D.C. Metropolitan Police arrested Georgetown students Mike Wilson (CAS’05) and Ev Yankey (CAS ‘06) at a protest at the George Washington University campus Monday. Yankey and Wilson were arrested along with nine GW students and face misdemeanor charges after they defied police orders at a protest for workers’ rights at GW.
According to a press release issued by Georgetown Solidarity, protesters are pressing for GW to join the Workers Rights Consortium, an international organization that monitors factories that produce university apparel, and are also hoping that the University will adopt a code of conduct for all labor relations. According to Wilson, George Washington has yet to implement regulations for labor that have been standard at Georgetown for six years.
The arrests of the 11 students were the end result of a morning of protests at GW, which, according to Yankey, involved over 100 protesters , including three other Georgetown students. Students first rallied outside of Rice Hall, the main administrative building, and then marched into the lobby of the Marvin Student Center where they chanted and called for the administration to accept a list of their demands.
According to Yankey, some of the students then began to assemble a “tent city” in preparation for a sit-in in the corner of the lobby. Campus police asked them to leave and then called in Metro Police to arrest the students. All but Wilson, Yankey, and the nine GW students heeded police warnings to vacate the crowded lobby.
According to a GWU press release, the protesters were arrested when it was determined that they intended to stay in the lobby until their wide ranging list of demands was met. The University claims that many of the complaints about labor abuses have already been addressed.
“It became clear that the remaining demonstrators had no intention of leaving, despite repeated requests. They chose to stay, laving MPD no choice but to remove them,” the press release read.
Wilson expressed surprise and disgust at his arrest. “Since it was their student center, I thought it was totally ridiculous, and they completely overreacted,” he said. He said that protesters were cooperative and took care not to interfere with the business of the University.
Despite his arrest, Wilson thought that the protest was successful in bringing greater attention to the issue of labor abuses at George Washington. The arrests spurred the passage of several resolutions in the George Washington student assembly calling for the charges against the students to be dropped.
Attention to the issue will be magnified manifold, Yankey said, because Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) will come to campus in support of the protests at a rally on Friday.
