STANFORD WORKERS CUT OFF

When Covid-19 first hit, the UG2 custodians were largely left in the dark. Stanford provided them with no warning, and the first inklings of trouble came when they received notices from UG2 that work in certain areas might be suspended. Jorge, one UG2 custodian who agreed to speak with Stanford Politics under the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, remembers receiving a notice on March 6 that there was a list of 84 workers who had been suspended. Jorge, who has worked at Stanford for more than 20 years, was spared the worst, but many of his co-workers weren’t as fortunate. Those who were laid off were told that they would cease working the following Monday, giving them little more than three days to, if they were eligible, apply for unemployment. “It wasn’t a timely notice at all,” Jorge said.

Even those who were able to continue working weren’t entirely aware of the risks of janitorial work during a global pandemic. Until he heard Governor Newsom’s announcements about statewide shelterin-place orders, Daniel — a UG2 custodian who, like Jorge, agreed to an anonymous interview with Stanford Politics for fear of retaliation — didn’t realize the risks he was taking by continuing work. When he confronted the company about it, however, he received a lukewarm response at best. “They told me they weren’t forcing me to work — I could stay at home,” Daniel said. “But if I wanted to keep getting paid, I’d have to use either sick days or vacation days.” The negligence continued even as several workers began to feel sick; by midApril, at least one service worker had tested positive for Covid-19. “Effectively, it’s revealed a certain carelessness on the part of the company,” Jorge said. “[At first], they didn’t tell us directly if some workers were sick or if some work areas had been exposed [to sick workers].”

In the absence of a timely response focused on meeting workers’ basic needs in the midst of a global pandemic, the organizers of Students for Workers’ Rights (SWR) took action. They began fundraising, reaching out to alumni on social media, and publishing a series of op-eds in the Daily outlining their demands — the goal was to use mutual aid to provide laid-off workers with an immediate financial lifeline, and to collectively gather the voices of students, faculty, and alumni to pressure Stanford to change its policies to offer both financial support for laid off workers and better protections for those who continued working.

In the time since then, UG2 has implemented several precautions to help prevent the spread of the virus: they’ve limited workers’ gatherings and enforced other social distancing measures while asking its workers to wear masks. The workers who tested positive for Covid-19 — as well as any coworkers who had come in close contact with them — were asked to go home and quarantine for 14 days. Even still, most of the warnings and rules were implemented only after workers like Daniel approached management about the dangers of working during a pandemic. “We [the workers] knew about keeping social distance and wearing masks because we’d hear about it on the news,” Daniel said. “But the company was consistently late in implementing the rules and protections.”

COVID AND THE CURRENT CRISIS

Students for Workers’ Rights moved quickly when the pandemic began. It started with a meeting in Ethan Chua (‘20)’s room near the end of winter quarter (Chua, like the other organizers, doesn’t hold a formal leadership position in SWR, since the organization follows a horizontal leadership model). Chua — who has been organizing with SWR since his junior year — and the others had gathered to debrief the results of their efforts, but soon reached a consensus that the pandemic and the implications of Stanford’s yet-to-be-announced response for campus service workers was a far more pressing concern. That Saturday, March 7, the group members coordinated a strategy over GroupMe and drafted a petition with a series of demands regarding worker treatment based on language from the University’s Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) with SEIU Local 2007. The demands — which included looser restrictions on paid sick leave, commitments to extend any benefits to subcontracted workers, and fully communicating to all staff members the risks they were taking by continuing work — were then published in The Daily in a March 8 op-ed with an accompanying petition which garnered more than 650 signatures from Stanford affiliates in a few short days. The speed with which they mobilized, Chua said, was crucial in setting the tone for future conversations with administration. “We moved really quickly, even before the administration announced some of their next steps,” Chua said. “The March 7 demands that we came up with collectively preempted a lot of our future conversations, and we anticipated some of the ways admin might be inequitable or disappointing in how we rolled out Covid-19 relief.”

By March 9, the students had gathered enough signatures. They delivered the petition in hand to the President and Provost’s office, expecting a response of some kind. When none came, they planned a sit-in the following day, but arrived to find out that both offices had been closed, ostensibly because of the administrators’ busy schedules.

SWR pressed on. They escalated their demands with another petition demanding hazard pay and pay continuance which would allow all non-essential hires to shelter in place until June 15. They began reaching out to famous alums on Twitter and Instagram, and organizing phonebanks and mass email campaigns to Stanford administration. Their social media following grew rapidly; their follower count on Instagram has grown from several hundred to 2500 as of early September — the Stanford community had taken notice. On Thursday, April 23, SWR held a press conference. Stanford affiliates ranging from former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro ’96 and Rep. Joaquin Castro ’96 (D-Tex.) to Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs ’12 and Bernie 2020 California Political Director Jane Kim ’99 spoke.

