Students sit in at Washington U
By
Larry Hales
Published Apr 14, 2005 11:15 PM
College and university students across the
country are beginning to join with campus workers to take up their fight for
benefits and better wages. Currently, the focus of this struggle is on
Washington University in St. Louis, where students are sitting in to support
workers’ demands for a living wage.
Harvard students were among the
first to protest. Four years ago they staged large rallies and sit-ins to demand
a living wage for the workers on their campus. Students at Georgetown, Stanford,
SUNY Purchase and now Washington U., to name a few, have also begun to call for
better wages for campus employees.
This includes a living wage for those
hired by subcontractors, since deferring jobs to subcontractors continues to be
a way for university administrators to try to escape blame and
embarrassment.
Four years ago, students and workers at Harvard were
victorious in getting the administration to acknowledge that it wasn’t
paying the wages needed to live in Boston and to begin addressing this problem.
Though many students at Harvard and other top schools don’t come from
working-class backgrounds, they have been responding to a further developing
sensitivity.
The cost of living ascends while wages descend. The wealthy
are seeing their fortunes climb; bosses are getting greater bonuses for slashing
wages and benefits. Indicators that point to a recovering economy and job gains
only obfuscate the growing gap between rich and poor. The Dow Jones and Nasdaq
stock price averages indicate nothing for the poor, just that corporations are
becoming more cut-throat. The jobs opening up are overwhelmingly in the
low-paying, few-benefits service sector.
It takes nary a degree to
understand that college and university campuses mirror what happens outside
them. Schools like Harvard have huge endowments—Harvard’s is near
$20 billion—but the workers are not being paid living wages. These workers
keep the grounds, repair the buildings’ facilities, and supply and serve
meals to the students. Some students are waking up to the conditions that
workers face and are carrying the fight forward along with the workers.
At
Washington U. such a battle is underway. On April 5, some 20 students occupied
and began sitting-in in the admissions office of this “top-notch”
university. They brought signs, petitions, fliers, sleeping bags and food with
them, vowing to stay until the chancellor of the school decided to pay living
wages to 500 workers on the campus.
Washington U. has an endowment of more
than $4 billion. It pays the majority of its food-service workers, janitorial
staff and groundskeepers barely $8 an hour, even though last year a standard of
$9.79 plus full benefits was set by the St. Louis Board of Aldermen. Those hired
directly by the university make this standard, but those subcontracted start at
$7.50 an hour.
The Student Worker Alliance started calling for a living
wage for all employees of the university in 2003. The current sit-in is timed
around “April Welcome,” when the university has its open house and
hundreds of high school seniors and transfer students from around the country
converge on the campus. The students at Washington U. are willing to miss
classes and to risk their standings until the demand of living wages for all
university employees is met.
Across the country people are taking notice.
This mood is being matched by the throngs of young people not able to attend
college because of few options and those wary of taking out the loans required
to pay rising tuition costs.
This mood carries over to the fight to stop
the Medicaid cuts, the fight to beat back the threat to Social Security, and the
battle to stop the atrocious bankruptcy bill from being passed.
These
battles are not being waged by capitalist politicians but by those affected the
most by proposed cuts. It is all part of a current in opposition to reactionary
Bushism, a current strengthened by the timeliness of last October’s
Million Worker March.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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