its members, and without any further bargaining or
clarification of the College’s proposal, despite the fact that the current contract doesn’t expire until the end
of September. It is the prerogative of a union to decide when to take a contract offer to its members, not
the employer. It is for this reason that the UAW has filed Unfair Labor Practice charges against the
College for violations of the National Labor Relations Act, charging that in multiple ways the College
bargained in bad faith.

Next substance. When most of us think about the purpose of unions, we probably think about wages and
benefits. And indeed, by and large, and holding occupation and skill constant, union members tend to be
better paid with better benefits than their non union counterparts. But these material benefits are not in
fact the primary purpose of unions nor the reason for their genesis. Unions exist to offer protection from
arbitrary management power. That is why it is often said that employers get the unions they deserve. This
protection comes in various forms. First and foremost, it requires that managers show cause before firing
workers; in other words, it ends “employment at will” for unionized workers, the doctrine that a worker can
be fired for “any reason or no reason at all” which governs the vast majority of American workers
(eagle-eyed colleagues will have noticed that the College now uses explicit employment at will language
for visiting faculty hires).

Second, it provides a grievance process that protects a worker from dangerous or unsafe work, from
overwork or compulsory overtime, from the absence of personal protective gear, from doing work for
which they are not trained, from threats and intimidation -- the petty tyranny -- on the part of managers
and supervisors. At its most essential, it gives workers a voice at work; it is what guarantees the right to
disagree and be heard without fear of being fired. In contract language, management rights are
everything not specified in the contract. All collective bargaining agreements preserve these so-called
management rights in the form of broad managerial prerogative but prerogative that is bounded by
reasonable protections for workers. Protection for us too, because an employer who is unconstrained by
such clauses, especially a for-profit employer, is more likely to cut corners with health and safety in ways
that also put the rest of us at risk.
It is here, in the management rights clauses of the College’s final and only contract proposal, that there is
the most striking departure from normal language. By the point two weeks ago when the proposal was
made, the UAW, negotiating in the dark, had already offered substantial wage cuts, accepted the
CDHP-only health plan and zero retirement contributions, and was willing to give up vacation days to pay
for winter shutdown pay. The College in its proposal, took those material concessions and then
completely re-wrote the management rights section, undoing 27 years of contract language carefully
crafted between the College and UAW, in a manner spectacularly outside the norm of typical labor
relations. The scale of what the College was demanding was breathtaking; just aesthetically, looking at
the proposed language, one sees vast swathes of strikeouts from the previous contract, with agreement
replaced by stark language in which supervisors make all decisions unilaterally. The College would not
guarantee not to outsource further, current union positions could be replaced with non-union ones, and
managers no longer had to explain or bargain over changes to working conditions, schedule changes and
so on. Such language makes a union fundamentally irrelevant; the workers would be union members in
name only. When some in our community have charged the College with union busting over the last few
months, they have been referring to replacing unionized workers with non-union ones, which indeed has
happened through outsourcing. But this contract language literally empties union membership of its most
basic purpose and function.

This then is how we got here. A process of changing targets in which the UAW never knew what, if
anything, it would take to reach an agreement to save jobs and offered up concession after concession.
Then at the last minute, a single take-it-or-leave-it contract proposal which outsourced the dining service
workers anyway, took the wage and benefit concessions and applied them to new categories of worker,
imposed management rights language that eviscerated union and worker protections and rights, and all
the while, still refused to guarantee that the College would not turn around six months from now and
outsource the remainder of the workers. No responsible union could accept that offer or take it to its
members in that form. The UAW did what it had to do which was politely reject that proposal but offer to
continue bargaining now that it at least knew, four months into the negotiation process, what the College’s
maximal position was. The College’s immediate response was to announce the outsourcing of custodial
workers too. It can still step back from the brink and take up the UAW’s offer to keep bargaining. I hope it
does.