Jianno So ’21, who had taken a step back from SWR’s organizing throughout much of her junior year, suddenly found herself compelled to rejoin the group’s activist efforts as the pandemic began. “When I saw everything that was happening, I just knew I wanted to be part of the group again,” So said. “They did amazing work this past year and really inspired me even when I wasn’t working with them.” Using her experience as a graphic designer, So created content for and helped manage SWR’s social media accounts on Twitter and Instagram, whose reach and influence had grown rapidly since the pandemic began.

Eventually, in the wake of the press conference and SWR’s continued efforts to phonebank and send emails, University administration was forced to respond. In a faculty senate meeting on April 16, Provost Drell verbally committed to supporting “all workers”; an email from two days earlier promised pay continuance for all “eligible” service workers until June 15. Despite the apparent victory, SWR’s organizers remained dissatisfied. The email had been sent to students first — not the workers or union it nominally claimed to support — and provided little specificity as to how that support might actually materialize. It was only on May 27th that the university — in an email from President Marc Tessier-Lavigne — formally committed to pay continuance until August, and even still the means through which that pay continuance might be implemented appeared murky at best. Even getting the university to verbally commit to these basic demands took months of sustained organizing: each time the organizers and workers seemed to score a victory, there seemed to be a new catch.

THE SHADOW OF SUBCONTRACTING

Part of the problem was systemic: much of the janitorial staff at Stanford are not direct hires, but instead have been hired through a system known as subcontracting. Jorge, for instance, has worked at Stanford for 21 years but never been considered a direct employee of the school, and instead has worked for several subcontracting companies. UG2, the current company which employs many of the janitors, has been at Stanford for roughly 3 years.

In recent years, subcontracting has grown increasingly popular on university campuses across the United States. Essentially, these practices — which are used disproportionately to hire low-wage laborers such as janitorial, dining hall, and security staff — allow universities to shift the responsibilities and liabilities of being an employer onto external companies. As sociologist Corey Payne explains in “The School of Subcontracting,” subcontracting thus allows uni- 17

versities to “circumvent labor laws and pay lower wages.” A study conducted among the UC schools, for example, found that subcontracted workers earn as much as 53 percent less in wages than direct hires, in addition to receiving lower benefits and fewer job protections. With growing pressure from University boards in recent years to promote cost-cutting measures, crack down on campus activism, and combat union influence, subcontracting has emerged as an increasingly popular alternative to standard hiring practices.

Given the nature of most subcontracting agreements, subcontracted workers — including many of those hired by UG2 at Stanford — have limited recourse in legal disputes. For instance, many subcontracted workers have come to accept racial discrimination and harassment an inevitable consequence of their work. While such instances aren’t necessarily commonplace, Daniel said, the workers can do little when confronted with such injustices: many of them don’t speak English, or are unaware of their legal rights; even those who are aware “push it to the back of our minds, or walk somewhere else, or pretend we aren’t listening — really we can’t do anything or complain to the company. They’re not going to care.”

In addition to the already-precarious nature of subcontracting, however, a large number of subcontracted workers — both at Stanford and across the country — face an additional obstacle in their fight for fair treatment: many of them are undocumented. In a 2016 study surveying the state of Texas, for example, undocumented workers were estimated to represent up to 8.5 percent of the workforce, and up to 25 percent of the construction industry, where subcontracting practices are common. Bill Beardall, the Director of the Transnational Worker Rights Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin, explained that subcontracting agreements essentially allow employers to evade culpability, since employers “have no obligation to check the work obligation of someone they engage with as an independent contractor”.

Consequently, practices of labor exploitation and wage theft run rampant throughout the subcontracting industry. Subcontracted workers in Texas often reported receiving minimal payment — if any payment at all — for their work, despite the initial promises made by their employers. While the situation at Stanford is, admittedly, far less outwardly pernicious, many of the janitors such as Daniel and Jorge face the same challenges as other subcontracted workers across the country. “Because we work with these contracting companies, our situation is always a little delicate,” Daniel said, “because many of us subcontracted janitors and laborers are undocumented.” This not only limits the leverage that many subcontracted workers have in labor disputes, but complicates any efforts to combat workplace harassment, discrimination, and mistreatment: ultimately, subcontracted workers have minimal leverage. “The truth is we can do very little,” Daniel said, “because a lot of us don’t speak English, or don’t know our rights, such as how to defend against an accusation, or in the face of a situation of racism or discrimination.” As a result, subcontracting companies — as well as Stanford, more broadly — are seldom held accountable for such incidents.

