When Essential Workers Fight Back, Students Offer Solidarity

Words by Luca GoldMansour
Photo source

A strike at the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx, the largest produce market of its kind in the country, ended last month with the biggest pay raise for its workers in nearly 30 years. The strike, led by Teamsters Local 202, inspired students and essential workers at CUNY who are getting ready for confrontation with the university’s administration. National headlines were made when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) ditched President Biden’s inauguration ceremony in favor of joining the picket line in the Bronx. Megaphone in hand on a cold January night, AOC spoke to the crowd of workers, activists, organizers, and community members, saying

One of the things that is upside down is the fact that a person who is helping get the food to your table cannot feed their own kids. That’s upside down. The fact that someone that can help you get care, or help deliver your groceries, can’t even get healthcare themselves, or can’t even get access to those things.

The strike showed Luz Cespedes, a City College student and member of the City College Young Democratic Socialists of America, how change happens only when ordinary people come together and demand it; “As a Bronxite, watching my people fight for what they deserve brings me more than just pride, it makes me hopeful. There’s a lot of work to be done, but it can be done.”

Despite the risk to themselves and their families, essential workers have fed, educated, transported, and cared for New York City and the United States in a pandemic for over a year. Now, essential workers are bargaining for more as mostly black and brown labor organizers and workers give a crash course for the whole country on how the pandemic economy runs or does not run, at their behest.

CUNY faculty and staff are facing accelerated episodes of budget reductions and austerity. Many faculty and staff at CUNY believe the only thing to be done is a work stoppage, like that at Hunts Point Market, after continuing to educate New Yorkers amidst the pandemic. Cespedes stated,

Adjuncts work night and day to ensure their students get the education they’re paying for. It shouldn’t have taken a pandemic for the world to realize that all working people are essential workers. The same way CUNY would be nothing without its students is the same way this country and big business would collapse if workers put their foot down.

To that end, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the CUNY faculty and staff union passed a resolution in November in favor of strike readiness. According to a “strike readiness brochure” released by PSC this week, the work of getting strike ready, “includes establishing strike readiness committees on each campus. These committees learn the concerns of members and evaluate demands on campus, build cross-title solidarity, and develop ways for members to plug into strike readiness organizing.”

Teamsters strike at the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx, the largest wholesale produce market in the United States. January 2021

As the CUNY administration continues what they describe as difficult but necessary, adjustments to revenue losses from the pandemic, critics say that “preemptive and disproportionate” budget reductions have left colleges scrambling to identify savings, all despite unused federal aid granted in the CARES Act, which included specific provisions for keeping staff on payroll. For students, budget austerity has forced colleges to diminish course offerings and expand class sizes to unprecedented levels, even as tuition continues to rise. Student campus organizations like CUNY Young Democratic Socialists of America, The CUNY Rising Alliance, and Free CUNY are determined to fight for students’ quality of education and are calling on students to join their struggle. Cespedes explained,

I personally am not surprised by this botched response by the Board of Trustees, CUNY, and the City of New York. Students should be prepared to organize on their campuses individually and as a CUNY collective, to demand the needs of working-class students. CUNY is composed of a working-class demographic and at a time where students need more support than ever - balancing jobs and school during a pandemic - the city and state should be pouring money for resources and aid, not leaching away at the limited resources we already had. President Boudreau will be hosting a CCNY town hall on February 23rd, everyone who can should come and voice their concerns about budget cuts and CCNY’s response to the COVID pandemic.

Daniel Kane, President of the Teamsters local 202, described the solidarity he saw on the picket line in the Bronx in an interview on Democracy Now!.

You know, during the strike, about midway through, when — I saw the solidarity, the people, the workers, engaged in a struggle that was obviously harrowing to them because their livelihoods were on the line, but they were resolved with each other, and they were standing shoulder to shoulder with each other on the basic premise of being treated decently. And I said to them — I said, ‘No matter what, in the end, we won already, because we fought.’

As students, faculty, and staff weigh the strike as a means of rescuing the people’s university’ from an all-out assault by market forces, Cespedes believes now is a more important time than ever to think deeply about a university system, a labor market, and a country which offsets its costs on its most vulnerable and most crucial members. Most important of all, Cespedes believes we must prepare for action and that now is the time to,

Educate yourself. Do your own research. That’s where it all starts. Dialogue; join the conversation. Start the conversations in your classes, or in your living rooms with your family. Some of us can’t risk going to a strike or protest, but what we can do is share on social media, show support through monetary donations or donating supplies.

As AOC mentioned on the picket line,

Yes, change happens at the ballot box. Yes, change happens in policy. But change happens on the picket line, too. And we can’t ever forget that. That kind of solidarity is how we win everything. It’s how we win our wages. It’s how we win our rights. It’s how we win a better country. And it’s how we win our future. And I think it’s so important that we remember that.

Cespedes concurs, “This new political moment won’t bring us any change unless we fight for it. It’s time to take the stage by any means necessary and that’s what the essential workers at the Hunts Point Strike did.”