Tennessee Funding Higher Education on the Backs of Its Workers
By Michelle Chen reports on how Tennessee has received kudos for offering a free community college program that has influenced Obama’s proposals. But how is this being funded? By cutting benefits for the workers at Tennessee universities.
The new budget would impose major “reforms” to the healthcare benefits of career civil servants. The cutbacks for retired workers and the newest hires, according to Commercial Appeal, include “ending eligibility for pre-age-65 retiree health insurance to state employees and school-district employees hired after July 1, 2015; ending eligibility, after July 1, for state health insurance for part-time state employees.”
The budget also proposes so-called “flexibility” for the state to offer current workers a more limited defined-contribution retirement health plan, instead of the traditional, typically more stable, defined-benefit scheme. The state may also seek authority to tweak the healthcare subsidy formulas for active employees.
And lest you think this is just taking some retirement money from well off professors, think again. As the United Campus Workers state, this is going to hurt the poorest workers–the housekeepers, the janitors, etc–more than the professors.
The United Campus Workers-Communications Workers of America Local 3865 union (UCW) is galled that the cutbacks have been proposed amid the governor’s boasts of making higher education affordable for all. Will their kids get free tuition while parents pay more for basic healthcare? Doubling the irony is that the target population of the new expansion of Tennessee Promise—the new funds are aimed at adult learners with a few college credits already—are perhaps the type of folks who might work a campus custodial job and take classes on the side at night: will they see the new tuition boost offset by shrinking benefits, or have to forgo community college courses to take on a second job?
The students campaigning in solidarity with the UCW recognize the fact that the tuition break is just one piece of the promise—one that the state seems to have bargained for on the backs of public servants. Student organizer Lindsey Smith tells The Nation via e-mail:
we are struggling to understand how Gov. Haslam can put money into such a plan, but completely ignore the campus workers’ pleas for better working conditions and higher wages. His plan is to supposedly help traditionally marginalized, working class students to get a higher education degree…but what happens to those students when they graduate? Not to mention, what about the people that are already in the workforce?
Like so many plans around higher education today, this is about short-sighted political gain that ignores the structural issues around employment in this country. Cutting tuition by cutting benefits makes about as much sense as provosts promoting international studies programs while cutting positions for language professors. Or worrying about the children up to the age of 6 and then underfunding their schools and throwing them in prison for smoking pot at age 15. Education without good jobs is just education. If this is supposed to be about giving people the skills they need to get good jobs, good jobs have to exist. Cutting benefits for those jobs to fund the education does not make sense.
This issue has a bit more meaning for me than most labor issues because I was on the ground floor of organizing what became the UCW at the University of Tennessee back in 1999 and 2000. I had just finished a master’s degree at the school and was involved with a group of students working on economic justice issues. We had a lot of connections with local labor unions and, probably most importantly, with the Highlander Center, which has served as a center of left-leaning southern activism for eighty years now. We held a labor teach-in and through our connections we were able to get Richard Trumka, Bill Fletcher, Elaine Bernard and other great speakers. We put up flyers around campus to see if we could get workers to come out. We received a call from some of the housekeepers. I went to speak to them. What I didn’t expect was to walk into a room full of angry, passionate workers ready to go to the mat after employers who had treated them like garbage for years. They were ready to walk off the job at that moment. It was all pretty incredible.
From that came the UCW, which is now affiliated with the Communication Workers of America. By that time, I had moved to Albuquerque to start my PhD program. But I maintained connections with the union for years, sometimes editing newsletters and the like. Technically, I’m still a sort of honorary member and I pay them monthly union dues. Public workers in Tennessee still don’t have collective bargaining rights and no contract is ever going to come out of that union. But it serves as a voice for the workers of the Tennessee higher education system, from cooks and janitors to library workers and full professors, lobbies in Nashville, and provides power to workers. That this truly grassroots union has survived and flourished for 15 years in the face of the anti-union wave dominating the country is quite remarkable and the implications of it for the modern labor movement is something I should write more about, but I’ll stop reminiscing for now.