Hundreds rally at UMass to defend unions, working-class people
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AMHERST - The popular uprising in Wisconsin and other states against efforts to weaken public employee unions reached the University of Massachusetts Wednesday, as students, faculty, regional union members and labor advocates rallied to show support for their Midwest "brothers and sisters" and call for more help for working-class people in the commonwealth.
About 300 people gathered outside the Student Union at midday to listen to and cheer a succession of speakers who denounced efforts by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Republican state legislators to strip public employees of most of their collective bargaining rights. And student Ben Taylor, one of the rally's organizers, warned the situation in Wisconsin is not isolated.
"There's been an attack going on against the working class for the last 30 years," said Taylor, a senior who led the crowd in several chants such as "What's disgusting? Union busting!" with his foghorn voice. "And the only way we can stop it is to stand together."
After the rally, most of the crowd filed into the Cape Cod Lounge in the Student Union to talk more broadly about how what's happening in the Midwest states is a symptom of a larger, corporate-driven agenda that pits working people against one another while enriching the wealthy, which in turn affects the university by decreasing public funding of higher education.
Kathy Rhines, co-chair of the Professional Staff Union on campus, read a resolution that called for the UMass community not only to support Wisconsin public workers - audience members pressed bills and coins into collection boxes passed through the crowd - but to "fight against disinvestment" in public higher education in Massachusetts.
"Can I ask you to stand if you support this resolution?" Rhines said, at which point everyone in the room appeared to rise, and laughter rang out when someone shouted, "So moved!"
Indeed, the overall mood at the rally and the talk afterwards was festive; people waved an array of placards, and colorful balloons that read "Solidarity with Wisconsin public sector = public service" waved in the breeze where they'd been tied to the banisters of the staircase outside the building.
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One man carried a sign saying "Egypt, Tunisia, Wisconsin ... and UMass!" Another looked back to a Republican president who by today's political standards might be considered a Democrat: "I want Nixon's corporate tax rate back - 90%"
Professor Randall Phillis, head of the UMass faculty union, prompted some laughs when he told the crowd he found it amusing that Walker "has done more than anyone in the history of the labor movement" to rally union workers and their advocates.
"It seems when you give these conservatives enough rope, they always manage to hang themselves," Phillis said.
On the other hand, UMass graduate student Kate Losey, a Wisconsin native who got her bachelor's degree in the Badger State, warned that anti-union activities were not limited to Republicans: She said Democrats in her state had previously tried to cut the pay of TAs (teaching assistants) in the state's university system.
Other states
Eve Weinbaum, director of the Labor Center at UMass, touched on that broader theme as well in remarks she made to the crowd inside the Cape Cod Lounge. Some 22 states, she said, are now considering legislation similar to that in Wisconsin, in which public employees would face salary, pension and health insurance cuts and would also have to give up most of their bargaining rights.
"This is not just a bunch of Republicans who woke up one day and suddenly decided to do this," she said. Instead, Weinbaum identified corporate interests like the billionaire Koch brothers - one of Gov. Walker's biggest campaign contributors in last year's election, she noted - "who have a deliberate agenda and are using the financial crisis to attack unions, to attack the government, and enrich themselves."
Unions have also been forced to make concessions in Massachusetts, several speakers said, while on-campus unions have battled UMass administrators and state government leaders for salary increases, even as public funding for education has steadily declined. UMass senior Melissa Urban said she's known at least one person every semester during her time at school "who had to drop out because they couldn't afford it anymore ... that is not OK!"
Members of PHENOM (Public Education Network of Massachusetts) - a coalition of students, faculty and staff that formed at UMass about four years ago to push for greater state funding for education - said the commonwealth needs a more progressive tax system that will ask more of the wealthy while making education and services more affordable to the poor and working class through tax exemptions.
Max Page, a professor of architecture and former head of the faculty union, urged audience members to get involved with campus unions and to support a bill to redo the state's tax code; the bill, "An Act to Invest in Our Communities," now has a sponsor in both the House and Senate.
"I've been asked to be brief, so I'll summarize my message in three words," said Page. "Tax the rich."
Comments
Working class? Check your facts.
There is a case to be made for supporting labor unions for public employees, but Mr. Taylor needs to check his facts. The vast majority of unionized workers on the UMass campus are professors, almost all of whom are unionized. These are not working class people.