Students for Workers’ Rights: Labor at Stanford in the time of coronavirus
by Armaan Rashid and Sefa Santos-Powell
A year ago from today, Students for Workers’ Rights (formerly known as Campus Workers’ Coalition formerly known as SALA) held a May Day rally to pressure Stanford to act with workers, and not board members, in mind. This year, when Stanford announced classes were going to move online on March 6, SWR was still reeling from several recent losses. By the time COVID-19 hit Stanford, we didn’t think we could handle another crisis.
When we first arrived at Stanford as freshmen, Students for Workers’ Rights (SWR) was focused on addressing systematic patterns of workplace harassment and disrespect faced by dining hall workers. Throughout the years, we worked with the on-campus labor union, SEIU Local 2007, to prepare for contract negotiations by holding teach-ins and rallies to educate and galvanize the student body. Mounting losses included a bus pilot, planned for months, which was to run between East Palo Alto and Stanford for the many workers who live there and was abruptly shuttered by Stanford Transportation; our repeated efforts to get information about the archaic ‘Time & Motion Study’ the university was planning to run that had gone nowhere; and our attempts to organize with UG2 custodians that had been stalled, for a variety of reasons.
The university’s responses to these futile and painstaking campaigns were part and parcel of a larger trend in Stanford’s history of shirking its responsibility to care for its workers.
We became more disheartened and disillusioned every time Stanford reneged on its commitment to ensuring affordable housing or every time we heard another story (of which there were many) about R&DE management blatantly disrespecting workers. Through interviews with workers we found that 78% of service workers said they had felt discriminated against and that 66% of workers felt that their housing was not affordable. As the organization grew, we began to work with workers who did not receive the same benefits as full time workers or workers hired by the university, including casual workers and subcontracted workers. As our interactions with workers grew, as did our understanding of the severity of the injustice faced by service workers at Stanford.
But on March 6th, in the space of hours, it became clear that Stanford was willing to sacrifice service workers’ health and wellbeing in the name of ‘protecting’ everyone else. Janitors on campus were wildly, rapidly overworked in increasingly hazardous conditions, and many didn’t get a weekend on March 7th and 8th as the university expanded its cleaning services in the name of protecting students’ health — not just cleaning existing spaces more extensively, but offering full disinfections to the several co-ops on campus. Even the one co-op that refused these services in exchange for several extra hours of labor on students’ part, Columbae, still had its doorknobs disinfected by custodians who were already cleaning Row houses, because of orders from management. Stanford’s service workers, many of whom are in the at-risk population for COVID-19, were being overworked in evermore hazardous conditions. But most egregiously, service workers were not being informed of the risk they were facing, as we and many students found out talking to service workers. The updates we were constantly receiving via email about the COVID-19 risk on campus, and the number of confirmed cases, were simply not being transmitted to workers; in the case of subcontracted UG2 workers, they were flat-out lied to, and told there was no risk. Thus, many custodians were cleaning areas with quarantined students, without knowing that students there had tested positive.
Our first petition, sent out March 7, called for clear communication with service workers, paid sick leave, and hazard pay, driven by the belief that no one should be economically forced to choose against their own health. Of course, the demands were idealistic — everything that Stanford was doing, including the withholding of information, was precisely to keep service workers working at all costs, a violent pattern currently rippling throughout the country and the world. When administration refused to respond after thousands of signatures and press coverage, we brought the petition in-hand to the President and Provost’s office on March 9. When they didn’t respond to that, we planned a sit-in, but President Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Drell did us one better and simply closed their offices the next day — supposedly because of their busy schedules — and put two lower-level administrators who have no jurisdiction over the budget or service workers outside, on folding chairs, to deal with us.
As the situation escalated — mass layoffs, overwork, a lack of information, increasingly risky conditions, a lack of personal protective equipment — students in themselves initiated mutual aid responses, in addition to those begun by Students for Workers’ Rights. It became clear that the university was reluctant to offer even directly hired workers pay continuance through the end of the quarter, and seemed to entirely neglect subcontracted workers, who were increasingly being used to replace workers who were, rightly, being allowed to shelter in place.
