Making history, making democracy un-extraordinary: Harvard students make history.

Something historic happened at Harvard University last year.

On April 18, 2001, around 1pm, forty-six students (including the author) packed down with food and sleeping bags rushed into Massachusetts Hall, one of Harvard's main administrative buildings. Thus began what was the longest sit-in in Harvard's history, all in the name of living wages for the university's lowest paid workers.

The modest proposition was that Harvard--the wealthiest university in the world with an endowment of over $19 billion--should pay its workers a living wage of at least $10.25 an hour, the same wage paid to city workers in Cambridge, where Harvard is located. (Cambridge recently adjusted the wage upward to $10.68 to account for inflation). Led by the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM), thousands of students, workers and area residents gave of their time and energy for twenty days. On May 8, the protest's twenty-first day, Harvard administrators agreed to consider the recommendations of a newly-created living wage committee composed of faculty, administrators, students and workers.

Seven months later, on December 18, that committee issued several recommendations: it called on Harvard to pay its lowest-paid workers a living wage but fell short of the activists' call to adjust the wage annually for inflation to prevent erosion. One month later, Harvard President Larry Summers approved the committees recommendations, but without annual inflation adjustment, these living wages will soon once again be outpaced by the costs of living. (For more information on the sit-in and the committee's recommendations, see www.hcs.harvard.edu/~pslm/livingwage/.)

Aside from its duration and destiny in some Harvard history books, the sit-in was "historic" in other, more important ways. Harvard students made history in so far as they became agents in their own world, acting upon rather than passing through the institution which forms them. However, despite the congratulation that follows such activism, these extraordinary ways of making history--such as sit-ins, strikes, and walkouts--pose a fundamental problem. Just as such activism confirms the power of ordinary people to resist and challenge elite power, it also confirms the fleeting nature of that power: it reaffirms the power of elites to daily determine our lives and shows us the paucity of democracy.

On Wednesday May 9, 2001, one day after the living wage sit-in ended, the Harvard administration quickly cleaned, deodorized and reclaimed Mass Hall, and cleared Harvard Yard of all traces of politics; the area returned to its status as a silent, faceless space on the way to somewhere else. Harvard became Harvard again, an elite-controlled institution through which students pass.

In this essay, I will first rethink activism's relationship to democracy from the standpoint of extraordinary acts like this sit-in. Then I will examine activism which can and does counter this fundamental problem every day but in more ordinary; and therefore less publicized, ways.

RE-DEFINING DEMOCRACY: CLOSING THE GAP BETWEEN HISTORY AND EVERYDAY LIFE

In Making History (1988), 1960s activist turned sociologist Richard Flacks makes a simple yet significant observation: in elite-dominated societies, "those positioned to participate in elite transactions can influence the terms and conditions of a collectivity's daily life as an inherent part of their own daily routine. Those without such position can influence history to the degree that they have the ability to disrupt elite plans or the processes of daily life" (70). Those of us without elite position have power for as long as we are collectively willing to upset our daily routines (and those of elites). We can create social change, we can make history before we return to our daily lives and elites resume their routine control of history.

Flacks defines democracy as "a social arrangement in which the gap between history and everyday life is permanently closed because society's members achieve the ability to make history (i.e., to influence and decide the terms and conditions of their lives) in and through their everyday lives" (87) not by suspending their everyday lives. Here we gain a stronger conception of democracy defined not in terms of everyday potential or "ability" but in terms of everyday actuality. For democracy, self-determination is ordinary rather than extraordinary. History-making activism is not a support for democracy; but rather at its core.

This theory brings a fresh and consequential perspective to centuries of debate over democracy; stretching from Aristotle to Alexis de Tocqueville to contemporaries like Jane Mansbridge, Robert Dahl and Jean Bethke Elshtain. If we accept this everyday; active definition of democracy; the trouble quickly becomes apparent: our elected politicians' disappointing decisions are not by themselves diminishing our democracy. We too are responsible, because we pass through rather than determine the institutions which determine our lives.

