So about two months ago the two of us came up from Jersey to attend this hardcore progressive Wesleyan University we’d heard so much about. We’ve always been told that its professors, administrators, and students, have long supported the ideal of social justice.
The thought of going to a place where people actually cared about something made us giddier than Dubya holding a pound of Peruvian Blueflake. It didn’t even enter our minds that when given a choice between defending decent labor practices and supporting minimum-wage slavery that there’d actually be support for the latter.
The way we see it, the issues surrounding University dining services present the Wesleyan community with a choice between a real-world application of the long-standing progressive values that made this place so attractive to us, and a policy characterized by the sort of narrow self-interest and hypocrisy that used to be reserved for the Ivy League.
The worker-designed proposal for dining service reform is exactly the kind of proposal that any progressive student body would readily support. It includes a program for improving dining quality and protects the rights and needs of workers both here on campus and throughout the Middletown community. It recognizes the need for collective bargaining in the struggle for a balanced power dynamic in the labor/management relationship.
The WSA proposal, on the other hand, seems to value falafel over workers’ rights. It allows for the expansion of points off campus without even considering the treatment and representation of labor within the chosen establishment. And if the blatant disregard for labor conditions wasn’t bad enough, the WSA resolution contains no protection against future expansion of points off campus to additional restaurants in years to come, which could mean the loss of unionized positions here on campus as a result of decreased demand for on-campus services, in addition to the acceptance of sub-par labor treatment outside of the Wesleyan campus. Adding insult to the students’ and to the workers’ injury, this policy could also become an excuse for decreased food quality, which leaves frosh and anyone unwilling to trek down to Main St. for a decent meal in the middle of the winter without adequate dining options. Doesn’t that bother anyone else?
What we’re trying to say is, we’re a little confused as to which Wesleyan we’ve ended up at. Are we attending the compassionate, liberal Wesleyan that acts on its principles, or are we attending some other school filled with SUV-driving armchair activists who talk global and act nowhere?
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