After negotiating the post-employment terms for outsourcing 108 dining and custodial employees, the College and the United Auto Workers union have settled on a transition agreement that includes three months severance pay and one year of health insurance. Additionally, the UAW has dropped the charge it brought to the National Labor Relations Board on July 3, which accused the College of negotiating in bad faith.  The effects bargaining process officially ended Aug. 3. In addition to the health ...

Editor’s Note: A longer version of this analysis appeared on the Alumni Facebook page on July 9 in response to James Monroe Professor of Politics Chris Howell’s statement. Read more of the Review’s coverage of UAW outsourcing here.    When I reviewed a commentary from James Monroe Professor of Politics Chris Howell on Oberlin College’s collective bargaining with United Auto Workers-represented dining and custodial employees, I admired how the intellectual curtain could be drawn over the complex area of labor-management relations to fuzz the realities. He conflates subcontracting and outsourcing with being anti-union with no evidence of union animus, and he holds the parties to a view of collecti...

The current campus controversy around the proposal to outsource campus and dining services is not the first time that significant tensions have erupted between the College administration and members of Oberlin’s chapter of the United Automobile Workers union. Notably, in 1995, UAW members said they would strike if they were unable to reach agreeable contract terms with the College by March 31. Ultimately, a deal was reached an hour before the deadline and a strike was avoided. “The College recognizes the right of an individual to strike,” wrote Alan Moran, then-director of communications, in a March 30 memo to the Oberlin community. “The union has the right under the law to publicize the strike by picketi...

We, the members of Oberlin College Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 502, stand in solidarity with our United Automobile Workers union brothers and sisters, and we wholeheartedly support them in their fight to preserve their jobs and the dignity of labor at Oberlin College. We strongly condemn the administration’s plan to lay off unionized custodial and food service workers and to replace them with outsourced labor, and we oppose any union-busting techniques. Furthermore, we are convinced that Oberlin’s future is best secured when the College treats all of its workers like the valuable members of the campus community they are — rather than as expendable units of labor.  ...