THE MAKING OF STUDENT LABOR ACTIVISM

Nowhere is this more poignantly true than in universities and colleges, institutions that powerfully determine the life course of millions and also ostensibly inculcate the values of active, self-governing citizenship. The actual structure of governance, however, betrays these values. At most universities and colleges, administrators, faculty, and selected community "leaders," especially business leaders, are responsible for making the small and large decisions that shape the conditions of students' lives.

Despite the persistence of such undemocratic governance, student activism has by most counts expanded since the 1990s, specifically in the development of labor activism. Four types of student labor activism are distinguishable as components of this expansion: graduate student employee unionization, the anti-sweatshop movement, the living wage movement, and what may be called the "just globalization movement (since many if nor most globalization activists stress that they are not anti-globalization per se). Numerous factors explain the growth of such activism, and many are reliant on conditions particular to universities, such as the critical-reflective nature of much academic study; the high degree of interaction among diverse students in and outside of class; and the experimentalist temper which youth, free time and reflection together can create. Yet these relative constants of university life cannot fully explain all of student labor activism. From my vantage point as a student activist for the last seven years, I focus more on specific political and economic contexts.

Universities' increasing reliance on poorly paid graduate student teachers/employees provided perhaps the most significant impetus for the birth of the graduate employee union movement in the late 1960s. Grievances over due compensation were central to the organizing efforts of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Teaching Assistants' Association, the first graduate student employee union in the nation, which bargained its first labor contract in 1969. The graduate student movement grew slowly in the 1970s and 1980s. In forming the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) in 1992, students and activists spurred nationwide organizing. Major labor unions like the American Federation of Teachers contributed support. According to the CGEU, there are now 26 unions that bargain contracts covering graduate employees on more than 60 campuses in the United States and Canada. More than half of these graduate unions became recognized since 1990.

As a UW-Madison and Harvard activist, I believe that student wage, globalization and sweatshop movements developed in the 1990s in part out of pragmatic conviction. Students have come to realize that they, like other citizens, have more direct and effective influence on the institutions in which they live their everyday lives than they do on larger, more distant institutions like national governments and multinational corporations. New national student activist networks like USAS (United Students Against Sweatshops), SLAM (National Student Labor Action Movement), STARC (Students Transforming and Resisting Corporations) and the 180 Movement for Democracy and Education are not only signs of the growth of this pragmatic conviction, but promising engines for its expansion.

Accordingly, a growing number of student activists are employing their roles as students to research and expose the procurement and investment practices of their universities. They aim to make their campuses more just and democratic and to challenge multinational corporations, especially on their labor practices. In doing so, students are tapping into the power inherent in their relationship to universities: universities often care deeply what their students think and do, if only because students constitute their primary clients and commodities, or potential legal liabilities if harmed.

Another key source for the growth of student labor activism is the AELCIO (American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations). Perhaps too much has been attributed to the AFL-CIO's leadership change in 1995 from the conservative Lane Kirkland to the more activist-minded John Sweeney. Yet it sparked institutional changes, such as the development of the Organizing Institute, Union Summer and more banding to hire additional union organizers, many from the ranks of student labor activists. These changes have substantially nurtured wage and sweatshop activism across the country. Several of the activists I know at UW-Madison and at Harvard participated in Union Summer--a one-month, stipended program in which students learn about the labor movement and organize actual union campaigns. The experience led them to become more committed labor activists. Some later graduated from the Organizing Institute--a competitive, paid training program for aspiring union organizers--to become professional labor orga nizers after college.

Correspondingly, the more students and locals of labor federations like SEIU (Service Employees International Union) and AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) have worked together through AFL-CIO initiatives and through local labor struggles, the more they have come to realize the enormous and still mostly untapped opportunity for labor movement growth which universities represent. Indeed, many campus labor unions are seizing on growing student labor activism to press university administrations on nagging problems, such as the proliferation of lower-paid part-time staff on some campuses.

