CLASE, The Community Learners Advancing in Spanish and English, is much more than a language exchange program. Along with the acquisition of language skills, students often learn of some of the hard realities of the everyday lives of these undervalued workers. One symptom of the obstacles faced by these workers is prominently displayed on their uniforms.
At the start of the New Year, Aramark, the multinational corporation from which AU subcontracts its housekeeping duties, issued new uniforms to their employees. But instead of their traditional Aramark insignia, the uniforms wield the American University logo. The tags makes you believe that these workers are properly valued and integrated members of the AU community, but they do not even include the workers’ names. They contribute to the façade obscuring the harsh reality that the men and women who keep this campus clean and beautiful are, by all administrative accounts, not AU employees and, as such, are not entitled to the benefits AU is committed to granting its employees.
These workers dedicate themselves to making our campus a better place, and to improving our lives as students. In exchange, they are underpaid, denied substantial benefits and robbed of equal access to the school’s basic services. It is a grave injustice that many individuals bearing the proud name of our University over their hearts, who labor all day in service of it, must leave our campus and travel to another job once their shift ends.
That, even though our tuition pays their salaries, these workers wearing AU tags are not AU employees is a reality of which the administration routinely and explicitly reminds CLASE. It is their excuse in ignoring and rejecting CLASE initiatives, pursuing a policy of inaction, shirking their social responsibility towards these workers while denying culpability. The University is able to make this trivial distinction by sub-contracting to Aramark, thus cutting costs and minimizing accountability. AU has subjugated its social responsibility in service of the bottom line. But, the administration would rather evade questions, misinform with nameless tags and obscure the truth with legal jargon than admit that.
As a multinational corporation with 255,000 employees in 22 countries, Aramark does not care about the lives of a hundred workers at a small school. Many students, however, would care about these workers’ plights, if they were aware of them.
As representatives of AU’s student body, the administration should embody the oft-demonstrated compassion of its students and enact policies pursuant of their belief in social justice, in line with AU’s Strategic Plan and Corporate Responsibility statement. Instead, Aramark’s workers are branded with AU’s nameless tags, deliberately misinforming the student body and misrepresenting reality.
This helps suppress the resistance the administration is afraid could result from widespread awareness of AU’s culpability in these workers’ hardships. In the context of the University’s real stance on the status of its Aramark workers, these nameless tags are so ironic as to border on cruel. They function to hide the workers and their plights in plain sight. Some have worked at AU for more than twenty years, even as students, faculties, and companies like Aramark come and go. For the sake of the integrity of our University, the workers must be recognized as valuable members of our community through concrete policy. Without it, the ideals we claim to promote will continue to be debilitated by hypocrisy.
Empty rhetoric and superficial representations of inclusion are not enough. It is time for the students of American University to stand up and demand the administration to grant these workers the benefits due them. They have been invisible far too long.
Community Learners Advancing Spanish and English (CLASE) is focused on forming solidarity between AU students and Aramark and Bon Appétit employees who work on campus.?
Aaron Montenegro and Kate Hampton, CLASE
