Educate a Straussian: Support the Workers at Pomona College

Last month, I debated Mark Blitz, a Straussian neocon and former Reagan Administration official, and now professor of political philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, about the politics of freedom. Throughout the debate, Blitz expressed some skepticism about my account of coercion in the workplace.

At one slightly tense moment, I confronted Blitz directly about the situation of the workers at his college (1:08:35 in the video).

Robin: Let me ask you another question. You teach at Claremont McKenna College. Are the staff there—and by that I mean the custodial workers, the clerical workers—are they unionized?

Blitz: I would say that most people who are familiar with colleges everywhere recognize that they’re good places to work. They’re very good places to work if you’re tenured faculty, of course. But a lot of that carries on down through so that most people in my college and I believe other colleges have fairly wide protections. I would also say that most people in my colleges and other colleges would face a situation in which it would be extraordinary if the kinds of thing you’re talking about as reasons for firing actually occurred and even more extraordinary if they came to light and the managers who were involved in them were not themselves let go or fired. Again, it could turn out that if one had the vision which would enable one to see precisely what’s happening in each place, what I’m saying is wrong. But it’s my experience of any college actually that I’ve worked in, and it’s my experience working in government as well, of course.

Robin: Let me just add one thing. I’ve noticed this among many college professors, whether they’re on the left or the right, that they actually oftentimes don’t know the conditions of employment of the staff that works at their institutions. They oftentimes conflate their own working conditions—which if you’re a professor with tenure are quite good; you have a tremendous amount of protections—with those of the people who empty the garbage cans, who clean the dining halls, who serve the food, who really make up a large part of the staff.  I oftentimes am shocked, to be honest with you, at how little familiarity—again, this is not a left or right thing—professors have about those working conditions. And I would submit that unless those workers have a union or are government workers, the facts are that they have extremely few protections on their job.

Blitz: My experience, having actually been involved in management of my own college, is that that’s not the case. Perhaps you’re right about professors generally who are ignorant of all sorts of things. But not in this case on this issue.

Claremont McKenna is part of a consortium of colleges called the “Claremont Colleges.” All seven of its campuses are adjoining and are modeled, according to the consortium’s website, on the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. In other words, each college is part of a cozy little whole. In fact, Blitz at one point in the above exchange refers to “my colleges,” perhaps for this very reason.

One of the Claremont Colleges is Pomona College. And it just so happens that there is indeed, right under Professor Blitz’s nose, a rather nasty instance of workplace coercion going on there.

In 2010, the dining hall workers at Pomona began to organize a union. Many had been working at the college for years. In 2011 the administration suddenly decided to undertake a review of the immigration status of its workers. It found problems in the files of 84 employees. Seventeen were ultimately fired; 16 of those fired worked in the dining halls, including many leading union activists. Remember: many of these men and women had been working at the College for years. Only now, in the midst of a union drive, did their immigration status become a problem that was held against them.

This was hardly the first time the college had acted against the union drive. In the summer of 2011 the administration instituted a gag rule preventing dining hall workers and students from talking to each other during the workers’ break time. That order was ultimately rescinded in the face of a pending government action against the college.

These events were hardly a state secret. They were reported in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.  I had heard about them in far-off Brooklyn. Yet Professor Blitz didn’t seem to know about them at all.

Needless to say, in a climate of fear and intimidation such as this, it’s awfully difficult for workers to have a full and free debate on the merits of unionization. The dining hall workers have therefore asked the administration to sign a neutrality agreement, allowing the workers to debate this issue for themselves. Other universities, including Georgetown and Northeastern, have signed such agreements.

The workers are circulating a petition among academics calling on the administration to sign the agreement. If you want to sign the petition so that the Pomona workers can engage in this debate without fear of recrimination and retaliation, please do so here.

If you want further documentation of just how difficult it is to organize a union in the United States, and how the union election process is stacked against unions, check out this landmark study from Human Rights Watch. Additional studies can be found here, and here, and here. These will give some context for why unions are increasingly asking employers to sign neutrality agreements in advance of organizing drives.

10 Comments

  1. sj660 (@sj660) March 16, 2013 at 11:25 am | #

    Shouldn’t be news to him. I’m a ’99 and his was an issue my entire time there.

  2. Logan7 March 16, 2013 at 4:58 pm | #

    Robin: Let me just add one thing. I’ve noticed this among many college professors, whether they’re on the left or the right, that they actually oftentimes don’t know the conditions of employment of the staff that works at their institutions. They oftentimes conflate their own working conditions—which if you’re a professor with tenure are quite good; you have a tremendous amount of protections—with those of the people who empty the garbage cans, who clean the dining halls, who serve the food, who really make up a large part of the staff. I oftentimes am shocked, to be honest with you, at how little familiarity—again, this is not a left or right thing—professors have about those working conditions. And I would submit that unless those workers have a union or are government workers, the facts are that they have extremely few protections on their job.

    AMEN! Our university is divided into faculty, academic staff, students, and classified staff. Nearly all of the first three assume that classified staff get “vacations” between semesters. Classified staff were formerly represented by AFSCME, but when Scott Walker and his fellow Republicans came to power and all but destroyed the public employee unions, our “progressive” university happily seized the opportunity to institute a new personnel system that strips classified workers of the protections they enjoyed under AFSCME.

  3. Just another adjunct March 16, 2013 at 5:47 pm | #

    I’d also be curious to know if adjuncts are used at Pomona, and if so, what their working conditions are.

  4. John T March 16, 2013 at 10:20 pm | #

    Corey, thanks for posting on this. I graduated from Pomona last May and watched this thing unfold.

