Students on Hunger Strike --Georgetown’s Living Wage Campaign
By Colman McCarthy
Students have more power than they realize. Especially if it’s well-organized, collective nonviolent power.
Proof came still again at Georgetown University last month when some two dozen students of steely resolve staged a hunger strike on behalf of the school’s poorly paid 450 janitors, food service and other workers. The average hourly wage is $11.33, a sum seen by the strikers as well below a living wage. Many workers, foreign born and harried by the high cost of getting by in a new country, hold one job at Georgetown and another elsewhere.
After nine days of seeing their students going without food, and socked with intensive print and broadcast coverage, plus labor leaders standing with the students and workers, officials of the Jesuit university yielded to the demands. Total compensation would rise to $13 an hour by July and $14 the next year.
Several of the striking students are either current or former students in my two literature of peace classes at Georgetown. Without hesitation, I sided with them, both with money and giving them ample air time in my classes to tell their stories. They were articulate and passionate, and risk-takers, just the kind of students any teacher would relish. What’s the sense in asking them to study such Jesuit dissenters as Daniel Berrigan, John Dear and Richard McSorely, plus troublemaking Catholics like Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, and then not offer support when they carry on the tradition of worthy dissent..
The students’ living wage campaign was not a sudden eruption. It began three years ago. University officials, skilled in academic masonry, erected the usual stonewalls: appointing committees, holding meetings, more meetings. Wait out the kids: they’ll graduate soon enough. When students realized they were getting the Big Stall, they adopted the classic Gandhian tactic of fasting: our capacity to suffer is stronger than power’s capacity to stand by and watch it. The hunger strikers instinctively lifted themselves to the higher planes of protest: don’t bring adversaries to their knees, bring them to their senses.
Georgetown’s Jesuits deserves shame and scorn for this whole episode. Why did self-starving students have to risk their health—some were taken to the hospital—to wake up the administration? Did it require a few students of conscience three years to spell out the obvious facts that workers were oppressed? Jesuits weren’t aware of that? How did a disconnect happen, the one in which Jesuit missionaries in the Third World give heroic service to the poor, while Jesuit educators at Georgetown ignore the poor on their own campus. Why did a Catholic university let itself be publicly embarrassed by the obvious gap between its message to students—fulfill Christ’s teaching about the poor—and its message to the workers: stay impoverished. Why did the school’s financial managers who watch the bottom line fail to notice people working at the bottom? Why did the administration try an end run by writing letters to the parents of the hunger strikers, calling on Mom and Dad to talk sense to their irksome children and get them back to the chow hall.
Georgetown has great virtues—a stellar community service program, a caring faculty, chaplains for Jewish, Islamic and non-Catholic students—and great flaws. The latter include a weakness for glitter and hollow status: giving well-paid academic perches to George Tenet, Madelein Albright, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Paul Begala and other former Reagan, Clinton and Bush officials whose policies while in office served Caesar, not God. Royalty itself, in the person of King Abdullah II of Jordan, showed up during the protest—not to support the strikers but to receive an honorary degree in a grand ceremony.
Well away from the pomp, the scruffy protestors kept at it, sipping water and hanging on while vowing not to hang it up. Throughout their three-year living wage campaign, these idealists and altruists reached out to the workers by tutoring them in English, mentoring their children, informing them of their rights to organize, holding picnics for the families. Their volunteering gave substance to the protest.
I hope to invite some of the workers to my classes. I tried last semester, but the janitor I asked feared he might get into trouble. Now that he knows that students are aligned with him, I’m betting the fear has passed. It’s the university that found trouble.