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Mar 6, 17

Berkeley, CA: Student Workers at University Walk Off Job and Form Union

Undergraduate student-workers walked off the job from Crossroads, the largest university dining facility, joined by other student-workers from all of UC Berkeley’s dining commons to announce the formation of the Undergraduate Workers Union (UWU). Workers are demanding an end to exploitation and harassment in the workplace, safe working conditions, and living wages.

Currently, student-workers do not receive any job training, possess no concrete job descriptions, and have no formal procedures to put forth grievances. In the face of the university cutting their labor costs and firing career workers, student-workers act as a secondary workforce, allowing the dining halls to continue their operation. Student-workers take on the career workers’ duties, including, but not limited to, working grills, ovens, deep fryers, knives, etc. without proper training or certification. As a result, student-workers are constantly injured on the job on top of facing harassment from management.

As our supposed public university goes private, student-workers are exploited on both fronts: as university students facing massive loan debts, and as university employees who are forced into low-wage, unprotected service work in the struggle to make ends meet while pursuing a degree. Unionizing is necessary because the total lack of protections for student-workers on the job prevents us from being able to approach management with our concerns without the risk of being fired or retaliated against. In the contemporary neoliberal period, the union acts as a form of job and social security for students, especially after the previous administration largely transformed federal school funding into federal loans for students, and with a current administration that has threatened to cut our access to federal funds entirely.

As both students and employees of UC Berkeley, we make up an essential part of this university. Not only do we pay tuition directly into the system, but we literally make the campus function on a day-to-day basis: in the dining halls, in the libraries, in the parking lots and the gym. Forming a union is our response to the systematic disempowerment we experience both as students who have no say in how our tuition is allocated, and as university employees subjected to unsafe working conditions and workplace harassment while we struggle to make rent. By establishing the UWU, we are asserting our collective rights to have our voices heard on the campus that we mop, scrub, cook, and clean on a daily basis.

For many students, their jobs are primary sources of income needed to afford the high cost of living in the Bay Area while also paying high tuition. In addition to problems of housing insecurity, one in three undergraduates at the University of California are food insecure. It’s not uncommon in the dining halls to hear that another student has been forced to take a semester off due to lack of funds.

The formation of the UWU is a response to the shameless profiteering of California’s public higher education system exploiting both the physical and intellectual labors of its students. It represents a rejection of the ongoing subjugation of educational quality to fiscal mismanagement and administrative bloat, while students stagger under enormous debts and struggle to meet their basic needs with untenably low wages. It’s time to make our voices heard, rise up, and fight back.

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