“In my opinion, Cornell’s bargaining team has thought since the beginning that because they have fancy degrees and lofty titles that we don’t, our workers can’t read or do math. This strike is a direct result of University management not valuing its employees and treating working class people like they are an expendable afterthought… Today we take it to the streets. UAW members will wait for the university to come to the table with a REAL offer that reflects the truly essential nature of our workforce…” — UAW Region 9 Director Daniel Vicente in a statement on Aug. 20.
In the first sentence of the administration’s first email appeal to students regarding UAW Local 2300’s strike at Cornell, VP Ryan Lombardi wrote that the university has “negotiate[d] in good faith with the UAW over a new labor contract for our service and maintenance workers.” This sentence might seem neutral, but it subtly tricks the reader.
Cornell is not negotiating with the UAW over Cornell workers’ contract, it is bargaining with the service and maintenance workers themselves. Local 2300’s Bargaining Team is led by and largely made up of Cornell workers who dedicate their limited free time to fighting to improve the lives of their coworkers. Its president, Christine Johnson, has worked at Cornell for 19 years — 15 years longer than most students will end up spending in Ithaca.
Despite this, Lombardi opts to refer to the Bargaining Team as “UAW employees” — which could plausibly be read as “employees represented by the UAW,” but will undoubtedly be understood by some students as “employees of the UAW.” Cornell’s casting of the UAW as a mysterious intermediary intervening on behalf of its workers — rather than a collective organization of the workers themselves — is an example of third-partying, a common union-busting tactic.
Later in the email, Lombardi provides students with a grim, vague warning: “You may see individuals holding signs and chanting phrases around campus related to the ongoing union negotiations.” But as students, we see those “individuals” around campus all the time — making us meals in our top-rated dining halls, cleaning our residence halls and classrooms and repairing the many things students break during our time at Cornell.
Students should be much more concerned about the untrained individuals Cornell has hired as scabs during the strike, whose food safety training amounted to a few bullet points in a mass email sent out on Aug. 21. Cornell has resorted to asking faculty, retirees and nonunion staff members to cross the picket line and replace the essential labor of 1,200 UAW members. This is a dangerous and fundamentally unsustainable strategy that harms and divides the campus community as a whole.
Lombardi’s email also includes a “Negotiation Details” section, which spends more words talking about the intricacies of endowment management than it does describing the offers made at the bargaining table. The implication that workers represented by the UAW — which represents over 100,000 workers in higher education — are demanding more because they do not understand the economics of university endowments is deeply patronizing.
I don’t think students need to have an opinion on the minutiae of what a fair contract for Cornell workers should include — I’ll leave that to the workers who will have to live under the contract’s terms. But reasonable people can agree that Lombardi’s description of a proposal below the Ithaca living wage as “historic” is absurd. Throughout the email, Lombardi’s tone makes the administration’s stance clear: the University cannot feasibly improve their offer, and UAW members are being foolish and unreasonable by demanding more.
Could this university function normally if our Chief Investment Officer, Kenneth Miranda, were paid less than $2,671,714 per year? Could students endure living without the new $55 million athletic facility announced last year? Are university dollars best spent funding the research and development of advanced weapons technology for the Israeli military?
Instead of reviewing other areas of its supposedly-meager spending budget, Cornell has decided to find out how well the University functions without the people who take out the trash, mow the grass and cook the food on our campus. We’re already starting to hear stories from students about how that experiment is going: overflowing trash cans, reheated food and hilarious amounts of fruit in dining halls and maintenance requests in residence halls going unanswered. The situation will only worsen as more students return to campus.
The strike has already revealed why UAW members at Cornell believe they deserve a substantially better deal than Cornell has offered — they keep our campus running, and have the collective power to shut it down. In UAW Region 9 Director Daniel Vicente’s words, Local 2300 wants “a REAL offer.” Not an offer that resembles previous contracts, not an offer that fits within Cornell’s anticipated labor budget, but an offer that actually reflects the essential nature of our service and maintenance workers’ labor. An offer under which Cornell workers can thrive — not just scrape by.
If you want to understand what’s at stake in this strike, delete VP Lombardi’s bogus email, head to campus and strike up a conversation with a worker on the picket line. They are more than prepared to tell you about what it’s like to drive to work from far outside of Ithaca due to the sky-high cost of living, pay Cornell to park nowhere near their workplace, ride the notoriously unreliable TCAT to work and then be disciplined if they end up being a few minutes late.
Cornell needs to know that our community is united behind our service and maintenance workers’ demand for a truly historic contract, and the best way to demonstrate our solidarity is not crossing the picket line, or scabbing. Cornell has already hired temporary workers and asked non-union staff, faculty, and retirees to work in the place of union members, undermining Local 2300’s leverage.
Though individual situations may vary, most non-union, non-managerial employees are legally protected to refuse to cross the picket line. My organization, Cornell YDSA, has collaborated with labor lawyers in the region and law students in Cornell’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild to set up a strike hotline for Cornell workers seeking advice or resources related to not crossing the picket line. We can guarantee free legal support and representation to any protected Cornell workers who are illegally disciplined, fired or retaliated against for refusing to cross the UAW 2300 picket line.
Cornell community members can also sign our solidarity petition showing their support for our service and maintenance workers, and show up on the picket lines cropping up across campus. The Cornell administration thinks that they can turn students, faculty, non-union staff and other members of our community against the workers we depend on every day. Let’s prove them wrong.
Nick Wilson is a third year student in the New York State School of Industrial & Labor Relations at Cornell. His biweekly column Interim Expressive Activity provides a perspective on goings-on on campus from those who believe that Cornell should act less like a hedge fund and more like a responsible stakeholder in the Ithaca and global communities. The column does not intend to facilitate, engage in, participate or assist in any violations of University policy. Nick can be reached at [email protected].