OCOPE, College Update Benefits in Renewed Labor Contract

OFF THE CUFF

Kathryn Gin Lum, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and History at Stanford University

Kathryn Gin Lum Photo courtesy of Oberlin College

Nikki Keating

News Editor

Kathryn Gin Lum is an associate professor visiting from Stanford University with a focus in Religious Studies and History. This Wednesday, as a part of the College’s Race and Religion Lecture Series, Gin Lum gave a presentation to Oberlin students on her book, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History, published May 2022 by Harvard University Press. The lecture series aims to expand the dialogue about the roles race and religion play in Oberlin’s history, and how this history impacts Oberlin’s position in broader society. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you discuss your recently published

book, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History, and why you traveled

to present it in Oberlin?

The talk was framed as part of a new lecture series on race and religion, oriented around the Memorial Arch in particular, which was built to commemorate the deaths of missionaries and the Boxer Uprising. From what I understood from the invitation, my talk is trying to help contextualize the missionary outlook and think about the relationship between religious othering and racism. The talk is essentially an overview of the book, trying to understand the various arguments that I make in the book and how they connect this kind of outlook to a racial one.

When writing this story, did you draw connections to your previous

publication, Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction?

Yes, definitely. The first book was really focused on just one century between the Revolution and Reconstruction in America. It was more like a domestic story within the boundaries of the nation-state. But in thinking about hell, I was like, a huge proportion of the people expected to go to hell in this period of time were socalled heathens. That book touches on it, but it doesn’t do as much of it as I ended up doing in the second book. Part of that is just the constraints of the first book being a graduate dissertation, and I just couldn’t do a book of the scope at that point. This one is more synthetic, so it covers centuries and tries to look at the global outlook.

In your book, you explore how the idea of the “heathen” has persisted in religious and secular discourse around race, from the colonial era to the present day. Are certain racial groups more connected to the idea of the “heathen” than others?

That’s such a good question. One of the main claims that the book tries to make is that the category is this broad, encompassing umbrella, so it sweeps all sorts of different racial groups under the heading of heathen. So what the term does is it creates a kind of binary between the heathen and the white Christian. It’s not that this binary is more important than racial hierarchies, but that we have to look at both ways of rationalizing what we understand about how race works in America. Racial hierarchies can work like a divide-and-conquer strategy, pitting different groups against each other, but this binary, I argue, basically just works to set up the white savior. To create the savior of the white savior against all of these others.

Did anything throughout your life inspire you to write this book?

I think any academic, if you dig, has a personal reason for why we do what we do. I write about this a little bit in the beginning of the book, but I was raised in a pretty conservative denomination, and my family members are immigrants from China and Hong Kong. I was born here. I grew up here, but I was always raised to believe I was blessed, particularly blessed to be born in the United States into a Christian family. I grew up wondering about ancestors and relatives that I didn’t know in Hong Kong and China. I grew up thinking people who were not Christian were damned, feeling guilt and responsibility around that and wondering why I was so lucky to have been born here. What if my family hadn’t come — what would’ve happened to me? So I say in the book that childhood me could have been like a primary source for historian me. The kinds of questions that I grew up with are what I write about.

You mentioned this in the beginning of our interview, but what impact does the Oberlin Memorial Arch have on your presentation?

I was familiar with the Boxer Uprising and the story of the missionaries, but I didn’t know what the Arch was. When Professor Ann Sherif reached out to me about the talk, she said, “We want to orient it around this arch,” so I did some digging on the interwebs just to see what I could find. I’m not gonna go into depth about the history of the arch itself, because I’m sure people here know more about that than I do. Although I’ve been interested to hear that students were saying that they haven’t looked at the inscriptions. I think that the professors who organized this lecture series really want the Arch to become something that people talk about again. series really want the Arch to become something that people talk about again.

OCOPE, College Update Benefits in Renewed Labor Contract

Alexa Stevens News Editor

Over the summer, Oberlin College Office and Professional Employees union negotiated and ratified a three-year contract with the College. This contract puts into effect several changes: health care, retirement contribution, holiday, and remote work policies have been amended for OCOPE members.

