David Quigley believes in democracy and American rights. As a scholar, he specializes in the history of Reconstruction and early efforts to create a democracy that would live up to America’s founding values. In September 2018, he wrote in an open letter to the Boston College community that graduate students had a “right to establish a union and enter into collective bargaining,” a right protected by the National Labor Relations Act. Yet Mr. Quigley is the Provost of BC, a position that pits him against these deeply felt convictions. As a result, he opposes efforts by those graduate students who seek to democratize their workplaces by unionizing.
Though union-busting is attractive to Mr. Quigley, Father William P. Leahy, and the Board of Trustees, it is ugly and polluted to most Americans. According to an August 2022 Gallup poll, national approval of labor unions is at 71%, its highest point since 1965. Generation Z, which almost every current BC student is a member of, is America’s most pro-union generation. Opposing student workers’ unions is ignorant of student needs, but Boston College’s alarming relationship with its graduate workers’ union goes much further than that. In its frenzied lust for profits over the dignity of its graduate students, Boston College has engaged in just about every union-busting activity under the sun.
One of the simplest methods of union-busting is anti-union propaganda. BC’s official website has an entire page dedicated to scaring students away from one union in particular, the United Auto Workers, which has successfully organized student workers in higher education at schools such as New York University and Harvard. The first two links lead to news articles about corrupt UAW officials; no one seriously denies that there are at least some corrupt union officials, because no organization representing the views of many people can ever claim to be entirely clean (including unions, governments, and college trustees). The rest of the page mostly lists other colleges that have publicly opposed student unions—Columbia, Brandeis, and Seattle University are a veritable elite fellowship of union-busters. The arguments BC has made against graduate student unionization should not be worth addressing, but the BC Graduate Employees Union did so anyway because as dishonest as “a union contract could ‘exacerbate conflicts between students and professors’” sounds (and is), 45% of graduate workers still voted against joining the UAW in September 2017.
Once BC’s graduate students narrowly won their union, the school responded with a two-track solution. The first was to pursue legal action by appealing the National Labor Relations Board’s certification of the union. The second was to turn a blind eye to the union’s existence, in the hopes that refusing to acknowledge the union would deprive them of their legitimacy. Fearing a Republican-led NLRB would rule unfavorably, the union withdrew its petition to unionize, while BC refused to voluntarily come to the negotiating table. Within months, BC’s graduate students were back at square one: they had no official union and faced the same conditions that led them to unionize in the first place, including Master’s students’ lack of health insurance coverage. Without other options, the Graduate Employees Union began pressuring the school for voluntary recognition of the union. An April 2018 March Against Injustice, a September demonstration outside the Pops on the Heights concert, and a confrontation with Father Leahy during a Parents Weekend presentation were some of these efforts, but despite all this, the school refused to budge, all while having campus police tell demonstrators they couldn’t even pass out fliers. When BC officially acknowledged the graduate union’s existence in Mr. Quigley’s September letter, the school refused to make any promises besides committing to “ongoing, open dialogue” (in other words, nothing).
As of October 2023, Boston College does not recognize the Graduate Employees Union-UAW. It has no obligation to, as a 2020 NLRB decision found that religious institutions like BC are exempt from NLRB jurisdiction. The union continues to campaign for recognition; the school continues to ignore them.
The (mostly) men who represent Boston College talk a great deal about the school’s Catholic Jesuit values. Yet they don’t seem to care that the Catholic Church in the United States officially endorses the “organization and joining of unions” as a means of protecting the dignity of labor. Father Leahy’s distance from the BC student community makes the prospect of an “ongoing, open dialogue” much more difficult; while he declined interview requests about his 20th anniversary as president from The Heights and Boston College Magazine, Leahy agreed to an interview with TCPalm in southeastern Florida, presumably because there he could freely lament the woes of safe spaces and trigger warnings. Perhaps Father Leahy is a frugal man, so he refuses to recognize the graduate union out of concern for BC’s ability to remain solvent. But Father Leahy also knows that BC’s operating revenues increased by $66.8 million from October 2020 to September 2021. The pious man he is, Father Leahy ought to read the Gospels. Perhaps then he will learn that Jesus drove the moneychangers from the temple, for they turned a house of knowledge and reflection into a den of usury and theft.
This article has intentionally not addressed the ongoing campaign by BC Residential Life workers to form a union of their own. If the story of the Graduate Employees Union reveals anything, it’s that Boston College believes it has no legal or even moral obligation to respect the rights of its student employees. It’s highly unlikely that the ResLife union, or any union at all, will gain the school’s voluntary recognition unless Boston College’s leadership finally lives up to its values.
Aspiring high school history teacher. Some of my opinions are OK
