See this FoxNews story.. Also, this KARE11 story. These stories each excerpt from a longer statement that was read by polisci grad student, Isaac Kamola. Here’s an earlier draft (written by the umn student strike solidarity group):

We, the students, are here today to express our frustration at the inaccessibility of the administration at our University. We are here to say “no” to the silence and exclusion from the decision making process that affects our whole university community.

For the past two weeks, we have articulated our demands to the administration: offer the AFSCME workers’ a fair contract with a living wage. We used a number of different means to communicate this basic human right, but still they refuse to listen to us.

We have a petition with over five hundred signatures - still they refuse our Demands.
We have written hundreds of letters to the editor, and still they refuse our demands.
And our professors and graduate assistants have written many collective letters of solidarity, and thousands of students have attended classes off-campus to show that we refuse to cross the picket lines. We do this with courage, in spite of the vague threats by the administration to discipline us and our teachers. Yet they still refuse our demands.

When a hundred of us tried to speak face-to-face with the decision makers in the Board of Regents, we were ignored and arrested. They remain silent to our demands.

The channels of discussion in this university have been closed off to us by an administration who want to have exclusive power over decisions about the present and future of this university. We will not allow this to happen in our university.

Theirs is a vision of this university that we refuse to accept!
The administration’s treatment of the AFSCME workers represents a future of economic injustice and inequality. The administration’s offer is not only unfair, it violates the inherent human rights of workers to a livable and equitable wage. We refuse to live in that world and we refuse to silently allow our institution to perpetuate this inequality and injustice.

We refuse to allow our university to be an employer in which full time, long term employees’s fail to make a living wage and must take on second jobs, or choose health care or gas over basic necessities like food. We refuse to allow the administration to offer such measly contracts that our AFSCME brother and sisters must go to food shelters to meet their needs.

NOW, we are taking a principled stand. Your refusal to listen to us has forced us to take drastic action, to put our bodies on the line. Starting this Monday at noon, a committed group of students will begin a HUNGER STRIKE in solidarity with the striking workers. We refuse to let our sisters and brothers in AFSCME go hungry alone. In a survey of AFSCME workers, 25% said they had trouble buying food for their families. We want justice for our community, and that means nobody in our university should go hungry.

Our demands are simply that the administration return to the bargaining table and meet AFSCME’s request of a fair contract that offers a livable wage and covers the eroding effects of inflation, precisely what the state legislature allotted for them. We will continue our hunger strike until our demands are met.

If you wonder why we hunger strike, the main reason is that it has been proven to be an effective tactic for achieving socio-economic justice in university communities: see Harvard students’ earlier this year, Vermont U, and U of Miami. Here’s more technical and historical info on hunger strikes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 20:33 and is filed under Economics, equality, neoliberalism, unions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.