a few little big things - My Experience with Sen. Kennedy
There has been a veritable flood of memorials on these pages and others regarding Senator Kennedy, his passing, and the legacy that he leaves behind.
Many of these speak of his legislative accomplishments and his ability to get laws passed that have and will leave lasting impressions on the lives of countless numbers of this country's citizens. I think President Obama's remarks this morning really encapsulated a sentiment that many out there may share: "His extraordinary life on this earth has come to an end. And the extraordinary good that he did lives on. For his family, he was a guardian. For America, he was the defender of a dream."
But I wanted to briefly share what Senator Kennedy and his commitment to progressive principles and ideals meant to me.
In the spring of 2005, the union of which I was a member at the University of Massachusetts, the Graduate Employee Organization (GEO) (part of UAW Local 2322), had been engaged in a 15-month campaign to reach a new collective bargaining agreement with the university. GEO represents the some 2500 teaching and research assistants at UMass-Amherst, a group of graduate employees who perform some of the most thankless, but vital, roles at the university - serving as TAs for the enormous lectures that are unfortunate facts of life at large, state-run universities and as RAs for the scientists and professors who conduct cutting-edge research - in exchange for tuition waivers and barely subsistence-level wages.
We had been locked in contract negotiations with the administration for 15 months. But no contract seemed in the offing anytime soon. The university proposed wage increases that wouldn't even keep pace with inflation (which, when you're only making $12,000 a year, hurts a great deal) and cuts to our healthcare and other benefits that would have further eroded our members' standards of living.
We had steadily escalated the campaign over those 15 months. We wrote letters and signed petitions. We held seemingly countless rallies and marches. We staged public demonstrations of the work that we usually did behind the scenes and created rolling pickets to disrupt the campus's normal functioning. We even mobilized the undergraduates to help us basically close the university for a day that spring.
Still we made no progress.
Then, however, we caught a lucky break. We found out that the university had a special ceremony planned in Boston to inaugurate the newest president of UMass and also discovered that Senator Kennedy was to be honored at the inauguration. We decided that it was a perfect opportunity to stage a high-visibility protest to bring attention to our contract negotiations and the university administration's intransigence and settled on the idea of setting up a picket line around the building where the inauguration was scheduled.
During the course of our fruitless fifteen months of trying to bargain with UMass administrators, we had tried to enlist any number of state-level legislators to take an active role in our negotiations, to intervene with the university on our behalf. While some expressed support, no one did anything of any real merit or consequence. But we decided it was worth it to reach out to Senator Kennedy's staff anyways to see what his reaction would be to a picket at the inauguration where he was going to be honored.
Our union president and a few other officers had a meeting with a couple of Senator Kennedy's staffers. We explained our predicament and informed his staff of our intentions to picket the inauguration. We asked whether the Senator would cross the picket line. His staffers told us they would talk to Senator Kennedy and get back to us.
It wasn't long before his staffers called. Senator Kennedy would not cross our picket line to accept the honor UMass planned to bestow on him.
We were ecstatic, and the news reached the UMass administration quickly. Needless to say, this would be a huge embarrassment for the university: their guest of honor turning down the chance to be feted by the university in solidarity with our struggle for a fair contract.
Suddenly, the bargaining impasse was broken. The university dropped its demands that we give back benefits we had won in the past, and we reached an agreement on the outlines of a contract that was fair for our members. We dropped our plans to picket the inauguration, and Senator Kennedy was honored as originally planned.
Senator Kennedy had basically nothing to gain by agreeing to honor our picket line. But he did so readily, I believe, based on a principled belief in supporting anyone struggling to improve their daily working and living conditions. I was grateful back then for his support, and now that he's gone, I just thought it was important to honor the work he did that may otherwise go unremarked upon in the days ahead.
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