A Seat at the Table
A young woman in the rise of ResStaff
—by Madylin Eberstein
“If someone gets kicked out of ResStaff and it’s not me, how am I going to live with that?”
Months after the University of Michigan Residential Staff (ResStaff) strike, twenty-year-old Sabina Carty still seemed shaken as she stared back at me through a foggy webcam. She had never thought she would become a labor activist.
A veteran Residential Advisor who helped mobilize U-M’s ResStaff strike, Carty teamed up with the rest of her colleagues to formally demonstrate their concern—though not without facing any obstacles. Undoubtedly, her leadership would come as its own sacrifice, and the ResStaff strike would struggle to go on. In the end, these two weeks of tireless communication, intimidation, and deliberation would teach a valuable lesson of the trials of collective bargaining, the story of the American union, and all those who came before young Carty.
The Beginning
Apprehensive about details of the pandemic, Carty was less than optimistic returning to campus. With increased administrative duties and newfound workplace hazards, “the role changes,” Carty said. She went on to describe her frustrations with the university’s “nonchalant attitude” and ResStaff’s evolving responsibilities as “the COVID police.” In the end, her already time-consuming RA position had become outright grueling, comprised of uncompensated emotional labor and a never-ending test of personal strength. Specifically, Carty describes “It just felt like something we had to do because the conditions were so bad. We didn’t know how we were going to keep working.”
Inevitably, ResStaff’s grievances (reflected in ResStaff’s strike demands and press release) evolved into an action plan. Carty claimed that any whispers among ResStaff of starting their own strike were confirmed by a different labor initiative led by the Graduate Employees Organization, or GEO: “We were mildly talking about striking, and then GEO went on strike.” By the end of that same day, the ResStaff movement had begun.
But once ResStaff actually announced their work stoppage, things started to feel a bit more real. “We were expecting them to be enthusiastic in helping us,” Carty confessed, still in shock. “That is not what we got.” According to her, U-M did not hesitate in meeting their newest army of strikers with indifference and denial. “It’s just such a weird employment situation to be in to be seeing the reality and having your employers tell you, like, ‘That is not what’s happening. You’re fine.’ I just can’t imagine being an adult acting like that towards kids.”
Day-to-Day
Despite their determination, ResStaff workers were subjected to an overwhelming workload to maintain their strike. In the first place, Carty described the unprecedented effort to unite ResStaff across campus in consistent communication via group chat, eventually including an impressive 225 student workers. “In a normal year, there’s not really communication between different dorms.”
Other obstacles involved the need to secure emergency housing, should any ResStaff contracts be terminated. Luckily, GEO stepped in to assure no students would become homeless, agreeing to extend their crowdsourced housing resources to the young strikers. On the quarantine front, local restaurants and businesses offered substantial donations to sick students. Distribution of these donations—including food and toiletries—thus had to be managed by ResStaff themselves, facilitated by their own, personal transportation.
The Hard Truth
Carty explained that her initial role as “general representative” in the strike changed to a seat in ResStaff’s elected dorm council, with one RA present from each dorm, around halfway through. This kind of “promotion” may have been the result of Carty’s post in a relatively small dorm on campus with proportionately less RAs, or else the conscious selflessness guiding her role in the movement. She expressed profound concern for her food- and home-insecure colleagues who would not have been so easily able to stake their RA benefits. Carty, herself, is from Dexter, Michigan, just outside Ann Arbor. “I’m lucky that I live so close to Ann Arbor,” she said, “I probably would have been okay, which is I why I felt comfortable taking a leadership role in the strike. If the hammer was going to come down on anybody’s head, it would be okay if it was me. I could go home and live with my parents.”
This especially makes sense in the context of RA demographics on campus. At length, Carty described the proliferation of various minority identities within ResStaff’s ranks—everywhere from race, class, gender, and sexuality. And this concentration would make sense when one considers who among us could benefit the most from free housing and food in an upper-middle class city like Ann Arbor. At the same time, however, this fact only makes the exploitation of ResStaff more problematic as the university consolidates its minority populations and asks them to perform the leg work of the pandemic without pay—intentional or not.
This is compounded by the university’s peculiar ambivalence toward ResStaff. Despite the university’s desire for ResStaff “to treat the position more like a job,” Carty explains that university administration, themselves, have no intention of doing the same. “The only reason we were able to strike for as long as we did instead of getting shut down by court order like GEO, was because they refuse to see us as employees.” Instead, all of ResStaff qualifies only as “scholarship recipients.”
In this way, the university’s COVID-19 failings were never ResStaff’s only grievances—just the most recent. In a normal year, ResStaff is still expected to work for free, compensated only by free housing. Besides this, Carty describes the firm bureaucratic structure of campus housing that characterizes the RA position. Hall directors supersede and manage RAs. Hall directors then report to the Director of Housing, Rick Gibson, who in turn, reports to the Vice President of Student Life. According to Carty, this multi-tiered pipeline has always made voicing anonymous complaints difficult and is often exacerbated by the intimidating relationship between Hall Director and RA in which student concerns are met with “consistent humiliation.” Combined with a unique minority population, this culture of indentured servitude and unheard complaints elevates a troublesome work environment to upsetting humanitarian crisis.
It’s a dark reality, but luckily, these marginalized identities may have manifested positively on the part of this generation of RAs. While Carty describes not feeling impassioned towards workers’ rights in the past, because of ResStaff’s diverse profile, she feels that the process of organizing the strike “was a fairly easy gap to bridge.”
Following these two weeks of striking, U-M ResStaff was, thankfully, able to receive some of their demands. Carty, personally, expressed gratitude for new weekly testing, better PPE like gloves and face shields, and the 200 Blue Bucks deposited to all of ResStaff’s accounts. Nevertheless, the concessions granted at the end of the strike were mostly COVID-related and did not address other, more general issues about the job, an inevitable deflection when striking during the pandemic. “If we hadn’t gotten tired out by the admin, we could have gotten more.” For a more detailed account of this agreement, visit the Michigan Daily.
After the Fact
After a painful back-and-forth, these few concessions helped bridge the gap between normal housing and COVID dorm life, which begs what might be students’ most burning question: Was safe housing ever possible?
“Yes.” Carty did not hesitate. “It was possible. That’s the most infuriating part about it all.” Besides the university’s initial shortcomings in providing adequate testing and PPE, Carty reiterated, “We handed them safe housing. It wouldn’t have been perfect…but we could have been safer.”
Today, Carty is no longer working as an RA. “You can’t get fired for starting a strike, but you can get pushed out on the nuances.” Conveniently, Carty failed to submit the form to continue her RA position and is now biding her time until she can reapply.
In the meantime, there is still much for us spectators to dissect from this crash course in collective bargaining. Right here in Ann Arbor, September 8, 2020 began a new move for justice and a continuation of the historic American union. The story of Carty and the rest of ResStaff thus serves as a powerful example of unity, teamwork, and the agency of young workers.
In the wake of this grim future, I implore my classmates to remember our ResStaff, the sacrifice of workers like Sabina Carty, and the war waged against students just like themselves. To do so, we may circle back to the ResStaff’s first declaration of this strike, their bold battle cry echoing out into darkness: “If the U-M administrators do not want to live up to the Michigan Difference, we will be the difference ourselves.”
Feature photo by Allec Gomes on Unsplash.