On-campus protest goes unnoticed
I am writing in response to The Hatchet’s failure to cover the demonstration last Thursday for fair wages and treatment of all workers on campus.
Students joined representatives of the Laborers’ International Union of North America and employees of ACECO, a contractor doing demolition and asbestos removal on the Ross Hall project, to demand that the administration push for fair treatment of all workers on our campus.
GW should be a place where contracted workers are treated fairly under the law. Unfortunately, ACECO’s employees at Ross Hall have been shown anything but consideration and respect. Since the Ross Hall construction project is funded by a federal grant, ACECO is obligated to pay their employees the DC prevailing wage.
However, the workers have provided pay stubs that show ACECO directly violated those standards. It also has a long history of putting their employees’ safety at risk, even refusing to provide face masks in the dangerous job of asbestos removal.
Workers’ demands for just wages have been met with apathy and, in some cases, outright intimidation.
Here at GW, many of us have learned how to be activists. We’ve studied fundamental economic and political questions, we’ve worked for organizations and officials with tremendous influence in national and global affairs and we’ve campaigned and protested for causes that we believe in. In this case, violations of rights are not far away, and the conflict is not theoretical.
Workers are being mistreated on our own campus, and they are risking their jobs to stand for justice. We must stand with them.
The writer, Anne Schwartz, is an organizer with the Progressive Student Union and is a student in the Elliott School of International Affairs.
Rather than “activists” I suggest that you have learned to become responsible adults and human beings. Looking out for other human beings who may not be receiving proper employment compensation or who are operating under unsafe conditions is both humane and a practical way to demonstrate students’ and the University’s ethics.
Of course, we’re only getting half of the story here. If ACECO is, in fact, violating some federal law, the workers should partner with the union to file a lawsuit. Pay matters are settled in court, not with demonstrations.
Are the homeless people you pay to join in on the Union protests paid the DC prevailing wage too? Or are they just slipped cash under the table?
@GWLaw What they don’t teach you in law school is that nothing ever gets settled in court. It’s settled in the streets.
@GWAlum By my count, those homeless people already have more respect than you do.
Wow, bravo! As an alum, I’ll say that critical engagement with dominant social systems was embarassingly absent from both the cirriculum and the applied efforts of the student body during my time there. We really had to dig it up in the back corners of the coursebook, and cobble together counter-discourses outside the classroom.
What was more common, and no doubt easier, was the ‘learn the world as it is’ approach to social sciences. From economics to politics, this quickly becomes a ‘take advantage of the world as it is’ approach to practicing life.
No doubt, your first three commentors approach their education as a personal investment measured in terms of finances and prestige. If that’s your attitude, it necessitates an acceptance of participation in fundamentally unjust, inequitable, undemocratic and hierarchical institutions. If that’s your attitude, its easy to say that people dont deserve a living wage. Consider the calculous: it means cheaper tuition, more money for student activities, more money for me when I get rich and less money for the people building my kid’s new high-end dormitory, etc.
Of course, this is an equation based on faulty premises, as is the entire austerity agenda. In reality, the equation is rhetorical cover deployed by the privilidged and powerful to mask the banality of their intentions.
The Progressive Student Union seems to be emulating a different view of their education, seeing it as an uncommon opportunity to achieve distance from prevailing hegemonies and systems, reflect upon them in the ethical relief afforded by separation, dive into archives and oral histories to conduct studies of the subaltern, and then re-engage the mainstream by challenging to justify itself in the light of clearly evidenced injustice. I bet this is enrichening the academic experience of the whole community, perhaps against many of their wishes.
And yeah, it gets settled in the streets.
I work for GWU and also attended the demonstration in support of the ACECO workers. I applaud the students’ involvement in supporting workers’ demands for a legal wage.
There are many laws and regulations on the books that employers ignore but lull us into thinking there is more occupational health and safety provisions than there are. (The sick leave policy for DC workers is an example of policy that is not enforced).
Holding public demonstrations and strikes are often needed to pressure these companies to improve the well-being and health of workers.