Foreshadowing of Union Busting

Anon — When I was first hired in, maybe about a week after I was hired in full time, made an announcement of massive layoffs and "there will be pain and everyone will will feel it." When I asked other people that had been there for ten, 15, 20 years, they said, "yeah they say that all the time, but, you know, don't worry about it." And that's what I got the feeling for maybe the next two or three years was, "yeah, it's going to be an issue, it's going to be an issue." But like nothing really came about it. We didn't hear anything aside from rumblings and like the standard rumor mill situation until the announcement of, "everyone's going to lose their job."

Jeff — I think the main thing was management which is not a groundbreaking answer because everybody has a problem with management but bon appetit was pretty bad as far as these things went. They were hostile towards workers, they played favoritism to sow discontent amongst the workers, to divide and conquer, as they say. They would not order food, ya know, some things were okay for some people to do and not others. So I just didn't like the games that they played and they did-- they were there to play games. Bon Appetit was a known entity when Oberlin College hired them in. They had known to be union busting out west in Seattle already and Oberlin still made that decision to hire them.

Susan Carroll — In the very beginning when I started we had managers and it was like a family. When I first started, everybody was like a family. We had parties, we had Christmas parties, we did an exchange gifts, we... It was a fun time. It was a great place to work back then and then over the years, it just slowly, I don't know, it took a turn for the worse to just continue to get worse and worse and worse. And so we lost our job. Yeah, I had a supervisor that came in, didn't know anything about our job. You know, they were being picky about something. They had no idea about how we did it. You know, they had no clue at the end, the supervisors had no clue as to how we did our job, how long it took to do our job, the pride we took on our job. They were like, clueless. 

Diane — [Was it a gradual process of it getting worse in management?] Yeah, because I think they were pressured to save money. You know it's all—money is always the bottom line with that place.. It's just, you know, they had to cut costs, cut costs, and of course, who gets cut the most is the bottom guy. Which I guess was us. And, you know, heaven forbid if they ever take a pay cut, even a 50 cent an hour pay cut (laughs) they won't do it for the upper. We even suggested that when we were doing contract negotiations. They kept saying how broke they were, it's like, how about everybody on campus take a dollar pay  cut? Everybody across the board. Nope. No way. No how.

Eugene —  I don't know if other people were as tuned in. The college had done a series of, it was either two or three, "how can we save money?" And, I knew what they were doing, they were setting up their little game plan. I don't know if the others were cognizant enough to realize, they're up to no good here. They're not really asking to save money, what they're looking for is to get rid of us. Like I saw it happen. And I would tell my then wife, there's something happening on campus here. You could sense it.

Mary — The union really, really tried. But, our bargaining committee in the contract before that allowed that to be put in. And I remember specifically Bill Weinman, the president, coming up to me because I used to be a union steward. Coming up to me, he said, "What do you think of adding subcontracting work for summertime only for houses and all that?" I said, for summertime only? I don't see what the big deal is, they've been doing it anyway. "For summertime only" was not put in the contract. That's why we lost our jobs. We lost our jobs because of what the union put in our contract. "For summertime only outsourcing." We would have had our jobs. And to my knowledge, security, in their last contract, they had to put that in their contract. So, who do you think's going to get outsourced next? 

Jeff — It was funny cause the whole time I worked there people were always, they were, you know, the workers there weren't stupid. They were like, yeah, we know that this is an anti-union company and we know that they're being divisive and whatnot and like not ordering things and just being shitty in general. So, we knew that the attempt was to break the union and it's kind of surprising that -- I don't want to give all the credit to Bon Appetit, of course, but-- the union got busted up in 2020, 2192 UAW, and Bon Appetit's contract was not renewed. And I always thought that was very interesting. I mean, that pretty much says it all doesn't it.

Susan Carroll — We just were having different supervisors and it seemed like we were being set up. There was one point we we couldn't get chemical to clean the restrooms. I was bringing my own bleach to work. I was providing my own chemicals to take care of the students because I didn't want them to be in dirt and mold.

Diane — Well, the first time we caught wind of it was almost like a year prior, and that's when they had the Oberlin One [the 2019 One Oberlin report], the committee that was trying to save money. And we went to that meeting and they made a comment—they were talking about getting rid of the secretaries, some of the secretaries—and then they said they're dropping the custodial pay to $13 an hour and I was outraged. And I even said— because they were basing it on what other custodians make in the area, which I don't think that's even true, cause I know the schools, they pay, they paid the custodians more than that, even Kendal paid them more than that, but anyway—I stood up and I said that they should not decrease our pay to whatever they're basing it on, they should increase their people's pay. And I even read out what the cost of living was for everything in our—I said technically, you need to make like $23 an hour to be able to live if you're single in an apartment and have a car that actually gets you to work. And everybody cheered, you know, but that was the first time I heard, we heard about that. That was scary. And then we thought that we would be able to have negotiations with the union, that maybe we could work out something, so we didn't think that it was going to turn into what it did. We didn't think they were going to be outsourcing because we thought our contract kind of protected us, But here it did just the opposite, cause our union reps didn't put wording in that our outside contractors were only here for a temporary summer stuff. They put it in there with no addition to it. 

Jeff — I was a little disabused of Oberlin before they started busting the union up, and then once-- I remember the day, we got called in, it was like February sometime 2020, Covid had just started, and they called us in and some lady was like, "Well, they're thinking about outsourcing your jobs" and I would say after, it took me about 12 hours-- initially, I was like, Oh my God, what am I going to do? I have a dog, I have a house, I don't have an education, I don't have skills, what the hell am I going to do? And so everybody left-- it was so funny, that was a surprise to management that day. It was just like, "oh, well all you guys called off and left work early after that meeting" and it was like, are you fucking stupid? ... But after about 12 to 16 hours after that meeting, I was like, wait a minute, A) this is happening-- there were people there that were like, "No, we can still figure this out, they haven't said anything concrete yet, look, we can still figure this out," and me and some of my other friends who are a little bit more cognizant of these things, we're just like, "Nah, man, you don't call that meeting unless the decision is made." That does call into question some of their tactics that they employed after that, allegedly trying to save the jobs. They were not negotiating in good faith, I just need to get that out right now. Anything that happened from that day in February until the day the union was dissolved was not in good faith on Oberlin's part at all.