THE GRAPE x SLAC

April 2023

This semester, the school has taken dramatic steps towards creating the neoliberal college they want to see. We saw the outsourcing of Student Health, the destruction of Wilder's basement, the uprooting of dozens of hundred-year-old trees, constant construction, the upcoming destruction of Barrows...we could continue.

But, we have also seen enormous displays of student power. As students, we came together on October 6th to protest the inequitable changes to our school. WIth only two days of organizing, over a hundred students participated in a noise demonstration at the Board of Trustees meeting in the hotel. Directly following this, we participated in a huge protest and our collective anger led us to spontaneously occupy Mudd and hold an hour-long conversation with administrators and trustee members. This amazing display of unity and solidarity was something we had never seen at Oberlin before, and made me incredibly excited for the future.

In a conversation SLAC organized the following day, it was clear that the issues motivating people to act ranged widely, but were extremely interconnected. The root of them was a lack of student power and influence in student services and daily operations. We believe the solution is to bring back community cooperatives, and through them, create a culture of activism; a culture that bridges town members with students and campus workers, that redefines our community through solidarity rather than division.

Oberlin was once home to the Oberlin Consumer Cooperative, which started as a buying club amongst students and faculty in 1938. In 1940, they became a non-profit and eventually served the entire Oberlin community with a bookstore, grocery store, restaurant, children's clothing store, credit union, laundromat, and a Greyhound ticket service. Taking inspiration from this, SLAC and Students for Energy Justice (SEJ) are interested in working with our entire community to create new services that provide for all of us. We are in contact with Oberlin Community Services (OCS) and in the beginning stages of forming a student, worker, and town member cooperative.

We, as a community, will solidify the scope of the cooperative over the next semester; but as of now, we see a need to provide services which redistribute the concentration of wealth, labor, and skills we have on campus. The cooperative is a perfect avenue for bringing Oberlin High School students into the college, or expanding services lik the Free Store or the SWAP book co-op beyond only students. Through a cooperative, we can establish a mutually beneficial network that eliminates the "town-gown" divide. SLAC would like to encourage students, student organizations, workers, and town members to come together to make this radical change a possibility.

To succeed in changing our campus and empowering ourselves as workers, students, and town members, we need a culture of organizing. We know that every year the incoming first years bring a wave of new energy, new ideaas, and new passions. It is essential that this energy and passion for change is nourished early, and we believe an essential peice of that is the Disorientation Zine. Starting now, we are looking for any students, organizations, town members, and more who are interested in helping develop this essential resource for the incoming class. The Disorientation Zine is an essential resource for educating about Oberlin history, activism, and resources. If you are interested in helping with writing, art, editing, or anything else, please reach out or look for our interest form on Instagram and our website (@SLACOberlin, OberlinSLAC.org).

Let's take an active step in creating the College we want to see. Because even though our presence on this campus is not permanent, our impact ripples through for years after we are gone. The actions you choose to take at Oberlin will also shape you, and help you understand what role to take in the world. It is time we build community power and empowerment and take back the campus from the unaccountable trustees and their money-focused agenda.

April 2023

Last month, the Oberlin Review article “Effective Organization Necessitates Call to Action” called the effectiveness of our recent report and exhibit, “It’s All About the Dollar” about the 2020 mass layoff of Oberlin dining service workers and custodians into question. The project's primary goal was to educate the community on the effects of the layoff, and the harmful practices of the Board of Trustees and administration. The exhibit consisted of hours of audio from the fired workers, creating the space they deserved to tell their stories in their own words. It also included archived publications from the layoff period, and reports of Oberlin’s history of financialization and cost-cutting across several decades.

The Review article claimed that “On its own, the pamphlet serves the sole purpose of being informative, but overall fails to truly engage its audience.” Our goal wasn’t to repackage and exploit the lived experiences of respected community members in the interest of garnering your support—it was to educate and commemorate. The project was intended to establish institutional memory of the layoff, so that we may never forget that the College prioritizes profits over people. The effort to place such a critical and expository exhibit in the middle of Mudd (a central place on campus) was a feat that took months of preparation. While the article criticizes the exhibit for not providing “information on what steps students can take,” we were not allowed to make overt political statements in our exhibit description because of the institution-sponsored aspect of the project. Furthermore, we encourage critics of the campaign’s lack of action to join us at our weekly SLAC meetings so we can create engagement opportunities together.

