An Interview with Anna,
Student Activist at Stanford University

In the last few years, Stanford's labor rights campaign has been very active, including a long and successful hunger-strike by students. Involved since her freshman year, Anna recounts the history of the Stanford campaign, and the lessons it's taught her about universities and organizing.

You've been involved in labor activism for nearly your entire time at Stanford. How did you first become involved?

When I was a freshman, I started talking to workers in the dining hall and was shocked by some of the things I heard. Some of them were my age and had kids, trying to support themselves. They had wanted to go to school but couldn't because they had to work. And they had to work a lot because of the wages were so low.

I felt really, really uncomfortable when I first got to Stanford having people serve me and clean up after me. That was never something I had had before, and I felt a very weird power dynamic. I didn't like it. So I tried to get around that by getting to know people.

Olympia, where I'm from, is a very white town. But it is also a sort of middle class or lower-middle class community, so there isn't a lot of income inequality. You don't see the racial hierarchy, power, wealth, and all that. You're not exposed to that.

Also, I had just come right from working in a very rural community in the Dominican Republic. I saw the wealth and inequity here in Palo Alto as a sort of a continuation of the situation there. I felt like my alliances were with the people who were serving me, rather than with the school.

One of the major labor campaigns aimed at stopping subcontracting at Stanford Hospital. What was the problem, and what did the campaign do?

In 2001, Stanford Hospital administration was trying to subcontract housecleaning jobs that were formerly union positions. The hospital had opened up new satellite buildings around the hospital and were trying to switch those jobs over to subcontractor workers. It was a huge cut in wages. The subcontracted workers would be earning about $7 an hour with no benefits. Union wages started at at least $12, plus benefits.

The union realized, "Oh my god, this is the start of a trend. They are going to try to subcontract all this work out." We started talking to the union, and they suggested we talk to the administration of the hospital. The administration wouldn't talk to us-they just kind of blew us off.

So in the Fall of 2001, we did a protest action at the Stanford hospital about the subcontracting policies. I was one of the six protestors who were arrested and dragged off. At that point, I realized Stanford didn't give a damn about 99% of the people here, including students. It was all about maintaining its sort of corporate image.

After the arrests, which got a lot of attention and a lot of media, President Hennessey (who had previously refused to meet with us over the issue) agreed to a meeting. He came out with a proposed "living wage" policy, but we quickly realized that the proposal wasn't right. Basically, it excluded everyone that it could possibly have covered. We still haven't found a single worker that it would have covered.

We continued to pressure the university for a code of conduct. We confronted President Hennessey in an ASSU meeting, wearing black holding signs. It really sort of freaked people out, and we got a lot of negative backlash at that point from the general community of Stanford people. At that point, we were realizing that we needed to just more educational outreach on campus to get more general support, because we were getting nasty letters written about us in the Daily, that is was a bunch of crazy wacko students.

It also made us sort of realize our own power and the power of SLAC [Student-Labor Action Committee]. It was the first big action that we had done on our own, and it made us realize that we could start moving things-if we were organized enough and radical enough to make things happen.

How closely did you work with the unions during the hospital campaign? I know there has been a lot of tension between unions and students at other schools. What's your view on the relationship?

During the Stanford Hospital campaign, I don't think we were working too closely with the unions. It was more that we had heard about this from the unions, and then took our own initiative and came up with our own plan of how we were going to proceed.

It's interesting. For awhile, I really believed unions were the solution to everything. If you could have a more powerful union, everything would be better. And I still believe that to a degree, but I've also become a lot more jaded about what unions are actually capable of doing. I've seen how the lack of leadership, disorganization, and infighting that goes on in a lot of unions keeps those unions from doing what they really should be doing. It keeps them from achieving the goals they should be.

In the Spring of 2002, the Stanford Labor Action Committee [SLAC] began a hunger strike to protest labor policies at Stanford. How did that come about?

What lead up to the hunger strike was just this continuing frustration that it wasn't going anywhere-and a bunch of people were graduating and leaving the whole group.

The idea first came up right before Christmas, the year before, when the hospital workers were going on strike for a day. We talked about that if the workers didn't get a contract we might go on a hunger strike. It just kind of got tossed around. We talked about occupation and stuff, but after the administration's response to our Main Quad protest, we knew that they would be likely to kick students out of school. People wanted to graduate.

Plus, fasting was sort of a higher pass. You can't criticize someone who is doing this very non-violent thing, while it is easy to criticize someone that's doing something a little more violent.

What was the effect of hunger strike successful? Do you think, in retrospect, that it was a good idea?