“Lamentably, we’re in the dark about the exact reason why Stanford subcontracts its janitorial services,” Jorge said. “But the logic is that they do it to evade responsibility.”

STANFORD RESPONSE TIMELINE

SWR releases its first petition, calling for clear communication with service workers, paid sick leave, and hazard pay.

MAR. 07 MAR. 09

The Boston Globe reports that MIT has agreed to pay continuance for its food service workers through May 22, as Duke and UChicago adopt similar plans.

MAR. 22 APR. 11

SWR delivers their petition by hand to the president’s office, recieving no immediate response.

UG2 confirms that a service worker has tested positive for Covid-19

Responsibility and accountability — or the lack thereof — have presented an ongoing challenge for both SWR and Stanford’s workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. One consistent frustration centers on a pledge which Stanford made earlier in the summer to “fully support all its workers” [find explicit messaging] and provide pay continuance until August 31. Despite this initial promise, however, many of the workers were only paid until June 15. When Stanford Politics inquired about the reasons for this apparent renegement of the initial pledge, university spokesperson E.J. Miranda provided the following response: “Stanford continues to uphold our current commitment to contract workers through August 31… As the contracting firm, UG2 coordinates the financial assistance from Stanford for UG2’s employees. We needed information from them to determine the amount to pay. They have provided the information and we have sent the payment to UG2, who will distribute it to their employees.”

Stanford Politics also made multiple requests for comment to Grover Brown, Director of Operations for UG2 at Stanford; though he initially agreed to an interview, he did not reply to any further questions from SP.

Chua himself has expressed his — and SWR’s — mounting frustration with the consistent lack of transparency. Since Stanford announced its initial policies on pay continuance, Chua, along with many of SWR’s other organizers, has consistently emailed University administration to seek more clarity on the policy’s implementation. “There’s no accountability when it comes to subcontracting. Things are very decentralized, which is really infuriating, but it speaks to the larger issue around why subcontracting is so insidious — and there are many reasons, but one of them is precisely that this accountability can be passed on like a baton.”

And although the issues with subcontracting certainly aren’t unique to Stanford as a university, Stanford nonetheless appears to remain an outlier in providing support for its subcontracted workers. Other institutions such as Duke, the University of Chicago, and MIT all committed to paying their subcontracted workers until the end of the 2019-20 academic year by mid-to-late March; Harvard followed suit soon after. Stanford, by contrast, did not announce their earliest plans to support workers financially until April 14 — and even those plans only provided support for “eligible” workers.

Even now, many of the workers remain unpaid despite Stanford’s promises to pay all service workers. Jorge, for his part, believes there needs to be a more thorough investigation: “Stanford has to investigate because UG2 is not complying. If Stanford said ‘I’m going to pay until August 31’, the question is why didn’t UG2 comply? Did UG2 pocket that money, or is it that Stanford has lied? Who is hiding the truth?”

WORKER’S RIGHTS BEFORE COVID

Despite its newfound visibility with Covid-19, SWR’s efforts to improve working conditions for campus workers began long before the current crisis. Before Covid, SWR — which was previously known as the Campus Workers’ Coalition — had focused its efforts on a series of initiatives targeted at improving the quality of life for service workers: combating workplace harassment, building affordable housing (many workers commute from places as far as Sacra

The Provost commits to pay continuance for all “regular Stanford employees” until June 15, and notes that employees who “work in contingent roles that are not eligible for pay continuation”, i.e. subcontracted workers, can apply for a grant.

APR. 14 APR. 23

President Marc Tessier-Levigne restates the University’s commitment to pay all benefits-eligible employees through June 15 and notes that Stanford will extend pay continuation through August 31st to workers who would normally work during the summer.

MAY 27 JUNE 30

SWR live-streams a press conference with speakers such as Julian Castro (‘96). Workers report that despite the Provost’s initial promises, almost all of the university’s subcontracted workers remain unpaid. Six weeks after the Provost’s initial announcement, UG2 janitors receive their first pay installment. 19

SWR’s May Day Rally in May, 2019

mento, where housing prices are far cheaper than in the Bay Area), and piloting a new bus line from East Palo Alto to Stanford, where many other workers reside. Working with the local union, SEIU Union 2007, SWR had planned teachins and rallies to help educate and mobilize students in the months and weeks leading up to contract negotiations. On May 1, 2019, hundreds of students gathered in White Plaza for SWR’s May Day rally, marching alongside service workers to University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s office where they presented a list of demands.

