The Wake

During the two and one half weeks that the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME ) workers unions were on strike, I was working behind picket lines at the U of M Admissions office in Williamson Hall. At my job I perform clerical tasks typical of AFSCME’s 3800 union. These union members work in offices, entering data and processing transcripts. When word broke that union members were to go on strike the next week to protest the unfair contracts proposed by the U administration, I wondered what that would mean to me. I am a student worker, doing some of the same things that members of AFSCME 3800 do, although my job is admittedly more menial. I was working despite the strike, perhaps allowing the administration to prolong negotiations, and definitely allowing business to go on as usual. Yes, I was a scab.

Although I don’t actually know what being a scab means, I can derive the meaning from the fact that the purpose of a strike is to inflict massive wounds on an organization. A scab, then, is a person who mends the infrastructure that the strikers seek to disturb with their absence. Either that or scab is an acronym for Servant to Cretinous Administration Bollocks, which is probably a fusion of ideas preserved from the French Revolution and the overall sentiment of the Sex Pistols.

During my strike-time employment I found myself feeling both justified and fraudulent in wearing a green “I Support UofM Workers” button and insuring my own job security. Had I decided to honor the picket lines, I would have lost my job, my work-study funds, and perhaps my apartment, all at the cost of maintaining actions consistent with my opinions. As a student worker I was shocked at how my fellow co-workers on the picket lines were responding to student workers like me. The strikers were nice.

In the second week of the strike, I approached one of my fellow co-workers, Laura Mirelez, on the picket line to ask her why strikers were being so nice, watching business go on as usual beyond their established picket lines. She laughed, and set herself and her fellow AFSCME members apart from the stereotype of raving teamster and the scab haters of yore by saying, “That’s not the way to win over the community.” She went on to express her gratitude for the students that study at the U, as well as the students who had just begun their hunger strike earlier that week. Mirelez acknowledged that her job wouldn’t exist without the students, and that the students need the workers to keep business running. It is a symbiotic relationship that exists between U of M workers and U of M students. They needed me to continue my studies in order for their jobs to exist, even if that meant that I should cross their picket lines in order to do so. It was Mirelez’s second time on strike with AFSCME 3800; the first time was in 2003.

After the strike I sat down with Marsha Smith-Van Hatten, who also participated in the 2003 strike. Marsha was disappointed in the outcome of the strike saying, “The U is a good place to work, but I don’t like where it’s going.” She doesn’t regret striking even if the results weren’t beneficial. “There’s nothing fun about being on strike, but you have to participate in the process.”

Smith-Van Hatten sees the conclusion of the strike as a message sent to the community about the economic injustices that plague the U. The Unions ceded to University Administrators’ lowball offer because they couldn’t afford to be on strike any longer. It was a grim end to the AFSCME union strike.

Smith Van-Hatten explained to me the difference between non-union workers, and the union workers who continued to work during the strike. She said that students could cross the picket lines without objection because they have nothing to gain in the process of a strike. The union workers who crossed picket lines to their normal jobs during the strike were the problem.

I sympathize with the union members in their plight, and I know I will miss the strikers. I will miss crossing their picket lines, their pleasant morning salutations (“Hey there, nice button!”), and their affinity for horn honking support. For them, it was all about demanding economic justice with a smile.