By Ari Jewell, Alexis Ali, Daegan Miller
There have been so many stormy upheavals at UMass Amherst over the past few years, and the pace of change has been so unrelenting, that it’s worth pausing and taking a moment to reflect on all we’ve been through together. Storms are, by their nature, disorienting, and you may be wondering whether PSU has lost its way, become distracted by side issues, or has sacrificed its core values and main constituency. While the three of us can only speak for ourselves, we hope that our perspective is useful as you continue to help steer the course of our union.
A quick recap: there was COVID, of course, and the furloughs, the gutting of staff positions, the bitter fight over flexible and remote work, the runaway inflation and the stagnant—if not downwardly mobile—salaries. Management illegally privatized Advancement, and 125 of our friends and colleagues lost those state jobs. Then, only a year later, Chancellor Reyes invited hundreds of riot police to campus to violently quell protests. There were arrests—more than 130 of them—and trumped-up felony charges filed, no-confidence votes taken and passed, and our own ongoing member-wide efforts to hold the chancellor accountable. Nearly all of us suffer from overwork and understaffing. Bargaining has begun and management walked away from the table even as each of us continues to punch in everyday.
Despite all of this, there’s been plenty of good: we have collectively built PSU into a fighting union, and we’ve won when we’ve come together. Unit B occupied Whitmore and, with the help of our union siblings in AFSCME (who drove their trash trucks through the parking lot blowing their air horns), won a stunning title reclassification and pay bump for nearly all Unit B positions (for more, see this interview). We were able to not only win the option for flexible and remote work, but to codify the process, make it transparent, and so insulate our members against management’s whims. We won a historic 8% COLA, and then when the state legislature delayed its passage, we rallied and brought the politicians back from their holiday vacations to finish their work and get us paid. We’ve fought privatization every step of the way and won a historic job and salary guarantee for every affected member. That privatization fight has won the backing of our Congressional delegation, state representatives, and the state auditor, who found that the privatization was illegal. At our collective prompting, the Department of Labor Relations found probable cause that UMass broke the law on four counts, and we have a trial date set for later this year. PSU has shined light on the biased way that minoritized members are over-disciplined by management, and we’ve brought to the bargaining table the most comprehensive package of proposals—including a transformative new wage scale—that anyone can remember. All of this is just a small sample of the work that PSU has been able to make public.
With this many wins and losses, false starts, quick victories, and ambitious campaigns, it can be hard to see the throughline.
We believe that the throughline is braided and that the only way any of us win is when we all win. Put another way, winning the raises each of us deserves isn’t much of a win when management also targets BIPOC staff for excessive discipline; it’s not a win when student political engagement is seen as a crime, when entire units are privatized to make way for private investment, or when understaffing becomes a method for increasing revenue.
From our point of view, UMass management is acting in increasingly authoritarian ways. Even if (when!) we win our bargaining asks, a union is not and cannot be a single-issue political entity. Zooming out, there are two pillars necessary for a strong union that are currently threatened on campus.
Campus issues are union issues
Our workplace is the University of Massachusetts Amherst, wherever it exists: the physical space here in Amherst, the online space of remote work, and the various satellite units. Every one of us is ultimately here to support the research of the faculty and the education of the students, both undergraduate and graduate—which means that we acutely feel everything affecting our physical or virtual spaces, our colleagues (including those represented by other unions), faculty, and students. The campus climate and our workplace climate are the same, and we deserve a say over the conditions in which we work.
Furthermore, this is a public university in a commonwealth. UMass is funded with our tax dollars, the Board of Trustees is appointed by the state representatives we vote for, and the institution exists for the public good–for our good. So, when something like a mass arrest happens on campus, not only is it an act of harm against our workplace and working community, it jeopardizes what it means to serve Massachusetts as a public employee of a public university.
It’s not a conversation if you’re not allowed to speak up
From our perspective, one of the most disturbing trends of the past year is the way that management has consistently worked to curb conversation on campus. We saw this most clearly this past May when Chancellor Reyes refused to negotiate with students and instead chose to call in the police, and in his administration’s continual refusal to accept PSU’s invitation to a dialogue about the protest crackdown and aftermath. He even refused to meet with State Senator Jo Comerford—who represents the district that includes UMass Amherst and is senate chair for the Massachusetts Legislature’s Joint Committee on Higher Education—when she asked why he was pursuing felony charges against students. And campus unions have been shut out of the Campus Demonstration Policy Task Force while Reyes hosts “all employee forums,” which are in fact carefully staged events with small groups of staff.
Management’s position seems to be that the only situation in which PSU has a voice is during contract negotiations… and yet, they’re stonewalling us at the bargaining table as well. Management’s team has displayed unprecedented levels of obstruction during bargaining. (For more on this, see this story)
Despite this constant, multi-faceted refusal to converse, Reyes and his administration have been consistently marketing themselves as always open to discussion with the entire UMass Amherst community. A (paywalled) Boston Globe profile of Reyes from June 23 concludes:
Reyes has been trying to pick up where he left off. He’s back to walking the campus, making time for conversation, and looking for common ground, one person at a time.
“I work with people,” he said. “I can’t work alone.”
Two paths for UMass Amherst
We believe that all the different issues that PSU has taken on—privatization, low pay, free-speech crackdowns, racially biased discipline, understaffing, stalled bargaining—are but different symptoms of the same underlying problem. UMass Amherst is at a crossroads in its history.
One road, the one the Reyes administration is pushing the university down, is toward something that looks like a private corporation, where staff are nothing more than underpaid employees in “at-will” positions whose task is to stay silent, remain in our cubicles well away from faculty and students, work hard at whatever management tells us to do, and, when our salaries can’t cover groceries, gratefully head to the campus food pantry. It’s a vision where we are guests on campus, with little say over our pay or our working conditions, and none whatsoever over the direction the university takes. It’s a vision where outside, private consultants guide the university toward fulfilling a strategy made deliberately obscure by marketing-speak. This is a vision of a university that works primarily for the good of its executives and private investors who donate not to UMass Amherst, but the private University of Amherst Foundation, which shields its donors from public scrutiny.
The other road is one where the University of Massachusetts Amherst remains open, accessible, and accountable to the public; where management cannot unilaterally decide to privatize our jobs; where the common ground is a place for the common good in our commonwealth; where we can all work together to realize these common goals—great education, free expression, fair pay, and healthy and humane working conditions. UMass works because we do, and so UMass must work for all of us.
The current contract for which we’re bargaining—whenever management decides to show up—will transform what it means to work at UMass, but we can’t win it if we continue going down the Reyes administration’s road, and we won’t be able to win it on our own or if we continue to let management dictate when and where we can show up and what we’re allowed to say when we do. Solidarity is not just a slogan but an obligation to mutual aid, to help each other out.
There are times when we’re staff, faculty, or students, and there are times when we must be one campus community. Increasingly, in the midst of a groundswell of centralizing leadership, we cannot afford to remain distinct. When we show up for students, for faculty, for the campus climate, and for our fellow unions, that’s when we truly show up for ourselves.