One year, one month and one day from today will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the UNC Food Worker Strike.
While the strike lasted less than a year, it became a flashpoint of attention with the National Guard put on stand-by to re-open Lenoir in March. Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr.’s successor as the leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, declared support for the strikers and protestors.
In the end, after unionization, many of the worker’s demands were met by UNC and later by the corporation to which food service was out-sourced.
This powerful exercise of worker and student solidarity started with discontent among workers and was propelled by the leadership of food workers Mary Smith and Elizabeth Brooks. Their efforts focused on the low wages, racist white supervisors and unpaid labor that the Black food workers were subject to. This planning was brought to the attention of students through the newly formed Black Student Movement.
As part of a larger history of worker activism on UNC’s campus, from the Janitor’s Association of the 1930s to the the Housekeepers' Association of the 1990s, this strike is an important reminder of the power of worker and student coordination.
Conditions have somewhat improved since the minimum wage for food workers was raised to $1.80 in 1968, but many workers at UNC are still at risk of poor treatment. UNC’s minimum hourly wages of $12.02 and $14.42 for employees respectively covered and not-covered by the State Human Resources Act, are both below the $22.23 that MIT’s living wage calculator suggests is necessary to cover expenses for a single parent with just one child in North Carolina.
The working conditions of workers across campus is more opaque, given the risk of speaking out and the existence of some language barriers, but as recently as 2011 UNC was wracked by allegations that the University’s Head of Housekeeping, who subsequently resigned, not only demanded sexual favors but fired workers who did not comply.
Even this past year, unsubstantiated rumors exist that some blue-collar workers of color on campus feel hemmed in by supervisors with racial animus. When planning the response to these conditions through student solidarity one-off GoFundMe campaigns or days of appreciation are kind but need to be supplemented by more systematic acts of support.
This includes engaging with the re-emergent UNC Workers Union, UE Local 150, which has skewed toward academic laborers but gained members over the last year in the Housekeeping and Maintenance departments. It means fostering personal and organizational relationships with workers at particular risk of being marginalized, and pushing back on the larger anti-worker sentiment in N.C., a right to work state.
