Join the GSC! We meet each Monday at 9pm in White Gravenor 202, where all the excitement of planning campaigns & events, sharing updates and report backs, and hanging out goes down. We also hold weekly workers breakfasts on Friday mornings, engage in English classes for campus workers through the DC Schools Program, and much more. E-mail georgetownsolidarity (at) gmail.com for more information. Here’s some background on what we do:
- Campus solidarity
- Direct service to workers
- Local & national solidarity
- International & anti-sweat campaigns
- More GSC traditions & activities
The GSC formed in the 1996-1997 school year when Marriott workers in O’Donovan Dining Hall were trying to form a union so that they would gain more control over their wages, benefits and working conditions. Ever since then, we continue to fight alongside campus workers, including our support for DPS officers’ efforts to negotiate for better wages and benefits in spring 2007 and the 2009-2010 school year, and the Living Wage Campaign with campus janitors that climaxed in March 2005 with a hunger strike by 26 students, drawing national attention to the reality that many universities exploit low-wage workers.
Direct Service to Workers
Providing services for campus workers is crucial to building friendships between campus workers and students — the relationships that form the foundation of our activist campaigns. GSC created a program of English as a Second Language classes for campus workers, now run in partnership with the Center for Social Justice. Early every Friday morning when classes are in session GSC holds a Workers Breakfast, serving up free food, coffee and friendly conversation to workers at the GUTS bus stops. Come sign up at our Monday night meeting if you’d like to get involved with this great opportunity to engage the Georgetown community!
Local & National Solidarity Work
Since 2006, GSC has been active in the Student / Farmworker Alliance, a national network of students engaging with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in their campaign to improve the working conditions in the tomato fields of southern Florida, to raise sub-poverty wages for farmworkers that haven’t changed in over 30 years, and to bring to an end the cases of modern-day slavery in U.S. agriculture.
International Solidarity & Anti-Sweat Work
In the late 1990s, GSC also took on a second major campaign. We joined students from around the country and founded United Students Against Sweatshops, a national student-led organization that campaigns with the garment workers all around the globe who make clothes for our universities. To this day, we have to assume almost all Georgetown apparel is made in sweatshops where workers get starvation wages, face dangerous work conditions, and get fired or harassed for speaking out. However, after years of GSC campaigns (including the 1999 sit-in in President O’Donovan’s office), Georgetown’s Licensing Oversight Committee has made some significant advances in fighting sweatshops. Most recently, Georgetown was the 2nd school of over 100 to cut our contract with Russell Athletic in Fall 2009 after a rally in Red Square with touring workers from Honduras, a lauded national campaign that culminated in Russell’s re-opening of an unjustly closed factory and the re-hiring of workers.
More GSC Traditions & Activities
Campus solidarity with other student groups on campus. Based on the understanding that all anti-oppression struggles are interconnected and interdependent, GSC supports and engages with other student allies in support of their campaigns to build a better campus and local community.
School of the Americas Rally & Vigil. Every November, GSC joins tens of thousands at the gates of the School of the Americas (recently renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, WHINSEC) to protest the continued running of the paramilitary training campus for Latin American police forces. For more background information, visit SOA Watch online.
