Another U of C Irresponsible Investment...
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is currently running a campaign to divest from HEI Hotels & Resorts, as well as to establish a Socially Responsible Investment Committee. The University of Chicago has a long history of irresponsible investments. We did not divest from Apartheid and have yet to divest from Darfur. Most recently though, we have become a major investor in HEI Hotels and Resorts. HEI is the 7th largest hotel chain owner and operator in the United States, owning 33 properties across the U.S. Workers at three of HEI’s hotels are now campaigning for respect and a fair and democratic process to decide on unionization. HEI workers have spoken out about excessive workloads, injustice and exploitation and now HEI has been accused of violating federal labor law. As students, we stand with the workers who are struggling to organize and demand that U Chicago divest from HEI.
To learn more about HEI visit http://soul.uchicago.edu/hei.html and the workers’ site at www.heiworkersrising.info.
What separates this case from Apartheid and Darfur, however, is that the University has a major investment in HEI and actually has the ability to force a change in policy. The UofC's investment constitutes over 10% of HEI's recent acquisition fund, which comes out to over 50 million dollars. The UofC stands to profit greatly from this investment, and must assure that it does not do so at the cost of workers.
What HEI is Doing Wrong: HEI has reduced staff and increased workloads and now refuses to allow their workers to decide whether or not they can organize or form a union through a card check neutrality agreement! In 2008, HEI spent $98,000 on consultants to oppose their workers’ efforts to organize.
Many HEI workers have spoken out about unfair treatment because of HEI’s cost cutting on the backs of workers. Workers at the Sheraton Crystal City in Virginia complain about the cost of family health insurance at over $300 per month. HEI has also reduced staff levels, which has severe consequences especially for housekeepers. Virginia Portillo, a housekeeper at the Sheraton for 13 years, said, “For each room, we only have 30 minutes. I have to run between the rooms, but I can’t run. Now that they have scheduled less housemen, I have to carry a vacuum in one hand and a bag with all of the coffee and shampoo in the other. Before, these things would already be in the closets for us. For each bed that I make, I have to lift the mattress 12 times. If you multiply that by 2 for all of the double rooms and by at least 16 for all of the rooms we clean, that is a lot. I can’t lift my arm above my shoulder, and I have severe pain in my lower back. Other workers at the hotel have complained about the same thing. It hurts to lie down, so I can never rest. I have to take painkillers just so that I can work.” Delmy Morales, a housekeeper at the same hotel, described HEI’s initial attempt to double the workload of housekeepers: “When HEI bought our hotel, they started the P26 management program. It meant that we had to clean 32 rooms in 8 hours. Many times they were on different floors – for example I would have to walk from the 3rd floor to the 15th and across hallways too. I came home from work dead tired. They were using us. We were very mad because before HEI we only had to do 16 rooms. They even used 3 temporary housekeepers and 2 temporary housemen to scare us into thinking that they would replace us. There is a lot of injustice and a lot of humiliation.”
In October and November 2009, the Office of the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued unfair labor practice complaints alleging that the HEI Sheraton Crystal City hotel in Viringia violated federal labor law in various ways: threatening workers with dismissal for participating in a union, confiscating union materials, disciplining a front desk worker in retaliation for participating in a union picket line and firing a union leader Ferdi Lazo for his role in the union. HEI has denied these allegations and a hearing is scheduled for April 2010.
While numerous peer institutions have established Socially Responsible Investment committees - many divesting from companies that do business in Darfur and even Burma - the University of Chicago has refused to take action under the guise of the Kalven Report and academic freedom. While it is debatable whether academic neutrality even exists, it clearly does not provide the moral standing for supporting genocide, racism, or worker exploitation. The University of Chicago has taken a stance by supporting these companies financially. We cannot allow this to continue!
Some info on Socially Responsible Investing (SRI): The following universities have divested from Darfur (Sinopec, PetroChina, ABB, and Tatneft): Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Yale, Brown, Princeton, UCal, Northwestern, MIT, UMichigan, Duke, UPenn, and many others The UofC has yet to divest -- this gives us the distinction of having the largest private university endowment still invested in Darfur! The following schools have SRI Committees: Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Cornell, UCal, Brown, Yale, Princeton, Swarthmore, Columbia and many others. Harvard has divested from all tobacco stocks, makes 100+ proxy votes each year. Stanford committed itself to SRI in 1971, and since then has divested from South Africa, Nigeria, Burma and most recently Darfur.
Posted on 2010-02-08
Photo by Laurie Rojas
The truth is, we were all kinds of afraid. The whole thing came off so tame that it was hard to remember that this was a big step for almost everyone involved, myself included. There were no handcuffs or cold jail cells, and the police were polite and civil. But I spent some long hours thinking about if I should do this, and I dreaded telling my parents. We've all got things and people that keep us from taking risks. But more and more, it seems that sitting idly by is just as risky. In Boston, Hyatt fired around one hundred employees without notice, replacing them with contract employees making six dollars less per hour. Here in Chicago, every major hotel company is asking UNITE HERE members to give up hard-won parts of their contract, whether concerning wages or health care. In California, public universities face unprecedented cuts. None of us are safe.
