UH grad students rally in support of unionization

At an economic justice rally on Sunday, February 12, 2017 organized by Young Progressives Demanding Action, graduate students from the University of Hawaiʻi (UH) asked attendees to stand in support of their right to form a union.

Currently, graduate students at UH are the only state-employed workers that are not permitted to unionize or collectively bargain with their employer. House Bill 1277 and Senate Bill 406—currently working their way through the state legislative process—would change that, giving student employees the same fundamental workers’ rights that the rest of Hawaiʻi’s government employees have.

“This is about more than just wages and benefits,” said graduate student Benton Park Rodden in a speech on behalf of Academic Labor United (ALU), the organization grad-students have formed to campaign for their labor rights.

“We’re not exactly making widgets over at the university,” continued Rodden. “We’re engaged in the production of new knowledge. And when you limit the production of knowledge to those who are wealthy and well-connected, you limit what we are capable of doing as a society, and the kinds of information we operate on.”

Rodden is a grad student at the Hawaiʻi Research Center for Futures Studies. He did his undergrad in Political Science at DePaul University and he serves as the Advocacy Chair of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Graduate Student Organization (GSO)—a chartered student organization. Rodden campaigns for legislative action, community activism and change that will benefit students and, therefore, the university:

What we’re fighting for is the opportunity to change the conditions of possibility so that we can advocate for the world we wish to create. I know that when we succeed in uniting academic labor, our alu will become an unstoppable force for change, both here and nationally.

We’re getting hit from all sides right now. The current White House and Congress has gone ahead and politicized the grant process. They’re attacking researchers when they don’t like the results. They’re attacking our international students, preventing them from being able to do work. We can’t fight every struggle we have on our hands right now; we can’t be fighting both the lawmakers in D.C. and the lawmakers in Honolulu: we need support from our local legislators. We need your support.

If you care about the facts, then you need to understand that facts aren’t free. Somebody has to work to put the facts together. Somebody has to do the research to make it happen. If you want a public science that works for the public good, then you need to support it. This is a fight that started a long time ago—in the 1970s—when students first started agitating at the university for collective bargaining rights. It’s a fight that we plan to finish.

The House bill is scheduled to be heard by the House labor committee (its second committee hearing) on Tuesday, Feb. 14 at 10 a.m. in conference room 309. The Senate bill has yet to be scheduled for a hearing by the Senate labor committee.