Ricardo Vila-Roger
Can we imagine what our lives would be without unions? The five-day work week, child labor laws, employer-based healthcare coverage, FMLA… these are just a few of the many things that unionized workers have done to make our way of life better and of what can be achieved when workers collaborate.
We keep hearing about how “unprecedented” these times are. The one thing we all are certain of right now is that we have no idea what is to come or how much worse things will get before they get better. If this is such an unprecedented time, why is the administration acting like everything is business-as-usual? Why is our “input” limited to emailed surveys and poorly-attended town halls?
This should be a time in which we all work together to come up with solutions. The folks teaching understand better than anyone does what it takes to run successful classes in this environment. We should be collaborating with upper management to figure out what is best for us and for our students. That is why unionizing is so important right now. We need to have more of a say in how we navigate these challenging. We should be able to bargain collectively for the things we need rather than await decisions that may or may not be in our best interests. We owe it to ourselves and to our students.
We also owe it to the most marginalized among us to fight for everyone. We can make Pitt a much more equitable workplace by negotiating fair pay and workloads for all faculty — from the tenured professor to the adjunct who is here for one semester. What can we imagine together?
--Ricardo Vila-Roger, Theatre Arts
We keep hearing about how “unprecedented” these times are. The one thing we all are certain of right now is that we have no idea what is to come or how much worse things will get before they get better. If this is such an unprecedented time, why is the administration acting like everything is business-as-usual? Why is our “input” limited to emailed surveys and poorly-attended town halls?
This should be a time in which we all work together to come up with solutions. The folks teaching understand better than anyone does what it takes to run successful classes in this environment. We should be collaborating with upper management to figure out what is best for us and for our students. That is why unionizing is so important right now. We need to have more of a say in how we navigate these challenging. We should be able to bargain collectively for the things we need rather than await decisions that may or may not be in our best interests. We owe it to ourselves and to our students.
We also owe it to the most marginalized among us to fight for everyone. We can make Pitt a much more equitable workplace by negotiating fair pay and workloads for all faculty — from the tenured professor to the adjunct who is here for one semester. What can we imagine together?
--Ricardo Vila-Roger, Theatre Arts