We chanted "Si se puede, yes we can," but it was less of a throwback to the Obama campaign than to the powerful grassroots movements that made Obama's win possible. That chant said that we got the first African-American into the White House, we got Republic Windows and Doors back open, and we're going to get a good contract for these six thousand workers--and we won't stop there. With the promise of a "jobless recovery" on the horizon, people are fighting and struggling. Struggles sometimes require that we dispense with "due care."
Posted on 2009-11-10
Powershift '09
Photo: Robert vanWaarden Have you ever seen 12,000 young people committed to working for change? Neither have I, even though I spent the last weekend in February at Powershift '09, a gathering of environmental activists and organizers from around the country that had over young people 12,000 registered. That's so big that you can only ever see a sliver of it, that you can only ever see the inside of your bubble within that vast sea. But that's the kind of scale we need to be thinking and working on, something so big that any one of us can't imagine it. And it needs to be growing. Powershift was organized by the Environmental Action Coalition (EAC) in an effort to begin the work of building a massive national movement around climate change. From Friday night through Monday people engaged in workshops, and attended panel discussions and speeches around these issues. All this culminated on a day of action in DC on Monday. Upwards of 5,000 people lobbied in the halls of Congress all day, and Capitol Climate Action organized the largest non-violent direct action in history around climate change. Some 2,500 people converged on the capitol coal plant and risked arrest to successfully halt operations of the plant for more than 4 hours. Over all it was an inspiring weekend. Why the environment though? Bracketing the fact that inaction on the issue of climate change could result in the collapse of world civilization in the next 50-100 years, "green fever" has a decidedly un-radical feel to it in today's political climate (the Walmart Foundation was a sponsor for Powershift). The growing crisis around the environment is not simply fear of doomsday scenarios, it's a working out of fundamental contradictions and injustices within our very way of life. This means that changing our approach to the environment will entail a reevaluation, and ultimate change of the determining structures of our society. The issue at hand is not the climate, it's humanity. Van Jones, the prominent green activist and writer, spoke about this on the first night when he outlined the need to see this struggle not as a struggle for survival but a struggle for a more just, equitable, and free society. This war must be waged on all fronts, for organizers on the left the fight around the environment is a fight for democratic universities, just work places, racial, gender, and sexual equality, and for an end to the constant state of war we live in. What can Powershift teach us about building a movement? First of all it teaches us that it's got to be big, way big. I've been to too many rallies and action on this campus that turned out 20 maybe 40 students; 40 out of 4,000 may get the administration to budge a little, but it won't make them jump and run. Besides this simple question of power though, Powershift is an important lesson in what it would mean to have a truly mass movement, and what it means to be a leader in a sea of leaders. What it would mean to not know all the activists on campus, for the administration to not know the names of all the trouble makers. While 12,000 people is also a very small fraction of the entire United States, we're already in the territory where you can't know everyone, where this movement is way bigger than any of us. We can make connections with a few people, reinforce old networks, or see big trends, but we have to understand that things are out of our hands. Being there was crucial experience in how to navigate at the truly large scale, how to do meaningful work with something out of your control. Off the top of my head I can think of a whole mess of questions it opened up: how do you disagree productively, how do you deal with liberals, how do you deal with those who are still figuring things out, how do you keep the forest in mind among the trees, how do you even determine what the forest is, what role do your little networks play, how do you crack into a new network and how important is that, how do you maintain a state of dialog and not fall into diatribe, how do you work with/trust people you only know at a surface level, to what extent do you need to have common goals clearly defined, what if you disagree with people's goals, how do you deal with the framing imposed by the big scale organizers (i.e. EAC), and when and how do you let go and let the movement do its thing? If we're really serious about a mass movement, a movement that can change all of society, we need to start thinking about these questions because we need to start thinking big. In the end though, coming back to these trenches, where I know all the faces, and the forest seems so far away I find myself with new energy, new conviction. While my battles may be small and insignificant when you think about profound social change, I know it's part of it. Every one of those 12,000 people has their own fights, their own set of faces, and they're all as insignificant alone as me. But in the bigger context, next to an infinite sea of battles to win, and within a mass push in even a vague direction things become meaningful, things become significant. At the meeting to talk about the UCMC campaigning the next week things seemed so much more important, and so much more valuable. I and all of us will eventually be lost in the crowd, but the because of our work the crowd will move on, and save the world.