THE PROBLEM WITH EXTRAORDINARY ACTIVISM

This growth in labor activism in recent years is as much a problem as a virtue. Like their predecessors in the civil rights, antiwar, feminist and antiapartheid movements, contemporary student activists have carried out sit-ins against sweatshops and for living wages and other causes with considerable success, despite the substantial risks, stress, time and energy involved. Indeed, sit-ins are emblematic of extraordinary protest actions, where participants upset the routines of a society whose values oppose their own. As Harvard living wage activists, we sacrificed our usual student routines in order to resist the Harvard administration's authority, and specifically its refusal to consider living wages for the university's lowest-paid workers.

Not long after the sir-in, I had a conversation with a Harvard professor who studies grassroots activism and was outspokenly supportive of the protest. The professor marveled at the sit-in's extraordinary nature. He claimed that we need to learn from it so as to help replicate protests and produce more extraordinary activism, more collective action which pushes us as ordinary people to stop our daily lives in order to fight for a just cause.

Yet there is a serious but too often unrecognized problem with this popular solution: activism which wrenches people from their daily lives will always be difficult to start and nearly impossible to sustain. That activism which draws the most attention because it brings routines to a stop typically has a time limit in an elite-dominated society. The Harvard administration and we, as living wage activists, knew we could not long continue the sit-in. The extraordinary energy we put into organizing rallies, vigils, picketing, speakers, and music day after day could nor be sustained because we could nor continue to postpone our papers and exams. Sooner or later, the extraordinary activism, the sit-ins and strikes, rallies and street actions, the protest and resistance end as activists return to their ordinary lives in which history-making self-determination plays little part. Extraordinary activism either fizzles, flails or wins concessions, but at the end of the day, when the protest is over, elites re-assume th eir routine exercise of power.

MAKING ACTIVISM UN-EXTRAORDINARY

To escape this bind, we need to stop taking extraordinary activism for granted and recognize it as a problem as much as a solution. The fact that activists have to perpetually inspire, convince, pressure, trick, plead, or guilt people into political action is a problem. After occasional acts of resistance, that few participants remain committed and most feel that their activism is a sacrifice rather than a routine: that too is a problem. The fact that a privileged few routinely make the decisions that affect all our lives is a problem. Extraordinary activism does nor change these facts; ordinary activism can and does.

To re-phrase Flacks, ordinary activism happens when ordinary people make history, i.e., influence and decide the terms and conditions of their lives in and through their everyday lives, nor when they stop, sacrifice or delay their everyday lives. This is the difference between strong and weak democracy, between the routine and the occasional practice of collective self-determination. To the extent that activism becomes an institutionalized part of ordinary people's everyday lives, we as leftists can achieve this strong democracy for which we have so long struggled.

While I cannot go into much detail here, I want to raise two examples of ordinary activism taken from my experience in Madison, Wisconsin.

THE UW LABOR CENTER: ORDINARY LABOR ACTIVISM IN EDUCATION

In 1999 and 2000, I founded arid directed the University of Wisconsin-Madison Labor Center with help from volunteers and interns and with money from UW student government and area labor unions. The money raised for the Center funds an office arid a part-time student director year-round to develop mechanisms to begin to make universities work for the labor movement just as much as they work for corporate America. In my imagination, such mechanisms include offering students the chance to turn their course papers into research which directly benefits local unions, and recruiting students as course-credit interns for the Labor Center and area unions. The interns I recruited conducted research for labor unions, helped organize two labor film festivals as well as the resources in our new office. Since I moved to Boston in September 2000 to carry out my dissertation research, subsequent student Directors have taken the Center in different directions but maintained the practice of recruiting student interns to carry forward various activist projects.

The Center has and will succeed in doing ordinary activism to the extent that it turns labor activism in the immediate and long-term into a taken-for-granted routine of education at UW. To do so, the Center needs to develop lasting arrangements with professors, departments and schools to recruit students as labor interns, to encourage students to write labor research papers, to organize labor film festivals, discussions, and other events. Cumulatively, if the Center makes labor politics less of an academic major for some students and more of a lifestyle for all, it will succeed in making labor activism an ordinary part of college education. The Center may also help make universities more democratic. This, however, depends on whether student labor activists turn their activism on the university, to demand their own and workers' rightful place at the table of university decision making. Given the tendency of activism to expand activists' moral horizons, I am optimistic. In all these ways, the Labor Center is st ill young and the opportunities limitless at UW, and hopefully, on many more campuses in this nation and beyond.

