The Living Wage Coalition may have declared victory over the University last spring, but they haven’t stopped fighting.
The students who took part in last year’s successful 10-day hunger strike have taken the lessons they learned and run with them.
Several joined to form the Living Wage Action Coalition early this summer, securing grants from social activism foundations-including the AFL-CIO and United Auto Workers-to get their program running. The group built a website, designed workshops and has begun work on a film documenting workers’ voices, former hunger-striker and LWAC member Ginny Leavell (CAS ‘05) said.
Leavell still lives in D.C. and works for the coalition almost full time. She said their goal is to energize, organize and network workers’ rights groups on university campuses across the country.
This week, coalition representatives will fly to Saint Louis for the Jobs with Justice conference, LWAC member and current Georgetown student Rachel Murray (SFS ‘07) said. At the conference, she and her fellow LWAC delegates will run a workshop on building student-worker alliances.
In the coming year, the coalition will visit the University of Missouri, Vanderbilt University, Notre Dame University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison to encourage budding workers’ rights groups, Leavell said.
Mike Wilson (CAS ‘05), another instrumental voice in last year’s living wage campaign, has not given up on the worker cause either. He now works as an organizer for the Gaithersburg, Md.-based Service Employee International Union. He is currently campaigning to unionize workers at a company that aids mentally retarded people.
Because he lives in the area, Wilson often returns to campus, occasionally running into the workers he fought for last year.
“It was one of the most educational experiences I had at Georgetown,” Wilson said. “It’s a good feeling to go back there and to feel that we made things better.”
Mary Nagle (CAS ‘05), a third veteran of the living wage campaign, had planned to study environmental law at Tulane University after graduating from Georgetown, but she fled Hurricane Katrina a month after school began. Her senior-year thesis advisor offered her a place to stay in the District, where she found a job with the Environmental Integrity Project.
Nagle, Wilson and Leavell said they still keep in close contact with current Georgetown Solidarity Committee and Living Wage Coalition members. Right now the two groups are campaigning to ensure that no Georgetown apparel is manufactured in sweatshops. They coordinate weekly breakfasts for campus workers and they are making sure the University’s new living wage policy is implemented.