We won some of our smaller demands. One of the workers, Victoria Vega, had been fired from Manpower for speaking up and wanting a job. She got a permanent job out of the hunger strike-that was one of our demands. Getting the committee created was also a step forward. Before, the administration always had refused to have a place where students, workers, faculty and staff were all in the same room talking about wages and hiring policies. So that was good.

But looking back it now, I have some regrets that we didn't hold out longer and push a bit harder. We should have demanded the specifics of what the committee was going to look at, who was going to decide who was on the committee, how the meetings were going to be run, how the recommendations were going to be implemented, and so on. Hunger strikers weren't thinking about all of that, since they're basically not thinking about anything. We didn't have the experience they had. The administration had lawyers and other people who knew exactly how to talk their way out of anything.

I am glad that we did it, and it was a good step. It was probably the most defining experience of my life, personally and spiritually.

The hunger strike led to the formation of a committee. Most students students have told me that committees are usually a waste of time. What was the committee at Stanford like? What were the results of it?

Basically, because of the hunger strike the administration agreed to form a committee that was going to look at the issues in our code of conduct.

The committee finally met a quarter after they were supposed to have started meeting. There was no one from SLAC represented on it, there was no low-wage workers represented on it. While four out of the five undergraduate students who applied to be on the committee and were nominated were from SLAC, they picked the one person who wasn't from SLAC. In addition, they initially refused to have the union representative that the union chose to be on it. Also, the non-union workers on the committee were secretaries and administrative assistants-higher up people and not low-wage workers.

As far as the report the committee issued, there are good parts and there are bad parts. [The committees report is available here.] The committee wasn't able to look at the issues of subcontracting at all, because they didn't have the data on it. But that is exactly where most of the problems are with low-wage workers. So one of their recommendations is that the university should start collecting that data.

For temporary workers, the committee had some good recommendations. They recommended wage parity between temporary workers with fulltime permanent workers, which is huge-if it gets implemented. They also recommended English Second Language programs for low-wage workers.

The committee also recommended union neutrality in union organizing campaigns, but not fully. Union neutrality means that the university wouldn't actively campaign against unions that are trying to organize workers. That's not illegal. There are certain things they are not supposed to do, like offer to raise people's wages if they agree not to vote for the union. But they can bring people into a meeting and say, "Unions are a bad thing, and if you vote for the union, that's bad."

They also non-unanimously recommended a living wage. I think a lot of people on the committee would recommend one, but not all.

Did the committee find out things that students couldn't about hiring practices and wages on campus?

It's pretty easy to show the wage and benefit differences between unionized and non-unionized workers. It's not with the directly hired workers that the problem is--it's with the subcontracted workers.

Not even the university has information on subcontracted workers. It's really, really hard to get information on them. We can get personal stories from people saying their earning this much, but we don't know how many subcontracted janitors there are. That is not information that we are able to get.

These are the sort of issues the committee was supposed to be gathering, but they failed to do so. It's a problem, and a big problem. Not knowing how many subcontracted workers there were meant not knowing how much proposed changes would cost.

But the debate with the administration was less about the current wages of employees, and more about whether higher wages were a good thing or not. The administration was have just been saying they do not think paying people a certain wage is a problem. But they didn't deny they were paying those wages.

Living wage campaigns are usually a lot more than just raising wage levels. They are also about power, race relations, and fairness. What's your take on the larger goals and benefits of living wage campaigns?

If people are able to get unionized, then people are more able to advocate for themselves. Anything that leads to people working collectively is a good thing. I think living wage campaigns bring workers together, collectively, to fight for something. And it brings students together as well-which is important, since there are so many obstacles to student organizing.

I think that for people who get really involved, it does affect the way they think about things and do things in their lives. Even if those people go off and become investments bankers or whatever, they will be cognizant of janitors in their building and how much they are earning. They will at least think about that.

And as far as the wider community, I think it does help that people are thinking about living wage campaigns or reading about them in the newspaper. An average student who walks by and sees students caring about living wages may think about the issue in a way that they would not have otherwise.

Also, many of the students on campus are going to be in power someday, somewhere. Maybe they will have decision making power, and maybe they will make a decision that will be more in favor of people without the means to support themselves. Maybe they will make a decision that leads to a more just society.

For me personally, the campaign was a huge eye-opener. Before the living wage campaign, I hadn't been exposed to labor activism and the way that Stanford ran. When I became involved in the campaign, I thought, "The administration just don't understand that there is a problem. As soon as we inform them of it they will try to fix it." That is obviously not the case.

