Student activism at UCLA is growing. Students now have campus
organizations fighting against sweatshops, war and globalization.
They are coalitions devoted to the struggle for a more diverse
university environment through the reinstatement of affirmative
action.
Most recently, a campaign was started to help unionize 150
subcontracted workers seeking to be unionized and hire them as
university employees. After attending a march to the
chancellor’s office last Thursday, it hit me that this
campaign is intricately connected to all the issues for which we
are fighting so hard.
What is the connection between affirmative action and a
unionization campaign to free workers from substandard conditions?
To put it bluntly, whereas a large number of these low-wage workers
are people of color with no chance to better their lives, UCLA
simultaneously keeps others from the same communities out of higher
education through its admissions policies. The student body is
becoming more and more gentrified, and many people of color here on
campus are only subcontracted workers who don’t even receive
health benefits.
Although UCLA still provides some workers with good union jobs,
the university is becoming increasingly privatized through outside
subcontractors. Most of the subcontracted employees involved in the
present unionization campaign work as parking attendants in Lots 4
and 8, as well as in the Wilshire Center. Subcontracted workers
also hold positions as food service workers, and as custodians for
ASUCLA and at the Anderson School of Business. These workers do
some of the hardest and dirtiest work on campus, and their reward,
on average, is a $7/hour job with few or no health benefits and no
workplace protections. It is a shame that, at a university funded
by our student fees and tax dollars, such low-wage, health
benefit-free conditions continue to exist.
The current unionization campaign is not an abstract issue for
the sake of politics and ideology.
Rather, it is a moral issue about people like Roberto, who works
as a parking attendant for AMPCO, one of the private
subcontractors. Roberto is from Mexico and lives in Highland Park.
After three years of working for AMPCO, he still only makes $7.30
per hour, and must rely on over-the-counter medicine when he is ill
because he has no healthcare coverage.
Roberto and his co-workers come to work under the threat that
any day they might lose their jobs. Their manager scares workers
with terminations and often berates employees in front of their
co-workers and the customers. Workers are at times ordered not to
speak Spanish amongst each other. Roberto ““ who was one of
the first workers to begin organizing to become a university
employee ““ has since been transferred to a non-UCLA AMPCO
site in what may be an act which aims to silence him.
If we truly want to eliminate these injustices, we have got to
start on our campus. We can’t create global change if we
don’t start in our own communities. Low-wage workers are
risking their jobs to better their lives and fight injustice at
UCLA. Will you support their struggle?
Flores is a third-year Chicana/o studies student, and Caitlin
Patler is a fourth-year Chicana/o studies student.