The Student As Teacher

Back during the days of student protests against the Vietnam War and other issues, there was often a gap between working people and those from the academic community.

Many workers felt that the students disrespected their country and were playing games while pursuing an education that working families could not even hope to afford. Students and professors often looked at blue-collar workers as rigid and intolerant and not committed to the ideals of a true international labor movement (as envisioned by Marxist theorists). To this day, some bitterness left over from that era can boil over among friends and families.

I thought of those days recently when I was in Boston in May for the Second District Progress Meeting. Upon my arrival, I learned that some 35 students at Harvard-the oldest and generally viewed as the most prestigious university in the United States-were ending their three-week sit-in at Massachusetts Hall after winning some key concessions from the school's administration. I felt we had to be there to shake their hands and thank them for taking the stand that they did (see page 4 of this issue).

This was no replay of the 1960s. The cause of the Harvard students was not social justice in the abstract, nor was it something that drove a wedge between themselves and working people. Their cause was working people, specifically the work force that provides custodial and food services to the richest university in the world's richest nation. The students sat in for 21 days to protest the university's refusal to grant a living wage to the working poor who handle the most basic jobs on campus.

A delegation from the IBEW, including members of Local 103 who perform electrical maintenance work at Harvard, were on hand to greet the students as they emerged from their sit-in. It was a strange, yet encouraging sight. There were people from all walks of life there to mark the occasion. There were young people with multi-colored hair and several body piercings next to blue-collar workers fresh from a day's labor. There were faculty members in open-collar shirts and rumpled sport jackets next to labor leaders who, ironically, were wearing ties (like me, who had just come from the progress meeting). There were people from all over the world.

It certainly wasn't what one thinks of as a standard labor crowd. But I can't recall when the word "solidarity" was ever better illustrated. These students, who as future grads of Harvard will have a leg up on achieving success in life, were not doing this for themselves. Nor were they doing it for some cause-of-the-month. They were interrupting their studies and putting their lives on hold to stand up for the least powerful in the Harvard community. They saw injustice right in their own campus and they stood up against it. And they won a victory that will leave the janitors, the cafeteria workers and the housemaids in the dorms better able to make a decent living and provide for their families.

Students at other schools have taken similar actions on behalf of their schools' workers or to stop college clothing from being made in sweatshops. Maybe this is the start of something. Maybe when some of these students at Harvard and elsewhere are corporate leaders someday, they will bring the treatment of workers to a new level of decency.

Whatever happens in the future, I know one thing. In May the students of Harvard taught all of us in the labor movement a lesson in the basics. They reminded us why we are in the IBEW in the first place and did so with a zest that sometimes eludes those who have been on the barricades for a long time. I left Boston feeling a little better about the future.

Edwin D. Hill
International President

  President’s Message

July 2001 IBEW Journal

"They saw injustice right in their own campus and they stood up against it."