Students and Workers Unite for Human Rights

Can you imagine peasants and nobles from medieval Europe laying down their class differences to fight for better treatment of the peasants from the clergy? How about white southerners and undocumented Mexican immigrants joining forces to squeeze rights for the immigrants out of the government? Just this kind of interclass cooperation has been happening at both Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the University of California in Davis (UCD). Unionized workers in both universities had recognized that they were not being treated fairly by their employers and deserved higher wages and benefits, and both schools’ students immediately picked up the message. They joined hands with the workers to fight the administration and try to get the improvements in working conditions that the workers wanted. The fact that university students are supposed to be regarded as a different class than low wage workers is incongruous with the other fact that these two groups cooperated so fully and willingly to fight for better wages and conditions of the workers. But against all odds this cooperation went above and beyond expectations, gaining significant victories for both campaigns in the name of social justice. The breaking down of this social barrier between meritorious university students and low-wage or poverty level workers catalyzed an extremely efficient way to fight for a cause both of those groups viewed as just. The following comparative case study will explore the two aforementioned struggles and demonstrate how the worker-student relationship made these struggles a success.

In early 2007, the Associated Students of the University of California at Davis (ASUCD) passed a resolution that promoted higher wages and benefits to workers in the food service sector of the University. Their reasoning was simple: not only had all of the other UC’s switched from contracting their food service to university employment, but merely the fact of their being subcontracted makes them unique as employees of the University who cannot unionize and have few other privileges that UC employees enjoy. Students had helped workers organize a team to talk to the administration of the university, but the workers were denied UCD employment, setting the foundation for a labor movement. Throughout most of the first half of 2007, the students and workers campaigned by spreading information to other students and residents of the town, and held protests, at one of which 24 students were arrested while demonstrating. In response, the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a nationwide union with over 1.6 million members which represents workers employed directly by the university, began to actively endorse the movement, putting even more pressure on the University. The Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef resisted the movement, claiming that a shift of such magnitude would cost millions of dollars, which would raise student fees, but justice-driven students demonstrated that they would prefer their workers to be well treated to having a lower tuition. After a final climactic protest and march on campus, the University at last began to take steps to resolve the conflict, culminating in an agreement signed in April of 2008 between AFSCME and UCD which helped raise food service workers’ wages by $1 to $3 an hour, and saw a stronger health care coverage and a monthly stipend of $100 to help offset the cost of living for the workers. The debate’s outstanding brevity and the fact that a strike was not needed to win the campaign shows that this was a very successful struggle.

Just short of ten years earlier, a longer, similar, but much more serious campaign had been launched on the opposite side of the nation at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With the passing of a new resolution, the Cambridge City Council mandated a living wage of $10 per hour for all public workers, and encouraged all private companies to follow suit. The Harvard Corporation did not even cast a sideways glance at this ruling and continued as before. In response, students at the university organized the Living wage campaign to pressure the university to negotiate a better deal for the workers. Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss tell us that “in April 2001, Harvard students had engaged in the longest sit-in in the university’s history, spending three weeks occupying the office of the former president. They demanded a living wage for Harvard’s service workers―the janitors, food servers, and security guards―many of whom were working two and three jobs to support their families” (p. 171). The mission statement of the Living wage campaign itself points out how unacceptable it is that “few of the service workers at Harvard share in [its] health: many struggle to raise their families as the richest university in the world pays them poverty wages. … At any time in the past 360 years, Harvard could have implemented decent payment standards on its own. Its failure to do so reflects a serious disregard for the well-being of its workers, and sends the clear message that Harvard values profit over human dignity” (p. 1). Eventually, Harvard would allow a so-called “Katz Committee” to be formed out of some of the sitters-in to recommend changes in its policies. Although many of the recommendations of this committee were controversially inadequate, the struggle won several notable improvements. Guards’ and Janitors’ wages go up to between $11.35 and $13.50, and dining service workers’ wages become $10.85 per hour. Although the latter is still below Cambridge’s living wage ordinance at the time (of $11.11), it is a significant improvement to the earlier level of $9.

Although these two movements were nearly a decade apart, there were many things that they had in common, especially those that brought success. One of the contributing factors to the campaigns’ widespread popularity was the social capital, or connexions to vital organizations, that they both had. At UC Davis, the local union representing workers at UC Davis endorsed the food service workers and their student proponents, and indeed had been trying to push for the same results before the student campaign had started, albeit with little success. Alex Gourevitch, in his article “Awakening the Giant: How the Living Wage Movement Received Progressive Politics” tells us that this factor was even more substantial at Harvard, because the Living wage campaign “received tremendous support from labor―every local union in Cambridge endorsed the students. The local Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) 26, representing the dining hall workers, went a step further, authorizing a strike to support the sit-in, electing the sitters-in honorary members of the union, and voting to make academic immunity for the students a key bargaining point during June contract renegotiations,” and that “[w]hile students and labor were the most visibly active members of the living wage campaign at Harvard, civil rights groups and the religious left added key support” (p. 1). This broad base of contacts allowed both groups to do tremendous outreach and pressure their respective universities, which proved enough in the case of UC Davis to rule out even the necessity of a strike having to occur.

