UPDATE: After Forsaking Food to Increase Workers' Wages, GU Students See Victory as Hollow
Georgetown University senior Diane Foglizzo was among the students who fasted last March in support of increasing workers' wages.
(By Preston Keres -- The Washington Post)
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A year ago, after nine days without food, students on a hunger strike at Georgetown University declared victory: School officials agreed to increase wages for all full-time workers.
But students are protesting again. They have put up banners, handed out fliers and delivered letters to President John J. DeGioia.
The students say the university didn't live up to its promise. They've seen pay stubs, freshman Sarah Heydemann said, that show employees are not all earning a minimum of $13 an hour.
And the school is making it harder for workers to unionize, she said. Politicians, including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), recently sent letters to DeGioia asking for a "fair and unbiased" way for workers to choose a union.
University officials say they have done exactly what was agreed to last year. Total compensation for full-time contract workers was raised in July to a minimum of $13 an hour -- a figure that includes such benefits as health insurance. But officials say they are negotiating with a contractor who is not in compliance. The contractor has three employees.
There's dispute about the total compensation, school officials said, because the contractors who provided breakdowns of pay and benefits did so only if the information would not be shared outside the committee GU administrators set up.
Wages will increase to a minimum of $14 an hour by July 2007, and administrators are considering ways for workers to vote on unionization, according to a letter to the community from Senior Vice President Spiros Dimolitsas. "Georgetown is justly proud of a successful partnership with unions," he wrote. "Indeed, since the 1970s many University employees have been represented by unions." He closed by thanking people who have worked on "an issue that is central to our mission as a Catholic and Jesuit university."
At Catholic University, some students wore "We Support Justice for Janitors" stickers when custodians voted overwhelmingly this month to join Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ.
"The university follows the Catholic social teaching," spokesman Victor Nakas said. "We fully support the right of our employees to collective bargaining. We also strongly believe that's a right reserved to the employees themselves. The university takes a position of strict neutrality as to whether there should be a union or not."
At GU, students are working with the committee set up by university administrators, hoping for progress, Heydemann said. And they're planning another rally Friday in the center of campus.
-- Susan Kinzie