I know that there's often racial tensions among students and employees in labor activism. How did the campaign work with ethnic groups on campus? How did you build coalitions in general?

We started to build coalitions with the hospital campaign, but it was very superficial. Later, we moved beyond that and started having statements signed by the Coalition for Labor Justice, which was a coalition of representatives of different ethnic groups. Then the hunger strike had a lot of support-the coalition ran a lot of the logistical support for it.

This ended up leading to a lot of the conflict internally last year. Some people felt that the coalition was being used for all the grunt work of running the hunger strike, while the people who were making the decisions were SLAC members (who were a larger percentage white than the coalition folks).

I am kind of worried right now about SLAC in that way. In the past, it was actively trying not to be a bunch of white hippy people, or people who were having a minor "liberal phase" in their life. I think that SLAC had actively recruited minority students, students of color, and females-it has nearly always been run by women. But recently that commitment has waned, or people don't see the importance of actively retaining that quality of the group. So that worries me.

It's also hard being a white person and saying this kind of stuff. People feel like they are being tokenized, and there are all these racial politics that come and make it complicated. I think any organizing is complicated when you are are trying to do multicultural organizing.

For instance, most of the workers aren't white--most are Spanish-speaking immigrants. How do you bridge gaps between student populations and those worker populations. Should students working on this be Chicano students? Is that necessary? Being able to speak Spanish is sort of necessary to do this kind of stuff. How do you actively make sure that your group is able to communicate with those people you are supposedly advocating for? Should privileged students should be advocating for workers?

Many activists I've talked to are suspicious of economic arguments and research. How do you use economics in your campaigns? Is the campaign mainly about economic rights?

I think it's really hard to win arguments for the living wage using just economics. Because of the way economics is as discipline is organized, it is very difficult to argue for a living wage using just economic terms. There are certain studies that show living wage policies help, but there are also lots of studies that show they don't. And people that are making many of the decisions about living wage policies tend to believe the latter research.

For me, it's not so much about the economics. It's more of an ethical or moral argument. For instance, at Stanford we haven't just been focused on getting a living wage. While that's part of the problem, a lot of the problem is power dynamics-who has the power to make decisions about other peoples' lives. We weren't just asking for a living wage policy, we were asking for this code of conduct: the right for people to organize, the right to have educational classes, the right to have wage parity. There are all sorts of ways of changing the situation, not just living wage policies.

In some ways, it's surprising that students have had any effect on wage levels at universities. Students are neither primarily employees of the university, nor own any part of the university. Where does student power come from?

From what I have seen recently, what the university cares about is its image It's all about public relations. Anything you can do that affects their image is where your power is. That's why if you have a student rally, no one really cares. But if you talk to the alumni and people who donate to the university, you have much more power.

Recently, I've been working on corporate responsibility and looking at where Stanford is investing its money. Just at Stanford, its generated a lot of press in the last year. We have ten people in our group and we do little action-and the press cares. We get much more press than we ever did with labor activism. We didn't even get as much press when we did the fast. It's sort of crazy. It is because we're talking about money. We are talking about hedge funds, and the hedge funds are scared students will start looking at them more critically.

My suggestion to other activists is look where the money is. Basically, just follow the money. If you can affect the money at all, that's what the university cares about. They care about their money and their image, and the way those two relate.

I like to end interviews with a question about advice for other students. What advice do you have for other students or activists interested in labor issues?

First, I think people need to be aware of their reasons for doing living wage activism. If they are doing it because of this feeling of pity and charity, that is okay for a certain level. But people need to be consciously trying to empower other people, and not just be their voices. They need to actually empower them to have their own voices.

Second, if you are going to do a big action, make sure that you have everything planned out as much as possible beforehand. Before you begin a hunger strike, or with anything that people are going to be under a lot of stress, make sure you have decision-making bodies in place that everyone can agree on.

You also want to be very cognizant of who at your university is making decisions-which bodies and which individuals. You need to figure out who has power over whom, and who are talking heads and who are actually pulling strings. You need to make sure you are targeting those who are pulling strings, not just talking heads.

Finally, within your group, make sure you know who has decision-making power. Make sure that power is distributed more or less equitably, especially among the younger people in the group. You need to make sure they feel empowered to lead the group after the old folks have moved on.

Wow, great interview. How can I read them all?

All the interviews from this project have been collected into a report on campus labor rights campaigns. It is available below for easy reading, printing, and sharing.

The Campus Living Wage Project:
Interviews with Student Activists, Organizers, and Researchers