Treat Our Workers Right

At Vanderbilt we talk a lot about “fostering community.”

An important part of fostering community is respecting those people who make this university run, whether they mow the lawn, swipe our card in the lunch line at Rand or vacuum the hallways of our dorm.

I thought it was reasonable to assume that those people with the power at our university always treated their employees with respect and decency.

Turns out I was wrong.

Last week, a story came up on my Facebook news feed about Brenda Goldthreate, an employee of Vanderbilt for 40 years. For 45 days this summer, Goldthreate worked at Rand during her lunch break. She was not paid for this time and didn’t feel she was able to take a break. 

 “This summer … was the worst and the hardest summer I’ve ever had … I felt like I was a prisoner. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I got migraine headaches worrying about it,” Goldthreate said. Vanderbilt Dining showed no concern about Goldthreate’s situation.

Goldthreate turned to her union for help. With the help of her union stewards, she was able to win unpaid wages for her meal breaks. That’s a start, but there’s still so much more we can do.

As students, we are lucky to have people like Goldthreate and the over 600 employees represented by the Laborers’ International Union of North America working to make sure that our lawns are manicured, our bathrooms clean and our food prepared. We need to do more to recognize them for what they do — but so do the leaders of the university.

When those of us who are undergraduates were still in high school, there was a major labor battle here at Vanderbilt. The story of Vanderbilt students and community members coming together with Vanderbilt workers to fight for a living wage garnered national news: PBS did a long profile of the contract negotiations, and national newspapers including the New York Times reported on student efforts. Danny Glover even visited campus to meet workers and show solidarity.

In the time since, almost all of the students who were part of the original effort for a living wage have graduated or moved on from Vanderbilt. Those of us who are here now came into a community that was better because of their efforts, but far from perfect. Stories like Brenda Goldthreate’s remind us of how much more there is to do.

What I wonder now is how something like Goldthreate’s saga happened. What kind of corporate culture makes a worker scared to ask for a lunch break — and then doesn’t pay that worker for the overtime she accrued during this time? For some reason, this happened at the school we love. We can’t expect that the people in charge of Vanderbilt Dining and the other Vanderbilt entities that employ low-wage workers will suddenly decide to treat their employees appropriately.

Creating and fostering community needs to be more than a slogan; it needs to be the mantra that guides the university’s actions.