OCOPE was founded in 1970 in response to inconsistent employee rights among the College’s clerical and paraprofessional staff. OCOPE currently has 125 members from a wide variety of positions and departments, such as the Center for Information Technology, departmental secretaries, library reference and instruction, and clerical workers.

Prior to this summer’s negotiations, OCOPE’s contract with the College was most recently updated in 2019. The 2019 negotiation resulted in increased wages in the second and third years of the contract but also decreased retirement benefits and raised out-of-pocket health care costs.

Similar areas of the contract were again amended during summer negotiations. Reference & Academic Commons Assistant for Mary Church Terrell Main Library Julie Weir, who serves as chief steward of OCOPE, described the contract’s changes regarding health care.

“There weren’t a lot of changes, but they do have major impacts,” Weir said. “The College is very set on having everybody under one health care plan. And so our membership has lost choice in health care and is going to a high deductible plan, which is already the same health care plan that faculty and professional staff are under.”

Weir also described the new contract’s impact on wages for OCOPE members. In the first year, OCOPE members will receive a retroactive two-percent raise on pay since July 1. They will also receive a one-percent raise in January and a two-percent raise in the next two years, in addition to a few bonuses.

The contract also presents increased retirement benefits for OCOPE members.

According to Weir, the team negotiating on behalf of the College during the nearly two-month-long negotiations process consisted of College Vice President and General Counsel and Secretary Matthew Lahey and various College Human Resources employees. During this period, the teams negotiating on behalf of the College and OCOPE would meet for multiple hours once or twice a week. The OCOPE team was elected by OCOPE members and typically consisted of four or five primary officers, two additional members, and a hired representative.

Daytime Desk Supervisor for Mary Church Terrell Main Library and Fifth Steward for OCOPE Joseph Maiville was present for negotiations.

“There’s this really complex nuance to what you’re talking about, what you’re asking, what information you’re supposed to have access to,” Maiville said. “I’m really proud of what our team did and also grateful that we were able to accomplish what we accomplished.”

Some students expressed discontent with OCOPE’s new contract. College fourth-year and Student Labor Action Coalition Student Worker and Unions Liaison Sam Beesley, while glad that OCOPE has reached a resolution, takes issue with the health care plan. He referenced the plan’s high deductible and the College’s alleged refusal to forecast costs past the plan’s first year.

“I think that’s completely ridiculous and is just a way for the College to withhold information and use it as leverage in the future,” he said.

According to Beesley, he and other SLAC members sought to aid OCOPE in its negotiations. They were able to provide some support remotely but were ultimately hindered by the fact that the process occurred over the summer when school was no longer in session and very few students were present on campus.

“The College loves having these negotiations over the summer because they know that students can’t actually be there physically to support,” Beesley said. “It’s very, actually, quite convenient for them that just a couple days before classes started, … they went to a mediator and got everything worked out, which is one of my worries.”

SLAC members and other students have expressed concerns about the College’s motives in its union negotiations following the College’s early 2020 decision to outsource 108 members of College staff who were part of the United Automobile Workers union.

Further, SLAC members also expressed concern about Lahey’s role in the contract negotiation, “who on his LinkedIn touts his union-busting abilities,” Beesley said. Lahey has since amended the language in his LinkedIn profile to remove any explicit mention of union-busting.

Lahey expressed satisfaction with the results of the contract negotiation.

“I was extremely happy that on September 6, 2022, Oberlin College’s Office and Professional Employees union (OCOPE) members voted to ratify the most recent contract proposal submitted by the College and recommended by the OCOPE leadership team,” Lahey wrote in an email to the Review. “The result of this process is an agreement that will continue the College’s commitment to offering competitive pay and benefits.”

The 2022 contract will be published online pending official review by both parties.

OCOPE, founded in 1970, is the union that represents clerical and paraprofessional workers. Photo courtesy of OCOPE