We escalated, with a second petition calling for hazard pay and pay continuance that would allow all non-essential workers to shelter in place through June 15. We also launched a mass social media campaign, attempting to tag famous alums to sully the university’s image — which is a notorious pressure point for Stanford — then in the form of a Faculty Senate resolution, the university’s hesitance resulted in serious precarity for an already precarious population, and most egregiously to the infection of at least one contracted service worker on campus. As the situation escalated day by day for workers, whose voices are constantly obscured and invisibilized, we escalated. Provost Drell’s April 14 message appeared to meet our demands and, subtly, attempted to knock the wind out of our campaign by kind-of-but-not-really committing to pay continuance for subcontracted workers. She also rhetorically attempted to set up a distance between subcontracted workers (in her words, ‘those employed by contract firms’) that obscured their essential labor, especially as they increasingly came to do the labor traditionally in the jurisdiction of ‘Stanford employees.’ At the Faculty Senate, an SWR statement read by ASSU President Erica Scott demanded that administration clarify, as soon as possible, what ‘support’ for contracting firms to continue pay would exactly look like, before our press conference the following Thursday.
The night before the conference, we got confirmation from both Bon Appetit and UG2 of our worst fears — that Provost Drell’s promises were false, and contracting firms and Stanford were not going to pay workers. It fueled us going into the conference, where SWR, union leaders, notable alum, and workers themselves spoke about ongoing abuses in the time of coronavirus, attracting far more media attention than we had anticipated — reaching even The Washington Post. This week, following the conference, we have confirmation from at least UG2 that the university has apparently committed to paying workers the difference in wages of what can’t be accessed through unemployment, especially for those who, for a variety of reasons, can’t access unemployment.
Stanford service workers are overwhelmingly people of color, in comparison to student demographics and, especially, faculty, who — though they are facing many challenges in this time along lines of race and class — are at least allowed to shelter-in-place. Our campaign was driven, from the first petition onwards, by the principle that those at the bottom of Stanford’s race and class hierarchies should not have to choose between health and economic security. Stanford’s refusal to solidly commit to pay continuance for subcontracted workers while they shelter-in-place, until mass student pressure was applied, reflects the nature of subcontracting itself as a form of precarious labor — the precariat, the disposable labor force. This perpetual state of crisis endemic to the existence of a capitalist state finds itself played out at Stanford, which has only been exacerbated by COVID-19. Racialized bodies are incorporated into the nation-state, and the university, differently, existing perpetually outside of it yet integral to its existence.
As Stanford dragged its response out, the consequences were grave — at least one UG2 worker tested positive for COVID-19, and was being forced to use existing sick leave to quarantine.
Though we may have achieved this one small victory, the racialized power structure of labor at the university lingers. Exposed most starkly in the time of coronavirus, service workers’ racialized and gendered labor is meant to invisibly maintain the university as a site of consumption and reflection for students and faculty, who provide the university its prestige (and thus, capital), and allow Stanford to keep up the farce that it is primarily a site of ‘higher learning’ — as opposed to being a site of (racialized & gendered) labor, meant for the re/production of a transnational elite class.
Eli Meyerhoff and Elsa Noterman’s 2018 analysis of the modern university as a hierarchy of space-times is prescient for understanding the longstanding violence against service workers on campus, and its intensification in the time of coronavirus. As they describe it, the ‘slow time’ of reflection & contemplation is lived by tenured faculty and undergraduate students, particularly those of the privileged classes, who do not face immediate economic pressure to support themselves and their families during and after college. This ‘slow time’ is demanded by the precepts of liberal education — the ideal that education is a place and time for students to reflect, form ideas, consider their values and ways of living in order to become moral beings, which of course demands some level of separation from the material world of labor and economic survival. Laments, particularly from increasingly marginalized humanities departments, about the corporatization of education — i.e., education as a means to a social or financial end as opposed to being a good in itself — decry the speed-up of even this ‘slow time,’ with the most powerful and privileged in the university’s power structure succumbing to a sped-up time of activities, internships, classes, and credentialism. These romantic complaints, while largely true, politely ignore and obscure the eugenic premises of modern Western education, built for sussing out and installing a (racialized) elite class — and distributing everyone else in a brutal racial capitalist hierarchy, one that plays out on campus at Stanford. The ‘slow time’ of a Stanford education is, and has long been, entirely dependent on the labor that makes the campus and its amenities run. To return to Meyerhoff and Noterman, this is the brutally ‘sped-up’ time — a time of overwork and exhaustion, when time is commodified and made scarce, and one is constantly ‘running out’ of it — lived by undergraduate students forced to work multiple jobs, on campus and off; clerical staff; graduate students and contingent faculty, who do the bulk of teaching work; and of course, the service workers who cook, clean, provide childcare, and maintain facilities for students and faculty.
