Union Boosters

Written by: Elga Rodriguez on Dec 20, 2005 1:32 PM EST

A group of University of Miami students has taken campus activism into a more confrontational direction -- trying to help unionize the workers who clean the school but don't make a living wage.

BY NOAH BIERMAN
nbierman@MiamiHerald.com

University of Miami students, better known for cheering sports teams than riling administrators, are putting unprecedented pressure on President Donna Shalala to improve conditions for about 400 janitors who struggle with low wages and no health insurance.

It's an awkward position for Shalala, a public advocate of universal healthcare coverage when she was secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration. She is about to make UM, where tuition is $29,000 a year, the first university in Florida to raise $1 billion in a single campaign.

Despite that backdrop of wealth, many men and women who keep the private school's grounds impeccable work for less than $7 an hour.

UM's worker movement has had several incarnations, but the first group of students became interested four years ago when the school found itself near the bottom -- above only Tennessee State University -- in a Chronicle of Higher Education survey of janitor pay at 195 universities. Like many other private employers, UM outsources the work, in this case to a Boston company called Unicco.

''A lot of students are waking up, realizing they make more than the Unicco workers,'' said Alyssa Cundari, 18, a freshman who has joined a relatively new group called STAND, Students Toward a New Democracy, that is working with union organizers.

Despite its 1960s-era reputation as Suntan U, Shalala and others say UM students have long been active in service organizations, foregoing vacations to provide hurricane relief and Saturdays to build houses for the poor. But the worker movement differs, students say, in that students are directly challenging the administration.

''We are leading the way, but without [students] we cannot succeed,'' said Julio Ramos, 47, a Unicco cleaner who says he makes $6.60 an hour cleaning up after the Hurricane football team and has joined efforts to unionize employees. ``They are the ones who can get to Shalala.''

In the course of a few months, STAND has held speak-outs and food giveaways, built an active e-mail list of more than 300 students and gathered 800 signatures from an undergraduate population of 10,000 for a petition calling for better worker pay. Its website, standum.org, is a busy hub of press clippings, fact sheets and talking points.

The movement reached its apex three weeks ago by the palm trees around Lake Osceola, in the center of campus, where dozens of students and uniformed workers marched with ''Support Janitors at UM'' placards.

During a recent STAND strategy meeting, junior Mewelau Hall underscored the challenge to penetrating mainstream UM culture.

''We have to be pretty,'' she said. ``We need an image group. A lot of people would be somewhat interested if we were quote-unquote cool.''

The students laughed. They were good looking enough, but ''cool'' in a more eclectic way -- a mix of tie-wearers, lip-pierced rockers and everything in between.

POLITICAL ACTIVISM

Though they are challenging Shalala, the students are in many ways a reflection of her efforts to foster political activism. Shalala brought one of three national presidential debates to campus last year and the local Republican club has been especially active.

Yet the students face hurdles, said Jacob Coker-Dukowitz, a STAND leader. Managers and administrators have tried to keep them from placing their literature on dining hall tables as other student groups do, and from distributing hurricane relief supplies to workers, Coker-Dukowitz said. In both instances, he wrote to Shalala.

''It's a lack of experience on the campus,'' Shalala said. ``Whenever they've complained about an obstacle, it's been fixed right away.''

CONTRACT TALKS

Shalala praises the activists, calling STAND a relatively small but vocal group. Still, she rebuffed past student and faculty efforts to renegotiate the Unicco contract and require higher pay.

And since the Service Employees International Union began organizing Unicco workers in recent months, she says UM -- South Florida's second largest private employer -- is remaining neutral.

''We have to let this union process run its course,'' she said.

Unicco has said in the past that it relies on the market and would change its pay policies if UM demanded it. Spokesman Doug Bailey said the average worker is paid $7.53 an hour; SEIU says it's lower. Unicco janitors' wages at Harvard start at $13.50.

Nationally, movements like STAND trace their roots to a three-week sit-in at Harvard in 2001, which led to the Chronicle of Higher Education article and a UM faculty resolution demanding a living wage.

Administrators at the time said UM was paying the market rate and staying out of Unicco's way. ''We allow them to pay whatever they want to pay as long as they can recruit and retain workers, and still make a buck at the end of the day,'' Vice President David Lieberman told the Chronicle in 2001.

Shalala said she remains committed to universal healthcare, but said she has always maintained that government needs to help because costs have grown too high for the private sector. Michael Fischl, a labor law professor who led faculty on the issue, said higher wages and health insurance would cost UM about $4 million a year.

''Unicco kind of puts the blame on UM and UM puts the blame on Unicco, and neither of them has to take responsibility,'' said Shelly Stromoski, a 2002 UM grad. ``Meanwhile the workers have to suffer for it.''

Stromoski, now a 25-year-old graduate student, and three friends spent the 2001-02 school year quietly interviewing 30 to 50 workers, finding some who had cleaned the same hallways 15 years without the right to a single paid sick day. They built a large e-mail list.

The night before Valentine's Day 2002, they stayed up cutting out red, purple and pink hearts and writing ''Having a heart for a living wage'' on them. They pasted 70 of them around Shalala's office building the next morning.

Stromoski and her friends hadn't formed an official student organization, meaning the hearts were not approved for posting. Hours later, it was outsourced Unicco workers who had to take them down, Stromoski said.

Shalala met with the students, just before they graduated in spring 2002. She promised more educational opportunities for workers, two paid sick days and access to a university nurse.

UNION ORGANIZER

The movement would eventually rise again, through another series of connections. This time, the SEIU is joining with students and workers, hiring a 28-year-old organizer, Eric Brakken, with his own history of campus activism, to lead the UM effort.

Last month, students from Georgetown University traveled to Miami to teach STAND members organizational tactics.

CAREER ON HOLD

Brakken says the majority of UM's Unicco workers have signed union cards, but Unicco management is rejecting the cards and calling for an election.

One of the newest leaders in STAND, Coker-Dukowitz, said he has put his career interest in exotic animals on hold because he wakes up every day thinking about the workers.

The group is now working on building coalitions, he said, enlisting black, Mexican and gay-rights groups among others.

''We have tacit support from a lot of organizations,'' said Coker-Dukowitz, whose mother is associate law school dean Donna Coker and says she has to remain publicly neutral.

''The issue. It's just so duh!'' he said.

``You make $6.30 an hour. You can't feed a family of four.''

Miami Herald staff writer Luisa Yanez contributed to this report

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Location: Miami, FL 33165