    I do want to take a moment to clear up the facts of the issue, not because I think they take away from the essence of your post, but just because, well, the facts are important.

    In November 2011, an employee of the college filed a complaint with the Board of Trustees alleging that the college had a policy of not obtaining proper documentation from employees prior to hiring. The Board hired a law firm, Sidley Austin, to investigate the charges. The firm found that the college’s hiring policies were fine, and in accordance with the law. However, they also discovered that 84 employees were missing proper documentation. (Many, maybe most, of these employees were hired by previous administrations whose hiring practices may have been less than sound.) The college issued letters to these employees and gave them two weeks to correct their deficiencies. 17 employees were not able to do so, and they were fired. Many of these employees were pro-union activists who had been, in a few cases at least, vocal critics of the college’s dining service policies.

    There are many questions about the issue that I have not been able to answer (granted: I’ve been a bit out of the loop since I graduated), but three seem particularly pressing. The first is what kind of complaint would have enough gravity and merit to cause the Board of Trustees to invest in an investigation of the college leadership that it ostensibly supports. The second is why the Board initiated the investigation before discussing the complaint with the college’s leadership and attempting to solve the problem without involving outside parties. (Perhaps the employee who issued the complaint threatened to alert authorities?) The third is why an investigation of this (relatively new) administration’s current hiring practices necessitated a review of the documentation of people that have been employed by the college for decades. Did they really go through every record? What might have been the motivation for that?

    But, like I said, I agree with the essence of your post, and I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s not just faculty that are often unaware of the conditions of college workers but students as well. Pomona is known for having a pretty liberal student body (even by small liberal arts college standards), but I’d say the majority of responses I witnessed to unionization efforts were apathetic and in a not-insignificant number of cases downright hostile. Students at the college were (and perhaps still are) authoritarian in the sense that they trust the administration’s assessment of the situation regardless of the existence of any evidence one way or the other.

    • Corey Robin March 16, 2013 at 10:26 pm | #

      Thanks, John, for your thoughtful comment and caution. I actually took up some of the issues you raise over in the comments section at Crooked Timber, where I also blog and where I cross-posted this post. One thing I’ll stress here (though you can read what I said there) is that all of this account you offer does come from a report that was written by five members of the Board of Trustees, the very board that has made the decision about Pomona’s stance on the union drive (it’s always the trustees that ultimately decide these questions). So we have very good reason to be skeptical. Not to mention that the purview of the report was very narrow and we still have no idea who this “employee” was who approached the board in the first place. The story sounds way too fishy to take on faith. And until we get real documentation from a credible outside body, I see very little grounds for taking it on faith or at face value.

      • John T March 18, 2013 at 2:17 am | #

        Thanks for the reply. I should have used scare quotes when I referred to the ‘facts.’ I think your skepticism is warranted. My point was that even if we are to accept the report as written we still have reason to suspect ulterior motives on the part of those who initiated the review of employment documentation.

        Unrelated, a great example of how out-of-the-loop faculty can be when it comes to college governance would be the admissions scandal at none other than Claremont McKenna College. (The college reported exaggerated SAT scores for its incoming classes for six years before fessing up early last year.) I knew many tenured professors who were heavily involved in college governance during those years, and they were (it seemed to me at least) genuinely caught off guard.

        What I found most interesting about that situation, actually, was that the college community was shocked — shocked! — that an admissions office would fabricate its data, but by and large did not question the assertion a sizable contingent of pro-union service workers needed to be fired for (in some cases) decades-old clerical errors. I wrote about this at the time (in the student newspaper), hoping to harness some of the skepticism bred by the admissions scandal: http://tsl.pomona.edu/articles/2012/2/2/opinions/2419-cracks-in-the-meritocracy .

        Anyway, I do want to thank you again for posting on this. There is a wonderful and dedicated group of Pomona staff, faculty, and students who continue to demonstrate solidarity with the dining hall workers. But given the gridlock that has been reached in negotiations with administration and college officials, I think outside pressure for a fair process can only be a good thing.

  5. Alto Berto (@AltoBerto) November 18, 2013 at 7:19 am | #

    What’s so bad about Strauss? Kind and patient lectures, beautiful books, beautiful history, interesting ideas – good fun!

  6. Alto Berto (@AltoBerto) November 18, 2013 at 1:40 pm | #

    On the topic at hand a very poignant case, that you’ve no doubt heard about, would be the Kermit Abortion Clinic. I remember thinking very much the same about how the

    Lynda Williams, 44, was trying to raise four children after her husband was murdered.

    Sherry West, 53, had been waiting more than a year for disability after contracting hepatitis C through her work as a medical assistant at a Veterans Administration Hospital, where she had spent 20 years.

    Adrienne Moton, 36, was steered to the Women’s Medical Society through a career school, where she was studying to be a medical assistant. And Elizabeth Hampton, 55, had been in foster care as a girl with the third wife of clinic owner Dr. Kermit Gosnell.

    The place was described as a “House of Horrors” where “It would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.” Think back to the Stanford Prison Experiments (popularly cited ad nauseam), giving even nominal power to someone over another often overwhelmingly leads to hell not heaven.

    Relevant article here:
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/29/pennsylvania-abortion-clinic_n_3351716.html

  7. AD Powell (@mischling2nd) November 18, 2013 at 9:37 pm | #

    There’s a war on the administrative support staff of universities all over the USA:

    Other schools, such as the University of California at Berkley and Yale University, have developed similar models, concentrating roles that were once decentralized.

    http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2013/11/university_of_michigan_downsiz.html

    http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2013/11

    http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2013/11/university_of_michigan_says_no.html/university_of_michigan_working.html

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