Organizing is always a collective and collaborative effort, and effective power building will only come from enthusiastic relationships of mutual respect and learning. “It’s All About the Dollar” is indeed “part of something bigger,” but it wasn’t the time or place to launch a full-scale campaign. That’s why SLAC, along with Students for Energy Justice and other incredible community and student organizations, are working to foster a culture of organizing. Doing so effectively requires sustained commitment, and we envision a future where our community can uplift one another in our efforts to advocate for the conditions and opportunities we deserve. We hope to build a cooperative space that would bring students and townspeople together to prioritize affordable food and housing, activist organizing, and community outside the purview of the College. We’ve entered the planning stages for this endeavor, and as ambitious as it is, we are grounded in Oberlin’s rich history of cooperation.

SLAC meets every Monday and Thursday, and all are welcome to join us in working towards Oberlin’s cooperative and organizing-centered future.

November 2022

Isn’t it funny that once a day, a $600 million app tells us, “It’s time to Be Real?” Like the other social media apps, BeReal markets to us something we’re desperately craving: realness. Created in 2020 and popularized in 2022, the app’s messaging seems to be in response to our desire for change. This desire is a natural response to experiencing Covid, which has infected us, alienated us and heightened the inequalities of capitalism. More than ever, now is the time to be real...for real. 

Our campus’s Covid policies and Student Health services are terrible. After hearing personal stories, we have created a form to document student experiences with health issues on campus (available at oberlinslac.org). In the first week, we’ve already received many extremely disturbing responses. Seventy-two percent of respondents say they are not comfortable with current Covid policies. Multiple students have reported sleeping in common rooms or hotels off campus to distance from roommates with COVID. In one instance, a student said that S&S kicked them out of the common room they’d been sleeping in, and they weren’t able to receive safe, stable housing until their parents got involved. 

Another student wrote,“I find it deeply disturbing that Crisis Counseling is the most reliable service at Student Health right now…This service is only reliable because it literally MUST be for life-and-death reasons -- and forcing that responsibility on workers where there is no reliability elsewhere is alarmingly careless.”

This behavior is incredibly violent and unacceptable. By documenting the issue, we hope to hold the school accountable and spread the word about what's happening here. Not only are these conversations important for making change in the world, but also within ourselves. Realness is a way of living, something that can’t be sold to us by multi-million dollar corporations. To be real, we must engage in serious discussions with one another about the issues affecting our community. Realness is honesty, care, and action; realness is survival. 

Please fill out and share our survey at oberlinslac.org

November 2022

Starting this semester, The Student Labor Action Coalition (SLAC) is a low-income and BIPOC-led space looking to engage the Oberlin community in our projects/actions towards fighting for better working and living conditions for our community's workers.

For our first piece, we would like to respond to the October 28 article “Student Protest of Bylaws Revision Favored Animosity Over Message” by the Oberlin Review Editorial Board.

In this article, the Editorial Board has chosen to echo the Board of Trustees’ calls for “civility” politics. They attempted to argue that our community’s anger weakened the message we organized behind. Yes, our community is angry, and there is nothing wrong with that. Due to the Board’s austerity, we are at a desperate point where our campus services are rapidly declining and no longer support us. The Board has shown our community zero respect with their decisions, so why should we respect them? The real “hardworking people deserving our decorum and respect” are the students, faculty, and employees who make this campus run every day, not the Board.

Asking the Board nicely is NOT the way forward. We need to be honest about the way we feel and demand what we deserve. The Board’s decisions are hindering the school’s daily operations, which we feel firsthand as campus services and healthcare are more and more inaccessible. The trustees parade into town to make significant changes to our education and lives on campus, only to disperse across the country, indifferent and removed from the implications of their decisions.

The situation is dire and the cutbacks to essential campus services, professor pay and healthcare, etc. are violent. When protesting, we cannot conflate “peaceful” with “effective” while the Board’s decisions are directly harming members of our community. Such threats to our wellbeing need to be met with an urgency that cannot be clouded by respectability politics. Building a campus beyond cruel austerity means building a campus beyond the Board of Trustees. The Board deserves, or rather needs, to experience our animosity. But more importantly, expressing communal anger is empowering and uniting. The direct-action our community took on Oct. 6th is something we should all celebrate and work to create again.

