To the Editor:

On Tuesday, Feb. 16, Vanderbilt Students of Nonviolence held a meeting in the Commons Multipurpose Room to launch a series of meetings to advance student-worker dialogue. The meetings are intended to provide space for diverse and until-now fragmented parts of the university community to meet each other, talk about working conditions for the lowest-paid employees at Vanderbilt, and hammer out concrete actions that we can take together to make Vanderbilt a safer and more just place to work and learn. The meeting was openly advertised to students and staff at the Commons.

The meeting was intended to be a safe place for workers and students to meet –we had heard rumors that due to a dictatorial contract and management hostility, it’s challenging for employees to claim that space. Despite being warned, we were shocked when we got our own taste of the intimidation that workers apparently experience when they try to talk and organize among themselves.

Throughout the meeting, university management stationed people to watch who went in and out of the doors, taking notes; after the meeting, they searched the trash cans for anything we might have thrown away and talked about whether they had gotten any photos of the meeting (“no luck”, they sighed).

The eerie feeling of our own administration’s surveillance was matched by the surreally conspicuous way in which they conducted it. Marta Stinson (a Human Resources manager who removed her nametag and refused to tell us who she was, but put her ID back on as soon as our meeting ended) stood just outside the room in the space behind an open door and the wall, putting one eye up against the crack to peer through. She came into our meeting room and stood in the corner, watching us, eventually marching up to the table (interrupting a worker explaining the attitude of management toward workers) and demanded that we stop handing out fliers and surveys. In a bizarre twist, she denounced our meeting, and not her intrusion, as “inappropriate,” before storming back out of the room to make a phone call.

We repeatedly asked the managers who they were and if there was anything they needed our help with, but they refused to say who they were and walked away in silence when we suggested a meeting to talk about their concerns. In the absence of a willingness to address the interruptions, we are sending this open letter to request an explanation and some basic commitments to campus freedom of speech.

We invite the university administration to respond to this letter and account for the harassment of student meetings, outline the policy on whether students have a right to have such meetings without surveillance and interruption, and explain whether you subject meetings of self-organized workers to the same kind of intimidation we experienced on Tuesday. We also invite other interested students, faculty, and employees to join us in our request, and to participate in these student-worker dialogues. We expect to be reassured that this was a one-time mistake, the unplanned and unsanctioned actions of a few rogue managers, but we (and many others in the Vanderbilt community) would also like to be assured that these tactics will not be used against the university’s employees now or in the future, employees that –as we are now acutely aware– are made to feel that they are not as safe in advocating for their rights as students are to demand their own.

VSN (Vanderbilt Students of Nonviolence) and LIVE (Living Income for Vanderbilt Employees)

Tristan Call

Braden Clark

Benjamin Eagles

Lauren McDuffie

Ashley Pasquariello

Ari Schwartz

Ben Wibking

Submitted by Eric Schechter on Tue, 02/23/2010 - 06:47.

My support

I would like to indicate my support for what VSN is doing. I'm sure that many other members of the Vanderbilt community, and the wider Nashville community, would agree, if they knew about it. Too few people know about it. I think that most students and faculty here are entirely unaware of the difficulties faced by the lowest-paid members of our staff. Many of them have never heard of the Living Wage movement.

Let me take a moment to spell it out: Some of Vanderbilt's employees are paid less than a living wage; that means they must pay for the privilege of working at Vanderbilt, by working a second job or living in a homeless shelter or subsidizing Vanderbilt in some other fashion. Representatives of the administration have carefully avoided ever using the phrase "Living Wage" in any of their negotiations or press releases, because they recognize the implications inherent in that phrase. They say, instead, that "the wages reflect the marketplace for those kinds of positions." (See, for instance, http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/313/video.html.) But this simply means that Vanderbilt, like other corporations, is able to exploit the desperation of the poor: Vanderbilt does not need to treat its workers decently, because there are plenty of unemployed people eager to take the place of those workers. And it's true that under present law, Vanderbilt is not compelled to pay a living wage. But what about a moral law? Some of us in the Vanderbilt community would like to work for an employer that sets a better example for the world.

I've worked at Vanderbilt for nearly 30 years, and I've often received emails from the admiinstration that began "Dear Vanderbilt Community." But those emails began to anger me after I learned of the Living Wage movement, I finally wrote an angry letter to someone -- I don't recall who; I think it may have been the chancellor -- explaining that they had no right to use the phrase "Vanderbilt community" when they used only the market for their moral compass. My letter apparently had an impact: The administration stopped sending me emails that began "Dear Vanderbilt Community." But that's not the impact I was hoping for. I really would like to be part of a community.

Eric Schechter
Associate Professor of Mathematics

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LETTER: Harassment of workers and students

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