CAFE ASSISI: ORDINARY LABOR ACTIVISM AT WORK

The city of Madison is home to an unusually high number of cooperative businesses, including credit unions, a bakery, pharmacy, printing press, bookstore, coffee house, two grocery stores, and about a dozen cooperative homes. Cooperatives--i.e., businesses owned and/or operated to varying extents by their customers or employees--are certainly not new in the United States, having flourished during the 1960s and 1970s and in prior "utopian" communities. However, in Madison they are not generally viewed as special or utopian, but rather as functional, taken-for-granted elements of the local economy. One of these coops, Cafe Assisi, located just two blocks from the UW-Madison campus, is unique in claiming student ownership. While some of these student-owners are politically active on campus, all of them make history quietly, ordinarily, every time they put on their work aprons. They make history because they decide and implement the terms and conditions of their work lives--where their coffee house income will go , how much each will make, how long work shifts will be, the kind of coffee and equipment they will buy, the look and feel of their workplace, and how their business will connect with the rest of the Madison community.

This is ordinary labor activism at work and it contrasts sharply with the extraordinary activism of sit-ins which have captured so much more media attention precisely because of their extraordinary nature. Yet ordinary labor activism is arguably most important for history making and for democracy because work occupies the bulk of our waking lives as citizens of modern societies.

Given ordinary labor activism's importance, it is perhaps surprising that the AFL-CIO and major labor unions hardly invest in cooperatives. Organized labor may well share the myopia of capitalist news media in their focus on the extraordinary, in particular on labor's weak voice in clashes between itself and management and on their attempts to share in the fruits of management-controlled businesses. The AFL-CIO's increased investment in organizing, including Union Summer and the Organizing Institute, has undoubtedly involved more students and helped infuse the labor movement with new life. However, such investment entails the same fundamental problem as the college major. While it may increase the number of students and other people who become activists, it continues to treat activism, i.e., history-making or democracy, as a profession some go into, rather than a way of life in which all should and can engage. The point here is not to dis-invest from such organizing, but rather to recognize its limitations, a nd accordingly devote more resources to building cooperative businesses as a conscious component, if not the heart of the labor movement in the United States and across the world.

CONCLUSION: MAKING DEMOCRACY UN-EXTRAORDINARY

The UW Labor Center and Cafe Assisi are just two examples of the kind of institutionalized activism which helps make history-making a routine of--rather than an interruption from--everyday life.

When labor internships and course-based labor research papers become a taken-for-granted step in the process of education the way summer corporate internships are routine for so many students, we are building the labor movement and democracy in the longterm, and accordingly closing the gap between history and everyday life.

When wage work for students and all workers shifts from an authoritarian to a more cooperative enterprise, we come closer to closing the gap between history and everyday life.

When we make these and other routine-altering institutional changes in schools, at work and beyond, we can turn activism from the extraordinary, self-sacrificing burden of a few into the routine practice of millions.

WORK CITED:

Flacks, Richard. 1998.

Making History: The American Left & The American Mind

New York: Columbia University Press.

PAUL LACHELIER has been a University of Wisconsin-Madison sociology graduate student and an often full-time student, labor and/or third party activist since 1995. Prior to patricipating in the Harvard living wage sit-in, Paul served as a union steward and then as an executive board member of the UW-Madison Teaching Assistants' Association (AFT 3220). In 1997, he co-founded the UW Federation of Labor, and in 1999 he founded the UW Labor Center, both organizations dedicated to bringing together students and organized labor. In September 2000, Paul moved from Madison to the Boston area to pursue doctoral research on what happens to college activists after graduation. In January 2002, Paul launched his first bid for public office, running as the Green Party candidate for State Representative in Massachusetts' 26th Middlesex District in this November's state elections.