We write in support of the Student Worker Collective at Dartmouth’s demand for a $23 minimum wage and improved treatment of non-citizen workers. We particularly lament the administration’s decision to delay negotiations with our students who have given the campus a lesson in dignity and courage by standing up for immigrants, international students and campus workers.
A budget is a moral document. It states clearly an institution’s priorities and assumptions. Our administration refers to its lead negotiator, a veteran of several union-averse law firms, as “Dartmouth’s attorney” to bargain against Dartmouth students. The students on the other side of the bargaining table, meanwhile, prepare for these sessions in between classes and long hours in low-wage jobs. Who is this “Dartmouth” in “Dartmouth’s attorney?” Certainly not the many Dartmouth faculty, staff and graduate students who have first-hand experience with collective bargaining.
As faculty, we know how important union activity is — nationally, faculty members are unionized at more than twice the rate of the population at large. These numbers are growing because unions represent one of the very few forms of democratic self-governance in higher education generally, and at Dartmouth specifically. Dartmouth, for example, is among the mere 10% of U.S. campuses without an elected faculty senate where the faculty members vote on issues affecting the campus. Most decision-making faculty positions at Dartmouth are appointed, not elected, and most committees only have the power to advise, not decide. Union members like the student workers of the SWCD vote for leaders and group actions; ninety-one percent of SWCD workers voted to strike this month.
Dartmouth is best served when all of us, but especially the upper administration, remain steadfast in our defense of workers’ prerogatives and democratic governance. In our current political climate, this requires the moral clarity and courage to correctly identify and confront threats to the protections guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. During the negotiations that the administration abruptly terminated, the SWCD proposed that to enter our campus, Immigration and Customs Enforcement must have a judicial warrant signed by a judge with the name of the person sought. This demand was later won by the Palestine Solidarity Coalition after a lengthy stand-off with the administration on May 1. SWCD seeks to give it enforceable weight by writing it into their contract.
That ICE must show a signed judicial warrant to enter private property is anything but an idiosyncratic notion: it is the law of the land as written. That these two democratically-run and entirely separate student groups had to demand that or engage in civil disobedience to get our administration to declare its allegiance to the law should give everyone pause — and the moral clarity to support the SWCD against an increasingly authoritarian administration.
It was the SWCD that originally proposed that the College provide non-citizens with the additional resources they now require — resources like housing during off terms — to thrive as equal members of our college community. Happily, in fighting for the rights of non-citizen workers, the SWCD has given our community a lesson in dignity — and a set of concrete proposals that we can expand upon to support not just unionized workers but ALL non-citizen students, faculty and staff at Dartmouth.
This is unsurprising: First Amendment free speech guarantees achieved their substantive legal status thanks to labor unions. In the 1910s and ’20s, union members went to jails by the hundreds for reading the Constitution on street corners or public squares. In 1939, the Supreme Court case “Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization” finally established that the use of public space was “a part of the privileges, immunities, rights and liberties of citizens.” Labor unions — not libertarians — put teeth into the constitutional right to free expression for all of us.
In delaying negotiations with student workers, Dartmouth’s administration is taking advantage of the current constitutional crisis that flouts Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization as well as the First and Fourteenth Amendments, habeas corpus and common decency. The SWCD offers a democratic and just alternative. We support their demands for a $23 minimum wage and their vision for more just and equitable immigration policies on our campus.
Pamela Voekel is an Associate Professor of History, Jodi Kim is a Professor of English, and Molly Geidel is an Associate Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Guest columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