This sped-up time has only intensified and become more brutal as structural conditions at and surrounding Stanford have shifted over the years. Skyrocketing housing costs in the South Bay have meant that service workers have had to either choose between hours-long commutes or working multiple jobs to support themselves. The university is also active in this economic-temporal violence. It has neglected to hire more service workers, particularly in non-contingent positions, to alleviate the burden of overwork Stanford workers increasingly face. And in the Winter Quarter, it hired a consulting firm to carry out a ‘Time & Motion’ study on dorm custodians — i.e., surveil and examine custodians as they work to determine their ‘efficiency,’ and make recommendations to the university to cut costs — literally attempting to measure and heighten workers’ speed against a temporal standard of efficiency. (‘Time and Motion’ studies, it’s worth noting, are a racial technology first invented by white slave-owners to increase enslaved people’s production efficiency.)
The brutal speed-up wrought for service workers by the coronavirus — overwork in hazardous conditions, if people were not simply laid off — has already been remarked upon. Infuriatingly though not surprisingly, Stanford continued a common tactic of pitting two of its most ‘sped-up’ populations — students reliant on financial aid, and service workers — against each other, as when GSE students asked for tuition refunds and a GSE dean told them that staff, particularly those ‘who perform manual labor,’ would be impacted if they kept asking for tuition reimbursements.
All of this economic violence is brought on by the threat to the ‘slowest’ time of all, even more privileged in the university than tenured faculty — the time of capital itself, that is, the university endowment. Economist Tyler Cowen summed up the nature of university capital quite precisely in his March 25 op-ed, “Universities Shouldn’t Spend Their Endowments on Coronavirus Relief,” in which he argues universities should not spend money on service workers or financially impacted students. The endowment, to Cowen, should not be tapped to support workers in a time of need, however integral they might otherwise be to the university’s functioning. It should be preserved for what it has been accumulated for: the university’s continued operation in perpetuity, the ultimate ‘slow time.’ To invest into service workers now, especially as the endowment is slashed and the budget is to be constrained for many years upcoming, would be to allocate funds that might otherwise be invested for accumulating so that the university might last, in its current opulence and prestige, for longer; literally, buying time. To pay workers — those who, certainly, cannot buy any more time — would be an investment in the present against the future, even if racialized, exploited labor has been a fundamental part of Stanford’s past and present.
But however much we may disagree with this position, Cowen articulates something vital:
“If you spend time at these [elite] universities, as I have, you will notice that the overwhelming majority of the political rhetoric of both the faculty and the students is supportive of egalitarianism and is critical of accumulated wealth. Yet the actual behavior of these universities does not accord with that rhetoric. That contradiction has now become impossible to sustain.”
He’s right, and reflects one of SWR’s key understandings — that labor organizing in the university often boils down to a conceptual battle over what the university is. The contradiction between egalitarian rhetoric — from students and faculty alike, including us — and the reality of the university’s behavior, and students and faculty’s widespread complicity, our deep embeddedness in perpetuating the unjust political and economic order of the day, is only growing more and more untenable in the time of coronavirus. It afflicts us as student organizers, who — though we come from a variety of race and class backgrounds — still occupy a position of power in relation to workers. We do this organizing work in large part because we know service workers’ voices are constantly being silenced in innumerable ways, and use our relative privilege and safety to attempt to amplify their voices and concerns, though this is and will continue to be fraught with ethical concerns.
Nonetheless, there is a deep tie between universities — which have existed from before the modern concept of ‘education’ — and radical organizing. The University of Bologna — the world’s first — was founded in 1088 by students who pooled money to get scholars to teach them, and collectively bargained with government and said scholars to get courses at a reasonable cost, even going so far as to threaten a strike — tactics, of course, strangely redolent of what we now see as labor organizing, as Meyerhoff notes in his Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World. In the intervening millenium, the university — especially the elite university — has evolved into capitalism’s labor organizer, distributing people within a racial capitalist hierarchy and then reflecting the same hierarchy in its own divides among and between students, workers, and faculty. In many ways, our organizing is a kind of counter-organizing — that is, challenging the existing organization of society that Stanford and institutions like it produce, reflect, and, it must be said, often work to ideologically justify through forms of knowledge production. As racial capitalism buckles in the time of coronavirus, punishing those in its foundations most extensively, we are grateful to have organized alongside workers for this small mitigation of harm — but a catastrophic future looms. We can only hope new forms of organizing ourselves emerge from this moment of crisis, so that theory and practice need not lie so far apart.
Sefa Santos-Powell is a junior majoring in History, with a focus on studies of race and capitalism. She has been organizing with SWR for two years.
Armaan Rashid is a sophomore majoring in Comparative Literature. He has been organizing with SWR for just over a year.