October 2021

Oberlin’s dining system is failing us—but how did we get here? The issues students have been facing the past few weeks are symptoms of a much larger, and very troubling, issue: Austerity. Austerity is the process of cutting spending and increasing revenue, which Oberlin does by slashing programs on campus and increasing enrollment. Beginning with the launch of the Academic and Administrative Review (AAPR), the committee Oberlin put together to balance their budget in 2018, Oberlin has focused on cutting costs and saving money wherever they can. This has been done with no consideration of the students, staff, or community. Despite claims of being in a financial crisis, Oberlin’s nearly $1 billion endowment fund—donation money set aside for use in times of crisis—remains untouched. In the past few years, the school has refused to use the endowment, instead choosing to outsource dining, sanitation work, and student jobs within CDS. They have also hiked up the price of OSCA, cut disability services and the MRC budget, hired fewer RAs, and instituted limits on hiring professors.

The endowment fund is currently being used for alternative investments, a problematic and secretive way to build assets. This method of investment permits only a few people to see what the college is investing in, which raises the question: why are they so intent in hiding their investments? Furthermore, the fees and contracts (potentially totaling up to $15 million a year) that Oberlin must pay for this investment essentially funnels money into Wall Street while accruing little in return. The use of alternative investment and implementation of austerity measures are the college’s desperate attempts to improve their poor bond rating (the school's equivalent of a bad credit score). By cutting back programs while using the endowment as collateral, the school can hike up its bond rating and continue to increase its non-taxable endowment fund. A better option would be an Index fund, a more transparent method of investment that would provide stability and ensure a higher rate of return.

The Oberlin community has the power to demand accountability. Oberlin is a brand, and it thrives on its image as a liberal hub with happy students. We have a serious chance to unmask the institution as a money-hungry business that will cut as many programs as needed to increase its value. Spending our endowment on risky investments and implementing a harsh austerity program is negatively affecting our community—look no further than the state of labor on campus.

Anyone who was on campus before the pandemic hit remembers the college’s decision to fire 108 unionized dining and custodial staff as part of their move from Bon Appétit, our previous dining provider, to AVI. The decision to outsource to AVI for food service was part of this austerity program, as the move was estimated to save $2 million a year. AVI does not have a good track record with unionization and has been known to exploit workers; however, the demonstrations by workers and students pushed them to contact the UAW and to get a contract for Oberlin workers that started in February of 2021. AVI hired 43 workers who were willing to stay out of the previously fired 108. This was not the case for Scioto, the new custodial service, which did not retain previous staff and chose to remain non-unionized. 

Despite their attempts to placate students and workers, AVI is certainly not worker friendly. Students, who are now employed through AVI instead of through the school, were required to work a minimum of 12 hours a week, or three shifts of 4 hours. This has now been changed to one shift a week thanks to a petition that was circulated by students. In addition, policies around breaks and missing work are harsh. Workers are required to call off two hours ahead of time if they are going to miss a shift, and even then they will receive a disciplinary notice. If they don’t call off, they are fired on the spot. Workers are also required to clock in and out for bathroom breaks, despite Ohio law mandating that breaks under 20 minutes be paid.

AVI has been grossly unprepared for this semester. With the combination of over-enrollment as well as staff shortages and supply chain issues, they have failed to adequately provide food for students. This is all something that Oberlin and AVI could have prepared for, yet made the conscious decision to not hire more workers. Due to the staff shortages, and as part of a clause in AVI’s union contract, management has asked everyone to cover open shifts, and can force workers to cover those shifts even on their days off. Days off for our staff are no longer a right, but a luxury that can be taken from them at the drop of a hat. Workers have even reported being forced in for back to back shifts (after already working a 40 hour work week), essentially being forced to work 7 days in a row.

All of these problems with dining are directly connected to Oberlin’s austerity policies. Not only does it affect workers negatively as they are moved to working for contractors, but it also affects the experience of students as it impacts the quality and accessibility of the place that houses and feeds us. Day by day the college stands by as more trash piles up around campus, food gets harder to access, and all the while student and adult workers are forced to work beyond their capacity. Enough is enough, it's time for us all to speak up and make our voices heard.