On May 3, the student body elected to pass the Brandeis Labor Coalition’s Just Employment Policy in a referendum vote, according to an email from former Student Union Vice President Charlotte Franco ’15. The referendum passed with 83 percent of the 608 respondents voting “yes,” 58 voting “no” and 46 voting “abstain” in response to the question “I vote in favor of the Just Employment Policy Referendum.”

The referendum does not make the Just Employment Policy an official University policy but will be used by BLC as evidence that the student body supports the Just Employment Policy’s practices. In an interview with the Justice, former BLC member Andrew Nguyen ’15 said that the referendum came from Provost Lisa Lynch advising BLC to adopt the policy through the Student Union, as “we need[ed] to show that students supported this idea.”

“I think we demonstrated that,” Nguyen said. “And so now we want to go back to Lisa Lynch and tell her, ‘Hey, what’s next?’”

The referendum was first sent to the student body on May 1 in an email from Franco, but a second referendum had to be sent out by former Student Union President Sneha Walia '15 after it was discovered that the first referendum did not require a Unet ID to vote, allowing students to vote multiple times. 

A third referendum was sent out a few hours later by Walia after it was found that the second ballot allowed voters to again vote multiple times when using a private browser, such as Google Chrome’s “incognito mode,” according to Nguyen. 

According to Nguyen, the Just Employment Policy includes both practices that are not currently University policies as well as policies the University had already enacted but which are compiled into one document for ease of understanding. 

If the Just Employment Policy is officially adopted, the new practices would include “a living wage policy for all staff,” according to the Just Employment Policy. This living wage would be calculated by the Crittenton Women’s Union’s Economic Independence Calculator, which currently calculates the living wage for a single adult in Waltham to be $15.05 per hour, according to a post on the BLC Facebook page. 

Staff directly employed by the University are already guaranteed a minimum wage of $15.05 per hour under the new minimum wage policy announced at this week's faculty meeting. 

Xerox and Sodexo employees, however, are not guaranteed a $15.05 minimum wage; currently, Sodexo employees earn $12.51 per hour for their first five years of employment, according to the BLC. The Just Employment Policy also calls for “index[ing] living wage annually to keep pace with rising cost of living.”

When asked whether students employed by the University would be guaranteed a living wage, Nguyen told the Justice that BLC is “not hard about living wage being universal,” but added that “students come from different economic backgrounds.” 

BLC member Marisa Budlong ’15 told the Justice in an interview that the policy is “specifically left pretty broad for the University and students to mold it.”

“I think that’s something that would also come out at future meetings,” she said. “… Because this is something where we need to have collaboration with other people.” The term “staff,” which is used in the Just Employment Policy includes student employees, according to the Rights and Responsibilities handbook. 

Other new policies would include “tak[ing] punitive action against subcontractors found to be violating union contracts,” according to the Just Employment Policy. As per Massachusetts law, the University does not intervene or prevent workers from forming a union, but the University does not have a policy that urges punitive action against contractors who violate union agreements, according to Nguyen. 

According to the BLC, Sodexo has cut full-time workers’ hours and ignored grievances procedures despite contracts stipulating that grievances be addressed within five days of being filed. 

BLC also claims that in October 2014, Sodexo workers reported a backlog of grievances dating back to April 2014. Sodexo General Manager Shawn Monaghan did not respond to requests for comment by press time. 

BLC was unable to work with Unite Here! Local 26—the union which represents Sodexo workers—on the Just Employment Policy because “it’s been difficult to actually contact them this semester,” according to Nguyen. However, he added that BLC had previously mentioned their plans for the policy to union representatives and “they seemed to like it.”

The Just Employment Policy also calls for the creation of an oversight infrastructure to enforce its own policies. Vice President for Campus Operations James Gray told BLC in a meeting last Fall that the University currently has no oversight mechanisms for evaluating labor conditions, according to a BLC Facebook post. Gray did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

Budlong told the Justice in an interview that “when we talked to Lisa Lynch, she seemed to emphasize the need to have infrastructure to enforce this, and basically told us that that should be our main priority. … The infrastructure is really the important part, because that’s how these things are going to get enforced.” 

“Just broadly, we want some sort of committee composed of faculty, workers, students [and] staff that will annually check up on labor conditions around campus and publish an annual report,” said Nguyen. BLC hopes to create the infrastructure through continued talks with University administrators. 

Nguyen added that “we don’t have as much experience or knowledge as many administrators, [but] I don’t [think] that makes the measures we want to implement illegitimate in any ways.”