Finally, the drivers retreated from the Teamsters' sincere offer of support. The drivers had promised to file a petition with the NLRB for a union election if Harvard refused to recognize their right to unionize. The Teamsters realized that NLRB precedent indicated the drivers' legal case was hopeless, but they weren't prepared to give up.
"We're ready to go and shut down Harvard if we could," a Teamsters official said. "We'd love to have the drivers join us."
In effect, the Teamsters hoped to help stage an old-fashioned organization effort. There would be no NLRB to back them up. But if the shuttle drivers would strike and picket, enough support might be drawn from the community to force the University to bargain for a shuttle contract.
No real pressure was ever put on the University by the drivers because there never was any groundswell of public support. People realized that the drivers were out to butter only their own bread.
The tragedy was that, as the Teamsters knew, knew, the shuttle drivers held a perfect opportunity to fight for all students' rights. By striking, and the going to court, the drivers might have reversed NLRB precedent, that fails to grasp the realities of student employment.
The relevant NLRB case states that the board generally has not allowed students who are employed by their own schools in a capacity unrelated to their course of study to unionize, either independently, or in affiliation with outside labor units.
The Board's reasoning is easy to follow. The educational process is intensely personal. Thus, the student-teacher relationship is not at all analagous to the employee-employer relationship. Collective bargaining might infringe upon traditional academic freedoms such as free speech if allowed-to penetrate the student-teacher relationship. Therefore, in many respects, collective bargaining may be said to represent the "very antithesis of personal individualized education."
Although the NLRB decided this case in 1977, its description of the student-teacher relationship has not applied since the days when the Boylston Professor of English exercised his right to graze a cow in the Yard.
DRIVING A BUS has nothing to do with any student/teacher relationship. The shuttle drivers work for part of a vast bureaucracy which has enormous power at its disposal. Under the guise of financial assistance, Harvard possesses a captive labor force--the students. Instead of having to pay wages determined on the free market, the University can label a job as financial aid, and pay students any wage it chooses. The students, for lack of anything better or any apparent way of changing the system, must accept.
The NLRB reasoned that collective bargaining among students "would not be in the public interest." The Board really meant that unionization would force students without jobs to pay higher tuition in order to fund the increased wages of student workers. The NLRB thus subordinated the rights of student workers, who generally can least affort the cost of an education, to the rights of non-workers, who in most cases don't need the money.
The shuttle saga represented a fundamental conflict between the rich and the poor. It should come as no surprise that the rich won easily. They successfully employed the deceiving concept of the public interest--namely, that some must necessaily sacrifice in order to ensure the welfare of everyone. But who is this everyone, and why are the rich never asked to contribute to the public interest?
Although they may not have known, it the shuttle bus drivers had the opportunity to ask these questions, and possibly force Harvard into providing some honest answers. Unlike the drivers or EC 10, Harvard will never run out of bullshit.