The Jesuits and us

Meanwhile, in far-off New Haven
    By Ben Smith

Last Tuesday, about 150 Fairfield University students, faculty, and janitorial workers marched up the hill to the school's administrative offices. They would have waved hand-printed signs, but organizers were worried that this might violate federal labor law: Fairfield's janitors receive their meager paychecks from a subcontractor, the Service Management Group (SMG), and under the century-old Taft-Hartley Act they cannot legally picket the university. They protested as part of the regional Justice for Janitors campaign.

The strange legal situation at this medium-sized Catholic university shows that even the most scrupulous of employers often use subcontracting as a legal and ethical dodge. Fairfield is run by Jesuit priests, and its president, Aloysius Kelly, S.J., released a letter to protesters conceding an ethical responsibility "because of who we are." Still, he pointed out that, for "business and legal reasons," wages and benefits "remain in the sole control of the contractors." Father Kelly, in step with labor law, suggested the union take up its complaints with SMG.

Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 531 organizer Autumn Weintraub says that workers would love to affiliate with the SEIU and bring their case directly to SMG, if they could keep their jobs too. But contract labor is cheap, in part because contractors don't have public images and institutional ethics like universities and religious institutions do. If SMG recognized the union and raised wages and costs, Fairfield could just switch to the next contractor. Unfortunately for Fairfield, the school now has a real image problem: a dog-collared priest opened the rally with a prayer, and many students cited a specifically Catholic responsibility to pay janitors more than the $6.50 per hour that many now make.

Half an hour north on Route 95, Fusco employs five or six people at Yale. These few non-union laborers clean out Linsley-Chittenden Hall and the Swing Space, and Fusco is only a mild thorn in the side of Hotel and Restaurant Workers Local 35, which represents the rest of Yale's dining hall and maintenance staffs. But Yale fought hard for the right to contract: it was a major issue in the 15-month contract dispute that culminated in the bitter strike of 1996-97.

In the most recent contract, Yale agreed not to lay off any Local 35 workers and to demand a degree of control over subcontractors that the Fairfield administration has insisted is impossible: Fusco is required to pay its workers at least $7.43 an hour this year, with a three percent increase each year. There's little for subcontractors to do—in fact, it seems strange that Yale bothers with such a small number. Yale labor relations director Brian Tunney, who denied plans to increase contracting any time soon, explained, however, that "we wanted to do some benchmarking, we wanted to learn."

For now, Yale undergraduates have little broom-waving to look forward to. Local 35 remains wary of contracting, and Chief Steward Meg Riccio is currently tangling with Tunney's office over the dining halls' decision to start buying their bread from a private shop near the medical school.

Justice for Janitors has seen success in the past and seems likely to win Fairfield. It succeeds because, ultimately, we're not that dumb: a community that doesn't tolerate poor working conditions shouldn't care who writes the checks. Fairfield, protesters claim, employed its workers directly until the summer of 1992, when they were all fired, then some were rehired by SMG at lower rates of compensation. Fairfield could have cut the wages itself, but didn't have the guts.

Yale administrators should keep that in mind. They negotiated the right to use subcontractors because they planned to use it and are now, as Tunney said,"benchmarking." At Fairfield, which is about half the size of Yale, the painful inequality between students and janitors brought 150 kids out in the bitter cold to hear speeches in Spanish and English. Subcontracting doesn't have to be a ploy, and there's nothing wrong with sourcing work to skilled union carpenters when there's a building to be restored. But you don't have to be a Jesuit to recognize when subcontracting simply means deceit. Fairfield crossed that line in 1992, and Yale's "benchmarking" comes perilously close.

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