If you eat in the dinning halls on campus, it’s no
exaggeration to say that your actions today will have a huge effect
on thousands of lives.
Today is the first day of strikes by the American Federation of
State, County and Municipal Employees Union, which represents the
UCLA dining hall staff and thousands of other workers across our
campus.
At every dining hall, there will be picket lines manned by
workers who are fighting for the right to wages that will allow
them to bring up a family and live a decent life.
Our job is simple and really effortless ““ don’t
cross them.
And if you have time, get yourself down to the rally outside
Ackerman at 3 p.m.
I wrote a few months ago about the disgracefully low wages these
people are paid, but because the statistics are so shocking
it’s definitely worth reminding you.
A recent independent report found that 98 percent of service
workers who are single parents with a preschooler earn less than
the bare minimum to survive ““ we’re talking here about
such luxuries as food, transportation and rent.
On Tuesday I spoke to my friend Suzanne Jett, who works
full-time in Hedrick’s dining hall. She told me she had just
gotten a check of $519 for 80 hours work. That works out at $6.48
an hour after tax, and she hasn’t received a raise for three
years.
Can you believe that?
As much as I’m disgusted by the University of
California’s treatment of these workers, I’m even more
angered by the student apologists, who somehow think this treatment
is OK. It’s sad because these students must be heavily
indoctrinated to have this callous attitude.
Four years of intensive economic and business training at an
elite university is designed not only to make you eligible to work
for a hedge fund or become an investment banker ““ it’s
also intended to give you dubious rationale to support greed.
According to John Kenneth Galbraith, the esteemed Harvard
economist, these people are “engaged in one of man’s
oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is, the search for a
superior moral justification for selfishness.”
When the rich were given huge tax breaks, the brainwashed
economic determinists legitimized it through elaborate theories
that purport to show how it will reinvigorate the economy (and they
hold on to this idea even as the budget deficit climbs).
But when faced with a workforce where 98 percent of single
mothers can’t afford basic necessities, these same sheep deem
the workers disingenuous and naive to think even for a second that
they deserve better. And, of course, they have a graph and pie
chart to show why.
“It’s all in my economics textbooks!” they
scream hysterically.
The belief that individual freedom and economic justice are
mutually exclusive is another commonly held myth.
When the state is small, it’s true that the rich are
certainly more free, but everyone else is only free to rely on
their generosity. Do these supposed freedom-lovers really want to
go back to the 19th century, when 9-year-olds had to work 14-hour
days in factories as they contorted their growing bodies? That was
capitalism when it was truly free.
There were no “communist” obscenities like strong
unions, minimum wages or caps on the working day, but did these
children really feel free as they sat hunched over a machine all
day and night? Does the single mother who works in De Neve dining
hall and can’t afford to feed her children feel any freer
because some billionaire has an extra hundred thousand dollars to
play with after Bush’s tax cuts?
This is what their “freedom” looks like in the real
world.
The free market is not quite as “free” as
they’d have you believe. A study of the top 100 transnational
corporations in the Fortune list found that every single one of
them had benefited hugely from state help, and that over 20 had
been saved from complete destruction by government
intervention.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone: Free markets and a small
protective state are fine for “them” (the poor) but not
for “us” (the rich).
The endless streams of doctrinaire theories that purport to show
how it is somehow demented to support the workers are only trying
to find a “superior moral justification for
selfishness.” They are intellectually obtuse and
spectacularly ignorant of the real world because they come straight
out of a dusty beginners economics book.
Luckily, there is something called “common sense”
““ it’s abundant among the workers in my dining hall
““ that sits above the ideological clouds that cover most
political debate in university classrooms.
It’s common sense to see that a full-time employee at our
dining hall earning $6.48 an hour is a blatant travesty. It’s
common sense to ask how UCLA managed to give 13 executives bonuses
that totaled $343,000 in 2005. It’s common sense to go on
strike in the face of an offer from UCLA that could result in no
raise for seven years. And it’s common sense ““ and a
moral duty ““ to support the people who support us, as they
reach a portentous moment in their working lives.
I’ll be seeing you in Westwood for dinner then. Falafel
King? 7:30?
Kennard is a third-year history student. E-mail
mkennard@media.ucla.edu.