On August 31, an era is coming to an end at Smith College in Northampton. The college has opted not to renew its Coca-Cola contract, severing ties with the company after a 50-plus-year relationship. President Carol Christ, in a letter to Coca-Cola on May 25, cited Coke's business practices in Colombia and India as the reason Smith will not allow Coke to take part in the college's bidding process.
Christ also wrote, "We conveyed our emerging unease to Coca-Cola President Donald Knauss two years ago, in a letter I wrote highlighting our concerns about issues related to union organizing and environmental degradation… As a private college with a public conscience, Smith College takes issues of human rights and environmental sustainability very seriously. Social responsibility is a core value of the college, one we aspire to reflect in our education mission and in our campus operations."
A brief look at Smith's track record lends credibility to these assertions. In the past three decades Smith College trustees have divested funds from the Sudanese government in protest over the genocide in Darfur and banned investments in tobacco companies, South African companies and Talisman Energy, Inc., a Canadian oil company tied to the Khartoum government (largely responsible for the Darfuri genocide). Also, the college routinely employs local, unionized workers to work on campus projects and repairs, according to Dan D'Alma, Business Manager of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 7 of Western Massachusetts.
This socially-conscious behavior is exactly why, according to D'Alma, Smith College's recent decision to reopen bidding and accept a bid from a non-unionized company on the Ford Hall Construction project is so surprising. 'After being assured by Bill Brandt (Director of Smith College Campus Operations and Facilities) that Wayne J. Griffin Electrical would not be allowed to bid this project, this suddenly changed after the students left school and all other electrical bids were already submitted… It appears after lecturing Coca-Cola about their labor practices in your letter to them, the college doesn't seem to be leading by example. We find this very disturbing, and quite frankly, hypocritical,' D'Alma wrote in a letter to Christ.
Massachusetts AFL-CIO President Robert J. Haynes also wrote to Christ, urging the college to reconsider hiring "a company that is well-known to have unscrupulous labor practices." In a review by Boston Business Journal of the top electrical contractors in the state, Griffin Electrical ranked first, with contracts worth more than $109 million in 2006. The company has come under repeated criticism from the IBEW, which lodged a complaint against Griffin Electrical with the state Attorney General earlier this year for allegedly subcontracting work on the North Residential Hall apartments at UMass Amherst to two companies that were not registered or licensed to work in Massachusetts. IBEW local 99 in Providence similarly criticized Miriam Hospital for allowing its contractor, Dimeo Construction Company, to subcontract electrical work to the non-unionized Griffin on a $116 million hospital expansion project. Dimeo Construction was the general contractor on the North Residential Hall project at UMass.
At press time, D'Alma told the Advocate that Smith College had verbally agreed to hire the union's top choice, Collins Electric, a unionized shop. Smith spokesperson Kristin Cole said she couldn't confirm that Collins would get the contract.
For roughly the past year, according to Local 7 business agent Bob Wilson, Local 7 has been working with Smith, attempting to create a project labor contract that would bind Smith into using local, unionized electrical companies for work completed on campus, and in the event that Smith chose to hire a non-union company, to hire workers through Local 7 (although the companies would provide their own supervisors). College representatives including Brandt, according to Wilson, were open to this agreement but wanted to limit it to work done on the upcoming expansion.
If this agreement were ratified, workers in companies representing eight or nine trades, according to Wilson, were willing to contribute $1 for each hour worked—totaling some $300,000—toward scholarships for future and current Smith College students.?
