Learn history of union before condemning it

It was 30 years ago this month, that hundreds of University students and many faculty, too, gathered on the rain-sodden grass in front of the chapel. The immediate stimulus for the gathering was the death of Martin Luther King, but the event itself had been planned long before as a show of support for the (mostly black) service employees who were struggling to have their association recognized as a bargaining partner with the University. The lengthy battle of these employees for a reasonable wage and, more significantly, recognition as employees with contractual protections, has been chronicled by Erik Ludwig in his Senior Honors Thesis. It is a thesis his fellow-students would do well to read, in this third decade after the employees' struggle for union representation. The tale the thesis relates has direct relevance to the current controversy over the "privatization" of food services at the University.

I find Burger King's food of poor quality, and that of Wendy's is by all accounts vastly superior. My vivid memory of the humiliations suffered by the University's black workers in the '50s and '60s, however, and the recollections of the sublime sense of solidarity evoked by the Chapel demonstration, will keep me from crossing Wendy's threshold, at least until they, too, allow their employees to join the union of their University peers. I would hope that, at the least, students would acquaint themselves with the history of that long and often sordid struggle for union representation before they take positions that lead to the battle lines being formed anew.

Peter Klopfer

Research professor

Department of Zoology