It's been a tough summer to work at Meharry Medical College. On June 13, the school was censured by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) for violating the due process rights of 11 tenured professors. The next day, more than half of the Metro Council signed a letter criticizing the college's leadership for its hostile relationship with service and support staff. At Meharry, it's fair to say, labor relations could be better.
This month, the college's approximately 200 workers represented by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 205 find themselves in limbo, with an expired collective bargaining agreement and no promising signs of a new one on the horizon. Last month, an anti-union manual surfaced that had been used to train Meharry supervisors in how to deal with a union campaign. That's what prompted the angry letter from council members.
"You, the management of Meharry Medical College, are both qualified and capable of selecting, directing, training and maintaining the employee workforce without the 'help' of the union," the document said on its opening page. "The headaches, restrictions and expenses associated with union representation to these employees are simply not necessary and should be avoided. Meharry Medical College should be allowed to operate free of restrictions placed on its employees and its management by a union." The 13-page packet identifies its "goal" as "attaining nonunion status."
Meharry officials decline to say who authored the document. What is known is that Meharry is represented in union negotiations by King & Ballow, a Nashville-based law firm with a national reputation for heavy-handed dealings with unions. That didn't seem to make the letter-writing Metro Council members too happy. "We understand that you have hired a law firm with a significant history of union busting to represent you in negotiations with the union representing Meharry's clerical, service and maintenance employees, research assistants and librarians," they wrote in the June 14 letter. "We are particularly concerned to see a manual distributed to your supervisors instructing them how to help 'attain a non-union environment.' "
Meharry officials insist that the document in question wasn't an anti-union manual at all. "The intent was to prepare managers for what we anticipated would be some [union organizing] activity and to help them understand their role," says assistant vice president for human resources Janet Rachel. "It was a training opportunity." And, indeed, the document clearly instructed management on what was and was not legal in their dealings with a union campaign.
But the cover letter was undeniably aimed at union busting. Rachel, however, says its tone wasn't representative of the whole packet. "We're trying real hard to do these things the right way. You can always pull one sentence out and take things out of context." So is Meharry's goal to be union-free? "At this particular time, I would say no," she says, equivocating.
John E. Maupin Jr., Meharry's president, responded to the council members' letter on July 1. "The primary goal of Meharry is to obtain the same management rights that other SEIU-represented institutions have in our community," he wrote. "It is clear from the union's actions that its strategy for winning in contract negotiation is to wage a scorched-earth propaganda campaign, instead of addressing the merits of the issues at the bargaining table. The union's strategy is disappointing."
Meanwhile, the AAUP censure, while not directly related to the SEIU labor negotiations, served as a nationally visible black eye for the institution. That organization's report found that faculty members had been unfairly terminated, that Meharry had stripped its tenure policy of meaning and that "generally accepted policies of shared governance were not in evidence." Basically, it found, at Meharry the faculty has little power.
But school officials deny the charges, noting that Meharry won the one lawsuit it faced stemming from those dismissals, and suggest that the AAUP's investigative methods were shoddy. Furthermore, they note, the censure hasn't hampered the school's efforts to recruit "exciting new members of the faculty." Bob Tuke, Meharry's outside general counsel (and the Tennessee Democratic Party chairman), says the college has put that report behind it. "Meharry will continue to cooperate and work with the AAUP and respects the AAUP," he says. "However, that particular censure was unfounded and unfair."
The Metro Council's criticism may be better founded, though. After all, the management manual/training guide in question sought to eliminate a union presence from Meharry, a historically black college with longstanding ties to the United Methodist Church. The school's apparent anti-union stance—though repudiated "at this particular time"—explicitly contradicts the church's stated position that all people have the right to engage in collective bargaining.
All the labor battles come at a particularly difficult time for the college, which boasts that it is "perhaps the major educator of black physicians in the U.S." (Perhaps?) But it perpetually seems to be struggling to maintain respect as a medical school in an increasingly cutthroat higher ed climate. Its almost 130-year history and significance as an institution for the advancement of African Americans make the stakes that much higher.
That's in large part why council members—many African American themselves—have taken a particular interest in the current labor dispute. "We certainly want to see Meharry survive," says District 1's Brenda Gilmore, who signed the June 14 letter. "At the same time, we do want Meharry to be fair in its negotiations with employees and to do what's responsible.... Both the administration and employees are going to have to give a little because we want to see Meharry survive."
Right now, union grievance procedures, health insurance plan changes and automatic dues payroll deduction are major sticking points in the negotiations. The two sides haven't declared an impasse yet, although they seem to be negotiating on borrowed time; they return to the table in early August. "We have a job as a union to ensure that people are treated with dignity and respect and fairness," local SEIU president Don Driscoll says. "We're not looking for conflict, we didn't expect it, we're disappointed in it and we wish it would end."
But like any union organizer, Driscoll is willing to use adversarial methods when necessary: SEIU members have been picketing Maupin's public appearances. "We're hopeful," says Driscoll, echoing Meharry's leaders, "but we're concerned that at least some elements in management seem committed to pretty hostile labor relations."