Another factor that the two campaigns had in common was their tremendous leverage based on how much they can threaten the university with. Even though at UC Davis, the campaign only concerned the food service workers, a work stoppage by these employees would be devastating. It would mean that all of the students living in the dormitories at the University would not be able to feed themselves where they most often eat―there are no kitchens inside of the dorms themselves, and no other nearby cheap food alternatives. But this would go beyond simply threatening to cause students severe discomfort. This would immediately travel to parents, who would become outraged that they are putting in tens of thousands of dollars per student to a university, and in return their children are being starved and mistreated. With this much leverage the university feels very threatened and even if they are trying to resist the change in the early stages, if a strike did happen they would try to resolve it at all costs. At Harvard the situation is even more drastic―the food service would stop, a lack of janitors would cause dirt and mess to build up to grotesque levels, and the absence of security forces would allow the entire campus to descend into mayhem―it would be like pulling the bottom out from underneath Harvard and letting its insides spill out. These services are so essential to the universities that without them they not only cannot operate, but pose a risk to the community of students living on the premises, and the threat of a strike by these workers was so unacceptable that the university would basically have to take whatever the workers wanted if it came down to a strike.

The last and arguably most vital point of similarity was the huge role that students had played in both of these campaigns. Alex Gourevitch explains that “the issue resonates with students because it is their tuition that universities are using to pay campus workers poverty wages, and many are unwilling to be implicated in injustice within their own community” (p. 1). Fantasia and Voss go on to say “it was a struggle that students initiated on their own, from their contact with service workers at the university, and that conjoined the tactics of the student movement with the immediate concerns not of the students themselves, but of a working class that is normally invisible on the academic radar screen” (p. 172). Though this latter quote is in reference to the living wage campaign at Harvard it applies to UC Davis just the same―the students are more likely to see the suffering of workers as a social justice issue needing immediate resolution than as a positive effect on their tuition prices. This cross-class sentiment provides a very powerful ally to workers―students have social and cultural capital that workers don’t, they have a much broader knowledge base as students, and are usually a lot more resourceful and have more free time than workers. This enables them to form such things as campaigns and teams to do sit-ins and disseminate information to the broader public on the workers’ behalf. Without the help of students, non-unionized workers at UC Davis may not have even had the right to organize, much less the resources, because since Sodexho (their subcontracting company) is a nation-wide firm, they would have had to gain the approval of more than half of all the workers employed by this giant to unionize at UC Davis, and most of these other people may not even have heard of such a place. (In fact, Sodexho was one of the subcontracting companies that workers at Harvard were having grievances with in the other campaign!) But with the help and outreach of students, especially students who were also employees of the universities, outreach became very real and the progress moved much more swiftly than many other unions in the United States.

So where does this all lead us? Fantasia and Voss perceptively point out that “Both examples are indicative of an emergent social movement that appears capable of dismantling powerful social barriers” (p. 172). And once these barriers are dismantled, groups with completely different long-term goals can nevertheless come together to fight for the same thing, joining hands and heads in the name of justice. Unlike most unions and strikes involving people from the same trade and the same class, movements like these allow much more widely dispersed skills and information to come into play―something that does not exist at the workplace but is desperately needed in a labor union. The concept is very simple and optimistic: once a social barrier is struck down and people can intermingle, they can accomplish unfathomable victories. The conclusion, therefore is that the more social barriers we break down, the farther we can advance as a nation in not only social justice, but technology, economy, and peace.

Bibliography

Fantasia, Rick. Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement. University of California Press, Berkeley: 2004..

Gourevitch, Alex. “Awakening the Giant: How the Living Wage Movement Revived Progressive Politics.”

“A Brief History of the Living Wage Debate at Harvard.”                                                  < http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~pslm/livingwage/timeline.html>

Lapin, Lisa. “Better pay, benefits for food service employees under new agreement.” Sept. 17, 2007. < http://www.dateline.ucdavis.edu/dl_detail.lasso?id=9695>

Robertson, Kathy. “UC Davis to hire Sodexho food-service employees.” Sacramento Business Journal. Thursday, April 17, 2008.
< http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2008/04/14/daily56.html>

“Food worker employment.” The Aggie. Apr. 24, 2008. < http://theaggie.org/article/479>

Kelly-Sneed, Caitlin. “University to employ food-service workers.” The Aggie. Apr. 21, 2008. < http://theaggie.org/article/421>

“Harvard Living Wage Campaign.”
< http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~pslm/livingwage/timeline.html>