Despite the ostensible success of the rally, however, SWR continued to face a series of challenges following the contract negotiations that summer. They had spent much of Fall and Winter Quarter pushing for a bus pilot from East Palo Alto to Stanford, only to have the pilot cancelled abruptly by Stanford Transportation — who had, until just days before the pilot, fully supported the initiative — with little warning or explanation. In January, organizers learned that Stanford was contracting Core Management Services, a “janitorial and custodial consulting company,” to conduct a “time and motion study,” threatening to increase the workloads of an already-overworked janitorial staff; when they tried to glean more information about the study and its approach, however, they received 20

only a token response from Residential & Dining Enterprises.

It was in the wake of these challenges that SWR’s planning around Covid began. Chua, who had read the Collective Bargaining Agreement between Stanford and SEIU 2007 over winter break, said that his familiarity with the CBA allowed SWR to draft specific demands based on existing language from the agreement. So, who had helped create content for SWR’s social media accounts, noticed a sudden explosion in engagement immediately after they started posting graphics about Covid-19. Further support from alumni such as Michael Tubbs and Julian Castro only amplified their messaging and reach.

But the network and infrastructure which allowed SWR’s organizing to take root as it had during the pandemic had been built through years of organizing. Since Daniel and Jorge first arrived, student organizing groups had always existed, even though their presence wasn’t always as visible as SWR’s in the current moment. In Daniel’s early years — when he worked as a janitor for the night shift — student activists played a vital role in circulating fliers and reaching out to local publications to support service workers in contract negotiations. More recently, with the May Day rally, for example, student activism has also helped shed light on the ongoing struggles many service workers continue to face,

JESSICKA ANTONIO

from unfair working conditions to . “The students have always been a pillar of support on which we have relied,” Jorge said. “They help us feel like we’re not alone.”

More importantly, Daniel said, they also helped the service workers feel like part of a community. Though the overall engagement of student activists often varies between years, students have consistently made an effort to invite service workers — and their families — to different student events, such as Day of the Dead festivals and poetry readings. “It’s small,” Daniel said, “but it makes us feel good. It makes us feel like we don’t just work here taking out the trash — like there are people who care about us having a good time.”

Nevertheless, because students spend comparatively shorter lengths of time on campus, however, sustaining long-term student activism has often been difficult. Both Daniel and Jorge noted that many of the victories they secured often took years of organizing: most students, however, are only on campus for four years. Before Students for Workers’ Rights officially formed, there had been other campus activist groups focused on workers’ rights initiatives: in 1998, the Stanford Labor Action Coalition (SLAC) formed during a joint action conference organized by Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) and Students for Environmental justice At Stanford (SEAS). While SLAC’s activity and membership fluctuated from year to year, they had established a strong campus presence by 2014, when they officially changed their name to SALA (Student and Labor Alliance) to avoid confusion with the linear accelerator laboratory on campus. In the time after, there was another name change, and for a while SWR was known as the Campus Workers’ Coalition — a name which Chua said the organizers decided to change given that the majority of its membership was still composed of students.

Given the challenges facing student organizers, teachers and faculty have also played a vital role in sustaining longterm activist efforts. When Covid-19 first hit, several professors — Jonathon Rosa, David Palumbo-Liu, Allyson Hobbs, and Rush Rehm — helped draft a letter of support for laid-off service workers, which garnered 104 signatures from faculty around campus in less than 24 hours. Palumbo-Liu, who knew some of the students who were involved with SWR, and had spoken at the May Day rally the previous year, had already been in contact with student organizers when the pandemic first began. Following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Palumbo-Liu had created a campus-wide initiative called StandFor which emerged from an Anti-Fascism and Anti-Racism course he’d taught that year; it quickly morphed into his course on Scholarship and Activism, which brought together students who were involved with organizations such as SWR, Fossil Free Stanford, and SCoPE 2035.

Rehm, who himself was not directly involved with drafting the letter but helped circulate it among faculty members, sees his role as one of providing support to student organizers who help spearhead and lead these movements. He first became involved with labor organizing efforts as an undergraduate at Princeton working at a local bakery, and has remained connected to campus activism since arriving at Stanford in 1990. “The administration has to pretend to listen to students, who provide the university’s public raison d’etre. Sometimes the administration really does listen — I’m not cynical, but we know that depends on all sorts of things,” Rehm said. “The problem is that students come and go, so the key is that there is continuity in student movements.”

