Columnist Daniel Kington discusses his belief that the Student Union and other partnering groups are examples that change can happen on campus if people come together.
The 2015-16 academic year marks the first time in Ohio University’s history that Residential Assistants have been compensated for the entire cost of their housing. That decision, made back in February, also came with a modest increase in the yearly stipend for RAs. The immediate response may be to praise Housing and Residence Life for its commitment to student-worker rights. However, counterintuitive though it may seem, those concrete improvements for the conditions of RAs are actually a far better demonstration of the power of collective bargaining among student workers and the administration’s desire to crush those efforts than they are a demonstration of admins’ bleeding hearts.
It is no coincidence that the announcement of a raise for RAs came at almost exactly the same time that the push for an RA union really took off on our campus. Only four days after The Athens NEWS published an article about the increased compensation for RAs, the paper published an article about the RA union drive noting that, at the time, more than 100 RAs had already signed union cards. It seems fairly obvious to me, as it should to anyone who looks at this correlation, that RAs were only granted increased compensation in order to take energy away from the unionization effort.
I do not bring this up now to just rehash old news. I bring this up because, on Wednesday, student-workers at the call center filed for an election with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the labor union that currently represents approximately 500 university employees. The call center has a vast majority of current student-workers on union cards, and, given the fact that the election was filed only a little over a month after the Ohio University Student Union made the unionization of students workers a top priority, the administration is certain to be feeling very afraid that we will win — not only at the call center, but in other workforces, as well. The Student Union and the labor organizers we have partnered with are demonstrating that, so long as we keep to our current course, we will soon have a union for all student workers.
The administration’s response is likely to be one of intimidation and scare-tactics, but its strategy of union-busting is also very likely to include raises for student workers and maybe even an increase in the campus minimum wage. If and when that comes, we must view it as a victory that we have won and fought for and not as something that has been handed to us out of the generosity of our administration.
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Informally, the very act of organizing to form a union is an act of collective bargaining. When managers and administrators respond to that by increasing our pay, what they are actually responding to is our own power. They want to quell the energy around the union with those raises, because they are interested in acquiring as much capital as possible. The union threatens that. The union promises a more democratic workplace and better working conditions. That is not in the interest of capital. Instead, it is in the interest of people.
Raises for student-workers in that context show, perhaps even more than the current exploitation of student-workers on campus, how much we need student-worker unions. The raises they give us as appeasement demonstrate the power that we have when we stand together. And, if we continue to stand together, we can get much more — better wages, for instance, or a fair say in the discipline process, or the ability to negotiate our own contracts. Don’t let the appeasement and fake tears of admins deter you. They don’t care until we make them.
Daniel Kington is a sophomore studying English and a Student Union organizer. He is also an officer of the Sierra Student Coalition. What do you think of the Student Union’s efforts? Email him at dk982513@ohio.edu.