Posted on 2009-04-05
Open Meeting With President Zimmer
Student Government did its part to provide the first open meeting with President Zimmer in 2 years (at the last open meeting, Zimmer got pummeled with questions about Darfur and the Calvin report). Unfortunately, the event was not well advertised and there were only about 20 students present, most of them activists of one kind or another. So what happened? Zimmer proved that the best way to get any real information about the university and the best way to change how the administration currently works is not through him, but through the VPs and other nodes of power directly beneath his presidential seat. Zimmer continually emphasized the complicated relationships between departments, VPs, and other bodies (such as the U of C Hospitals) under the umbrella of The University of Chicago. Zimmer's lack of substantive answers and his amazing ability to ride the middle line of appropriate PR responses to every question was disappointing. The low point was when he told a student that her question was not well researched and that she shouldn't believe everything that she reads in a newspaper. Fortunately, an administrator was sitting to his left and to his right, and we got their names and contact info for more information about what's happening with the hospitals and with transparency of/student involvement in the university decision making process: William J. Michel: Assistant VP for Student life and Associate Dean of the College phone: 773-834-4875 fax:773-702-4357 email: wmichel@uchicagoedu office: Room 228 5801 s. Ellis ave. Chicago Il, 60637 Kimberly Goff-Crews: vice president for campus life and Dean of Students in the University phone: 773-702-7770 Fax: 773-702-4357 email: kgoffcrews@uchicago.edu Kimberly Goff-Crews has expressed particular interest in the transparency issue, and a committee of some students involved in student government and administrators including VP Goff-Crews has been meeting on how to frame this very issue. Why weren't we invited? Now that we know about it, we're going to work on making this a more official and open committee. Maybe we can make some changes! Also: Student Government has made a recent effort to keep students updated by posting on the SG blog more frequently. Please comment, comment, comment! We might as well use every resource we have for getting opinions across.
Posted on 2009-02-27
Are the U of C Hospitals Dumping Patients?
Following emergency room organizational changes, the U of C Hospitals have been accused of coming "dangerously close" to defecting uninsured and otherwise cost-intensive patients to other hospitals by the American College of Emergency Physicians. The medical center's chief executive, James Madara, blames the economic crisis for having to cut $100 million from the hospital's budget, "but many fear the hard choices the hospital is being forced to make will have the greatest impact on poor and uninsured patients." SDS is joining students to fight the resulting layoffs, but it's important to remember that this is about more than one specific issue. This is about the systemic failures of the university, hospital, and our health care system. When will we have a say in how decisions that affect us are made and how to organize the institutions that serve us? Read the Tribune article here. UPDATE: A more recent Trib article in which the American College of Emergency Physicians say the U of C Medical Center comes "dangerously close" to violating the law and calls for a "congressional investigation."
Posted on 2009-02-21
SDS and SOUL support HEI workers
"The University has invested tens of millions of dollars of tuition dollars in HEI Hotels, a national hotel corporation with a terrible record on workers' rights. Specifically, HEI has refused to let workers organize in a neutral environment, using intimidation to prevent them from even discussing whether they want to unionize. There were a few HEI workers on campus to deliver statements at the delegation with student support."
Posted on 2009-02-20
Bernie Sanders on Milton Friedman's Legacy
Senator Bernie Sanders writes an article for In These Times critiquing Milton Friedman's advocacy of a "radical right-wing economic ideology" and repeating what he said at his talk at the University of Chicago: That by founding the Milton Friedman Institute for Economic Research,
Posted on 2009-02-19
Where's Zimmer?
The following statement is attached to likenesses of President Zimmer placed throughout the U of C quadrangles.
Since his inauguration in the fall of 2006 President Zimmer has made a number of consequential decisions that seem to indicate a shift in direction for the University of Chicago. Despite numerous controversies surrounding these decisions, President Zimmer has remained aloof and inaccessible to students, faculty, staff, and community members. The vast majority of the campus community has never had the opportunity even to see him in person. The decision not to divest from Darfur, the massive expansion of south campus, the creation of the Milton Friedman Institute, the increased emphasis on the international presence of the University, the replacement of the Office of Community Affairs with the Office of Civic Engagement, and the switch to the Common Application are, regardless of their possible value, all examples of substantive changes that have been made with little prior consultation and little subsequent accountability.
In the case of the proposed divestment from Darfur, an alleged desire to promote "academic freedom" and a broad-based "dialogue" on campus was used as a measure to sidestep actual change in the university. This is far from the only occasion in which these phrases and others similar to them have been used to divert attention and energy from the issues at hand. From the end of a recent university-wide email:
As students, we are all about thinking critically, but what use is our ability to assess the changing landscape if we are unable – indeed, not even permitted – to change it for the better? It seems ludicrous to imagine ourselves blazing new trails and solving the world's problems when what we learn on campus, time and time again, is that our efforts are not enough for systemic change and that the administration does not care to take our recommendations seriously.
A more engaged system is not impossible. Universities around the country (Ivy League schools included) have more transparent administrations, more students on school committees and boards, and more student and faculty involvement in both the administrative and academic decision-making processes. At some schools, presidents even go to student meetings and participate in campus events!
We are happy to learn critical thinking, but why are we being ignored (or worse, shut down) when we try to apply this to bettering our lives and the lives of those in our community?
Dear President Zimmer: Help us help you, step out of the shadows, and start listening.
Posted on 2009-01-29
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Posted on 2009-01-20