“I would put it this way—SWR is part of the Stanford community. SWR and faculty working together got hundreds of signatures from all over campus—hundreds more than we could have expected,” Palumbo-Liu said. “There is tremendous goodness in people, but again we have become accustomed to think of ourselves in very individualistic ways. SWR was a catalyst that unleashed the potential for Stanford to be its best. I think the more that faculty and students both work together on these issues that affect all of us the better—but first we need to understand what we mean by ‘all of us.’” 21

ORGANIZING FOR A BETTER FUTURE

In his 20 years at Stanford, Daniel has worked both on the night shift — work he performed for his first three years on campus — and day shifts. Though working conditions have improved somewhat in his time on campus, Daniel maintains that there remains much work to be done: the current pandemic has merely re-exposed existing structural flaws in the university’s organization and structure.

Workers, for example, are often given assignments in which maintaining social distance is virtually impossible, despite company guidelines. Often, Daniel said, multiple workers have to clean a confined space — such as an empty dorm room — at the same time in order to finish the work on time. “What the company, or Stanford, has to understand is that they can’t order us to clean this much space in one day — ‘oh, you have to clean 10 dorm rooms,’” Daniel said. “Because if we want to maintain social distance, we can’t have several janitors in the room at the same time — one dusting the furniture, the other vacuuming, and so on.”

Jorge, for his part, is currently assigned to a cleaning shift in Green Library. When he spoke to Stanford Politics, he had just finished a shift cleaning four floors, disinfecting the chairs and desks where students might return and study in the near future. When the pandemic first began, the Stanford Daily reported that UG2 had released instructions to workers on how they might make their own masks at home, in lieu of providing actual masks themselves. While the company has since provided gloves and masks of its own, Jorge noted that many of his coworkers have still been forced to buy their own protective masks, because the ones provided by the company often don’t offer adequate coverage or protection. Instead, many of the workers — who are, according to Jorge’s estimate, covering twice or three times as much space as they normally would — have been given kneepads to help expedite their cleaning.

Further complicating matters are the company’s current policies on sick leave. According to Daniel, workers with just one year of experience had been allocated a total of 14 days of combined paid sick leave and vacation days; the number is only slightly higher for workers with more seniority (Because of the subcontracting system, even workers like Daniel and Jorge technically only have three years of “experience” with each new company like UG2). In the past, these stringent sick leave policies meant that workers often showed up even if they felt ill, as long as they didn’t have a flu or fever. “Why? Because if we don’t work, we don’t get paid,” Daniel said. “Many of us don’t qualify for unemployment.”

Even now, workers like Daniel and Jorge continue working with a sense of trepidation. Many have already used up their sick days, and so a 14-day quarantine would force them to use whatever minimal vacation days they might have remaining — and possibly go several days, if not weeks, without pay. “What do we expect? To be told ‘ok, do you feel sick? Don’t worry, you’re going to have a salary’ — that would be ideal,” Daniel said. “But the problem is that if we’re at home in quarantine, we’re not going to get paid.”

In the wake of Stanford’s apparent renengement of its promise to provide pay continuance to all laid off workers until the end of August, SWR has also continued its social media campaigns with a new message: #StanfordLied. Earlier this summer, two members of SWR, Sefa Santos-Powell and Armaan Rashid, wrote a piece for the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity on re-imagining the future of labor at campuses like Stanford. Coupled with skyrocketing housing prices in the Bay Area — which have forced countless workers to commute from places as far as Sacramento — and the already-pernicious system of subcontracting, Covid-19 exacerbated countless structural inequities which have forced “those at the bottom of Stanford’s race and class hierarchies to choose between health and economic security,” they wrote. Though their efforts are currently focused on providing temporary financial support for workers like Daniel and Jorge, Rashid and Santos-Powell wrote that the mission of SWR extends far beyond Covid-19: “In many ways, our organizing is a kind of counter-organizing — that is, challenging the existing organization of society that Stanford and institutions like it produce, reflect, and, it must be said, often work to ideologically justify through forms of knowledge production….We can only hope new forms of organizing ourselves emerge from this moment of crisis, so that theory and practice need not lie so far apart.”

Despite their efforts, however, they continue to face an uphill battle: Stanford has yet to formally respond to their latest social media campaign, and a recent petition for hazard pay signed by custodians was, as Jorge noted, rejected soundly by UG2 management. As the pandemic continues, the situation appears increasingly bleak for the University’s service workers.

“With Stanford, we don’t have any protection, because the company has the final say,” Daniel said. “Stanford doesn’t care about us.”

Kyle Wang ‘22 studies English and Mathematics and is a staff writer for Stanford Politics