This past month, while many students were (hopefully) still bronzing in Cancun, exploring Europe or trout fishing in the Gorge, the unionized PSU staff came within four days of going on strike, making final negotiations and avoiding the picket line just in time for the student’s scheduled return.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and PSU workers staged large rallies on Aug. 8 and Aug. 17 in the Park Blocks. The
Aug. 8 rally had over 250 SEIU workers, faculty and supporters. Tiffany Dollar of ASPSU led labor chants near the end of the rally, and the workers marched to University Place Hotel where the administration was meeting to send their delegation inside.
The Aug. 17 rally featured Marc Nisenfeld, lead negotiator for the PSU workers and a development engineer for research apparatus at PSU. Nisenfeld donned an 18th century costume and delivered a “Declaration of Impasse” modeled on the Declaration of Independence. The SEIU troops then marched to President Wim Wiewel’s office and the office of Oregon University System Chancellor “King George” Pernsteiner (as the workers put it), and read the Declaration of Impasse again.
The resulting offer was a 30-day “cooling off period,” which, according to Nisenfeld, was anything but.
“It was a ‘heating up’ period for us,” Nisenfeld said. Sept. 2 negotiations “went nowhere,” and a strike notice—a 10 day warning that a real, live strike will happen without a contract agreement—was issued Sept. 9.
With a strike looming, the parties began smack-down negotiations early on Sept. 14, reaching a contract agreement at 4:30 a.m. on Sept. 15. A strike was avoided by a mere 96 hours.
Students don’t realize just how lucky they are.
A strike would have been “chaotic” for PSU students according to lead negotiator Nisenfeld. Imagine trying to get financial aid, change a schedule, find a newly assigned classroom, talk to department assistants or get a valid I.D. with all those experienced workers gone.
That’s not all. UPS deliveries to the campus would have likely stopped. Construction projects on PSU property would have halted. Other sympathetic union workers may have refused service for PSU.
Nisenfeld stated that SEIU had secured promises from the construction workers’ unions to halt work on the PSU construction projects in support of any strike. Kathy Best, Communications Assistant for SEIU Local 503, recalled that strikes by the campus staff at Oregon Institute of Technology in 1987 and 1995 were supported by sympathetic faculty, who contributed to a strike fund and held classes off-campus to avoid crossing a picket line. Both Best and Nisenfeld pointed out that UPS drivers, who are proud members of the Teamsters union, never cross picket lines by making deliveries to strike locations.
This would have made life a lot more difficult for students this fall. However, it does not means that strikes—or unions in general—are bad things.
Union bumper stickers brag that they “brought you the weekend,” and they are not exaggerating. Among other things, the labor movement also brought the eight-hour work day, overtime pay, the forty-hour work week, child labor laws, safety protections of all sorts and, eventually, the right for workers to bargain together without being intimidated or beaten up.
People forget what the transition to an industrial society was like for the people who filled the factories from the 1860s until 1935. There were no limits on how long people worked or how little they were paid. Factories could be smoky, unsanitary, hot, unventilated, dangerous and lacking exits, and often they were. Workers could be treated unjustly based on race, ethnicity and gender. Children as young as nine were employed for the same unsafe, unhealthy twelve-to-fourteen hour, seven-days-a week shifts which adults worked.
Unions fought to change all this, and they succeeded. As unions won victories in these fields, their work moved from organizing workers to “serving” the needs of their members. The responsibility of unions changed to handling grievances, maintaining and, as was the case here at PSU, winning new contracts. While their work does not seem to cause as dramatic change nowadays, it is no less important.
Students should inform themselves about labor struggles and their underlying political issues because they will be asked over and over to vote on state budgeting issues and ballot measures influenced by or affecting unions. The PSU workers struggled for eight months with negotiations, rallies and risk to win a new contract so they could continue to service our educations. It’s only fair that we thank them by paying a little informed attention to their issues.