s COVID-19 began to spread across the United States in late February, the contracted custodians of UG2 — a national custodial service to which Stanford subcontracts much of its janitorial work — were largely left in the dark regarding job suspensions or changes. The first inklings of trouble came when they received notices from UG2 that work in certain areas might be suspended. Jorge, one UG2 custodian who agreed to speak with Stanford Politics under the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from UG2 management, remembers receiving a notice on March 6 that there was a list of 84 workers who had been suspended. Jorge, who has worked at Stanford for more than 20 years, was spared the worst, but many of his co-workers weren’t as fortunate. Those who were laid off were told that they would cease working the following Monday, giving them little more than three days to apply for unemployment insurance, a benefit with strict eligibility requirements. “It wasn’t a timely notice at all,” Jorge said.
Even those who were able to continue working weren’t fully informed of the risks of janitorial work during a global pandemic. Until he heard Governor Newsom’s announcements about statewide shelter-in-place orders, Daniel — a UG2 custodian who, like Jorge, agreed to an anonymous interview with Stanford Politics for fear of retaliation — didn’t realize the risks he was taking by continuing work. When he confronted the UG2 about it, however, he received a lukewarm response. “They told me they weren’t forcing me to work — I could stay at home,” Daniel said. “But if I wanted to keep getting paid, I’d have to use either sick days or vacation days.” In early April, the Daily reported that workers had been given cloth and hairbands with which to make makeshift masks; UG2 Director Grover Brown justified his decision in a statement to the Daily, noting that these instructions were “consistent with CDC recommendations” even as workers continued to express their concerns about a lack of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) and inadequate cleaning supplies. On April 11, UG2 confirmed that a service worker had tested positive for COVID-19. “Effectively, it’s revealed a certain carelessness on the part of the company,” Jorge said. “[At first], they didn’t tell us directly if some workers were sick or if some work areas had been exposed [to sick workers].”
In the absence of a timely response to workers’ basic needs in the midst of a global pandemic, the undergraduate student organizers of Students for Workers’ Rights (SWR) took action. They began fundraising, reaching out to alumni on social media, and publishing a series of op-eds in the Daily outlining their demands. Their goal was to use mutual aid to provide laid-off workers with an immediate financial lifeline, and to collectively gather the voices of students, faculty, and alumni to pressure Stanford to change its policies and offer both financial support for laid off workers and better protections for those still working on campus.
Since then, UG2 has implemented several precautions to help prevent the spread of the virus: it has limited workers’ gatherings and enforced other social distancing measures while asking its workers to wear masks. The workers who test positive for COVID-19 — as well as any coworkers who have come in close contact with them — are asked to go home and quarantine for 14 days. Even still, most of the warnings and rules were implemented only after workers like Daniel approached management about the dangers of working during a pandemic. “We [the workers]knew about keeping social distance and wearing masks because we’d hear about it on the news,” Daniel said. “But the company was consistently late in implementing the rules and protections.”
COVID and the Current Crisis
In contrast to UG2’s delayed response, Students for Workers’ Rights moved quickly when the pandemic began. It started with a meeting in Ethan Chua’s (’20) room near the end of winter quarter (Chua, like the other organizers, doesn’t hold a formal leadership position in SWR, since the organization follows a horizontal leadership model). Chua — who has been organizing with SWR since his junior year — and the others had gathered to debrief each other on the results of their organizing throughout winter quarter, but soon reached a consensus that the pandemic and the likely implications of Stanford’s yet-to-be-announced response for campus service workers was a far more pressing concern. That Saturday, March 7, the group members coordinated a strategy over GroupMe and drafted a petition with a series of demands regarding worker treatment based on language from the University’s Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 2007. The demands — which included looser restrictions on paid sick leave, more transparent communications about the risks of working during COVID-19, and commitments to confer any benefits given to regular employees to subcontracted workers as well — were then published in The Daily in a March 8 op-ed with an accompanying petition that garnered more than 650 signatures from Stanford affiliates in a few short days.
The speed with which they mobilized, Chua said, was crucial in setting the tone for future conversations with the administration. “We moved really quickly, even before the administration announced some of their next steps,” Chua said. “The March 7 demands that we came up with collectively preempted a lot of our future conversations, and we anticipated some of the ways admin might be inequitable or disappointing in how we rolled out COVID-19 relief.”
By March 9, the students had gathered 741 signatures. They delivered the petition in hand to the President and Provost’s office, expecting a response of some kind. When none came, they planned a sit-in for the following day, but arrived to find out that both offices had been closed, ostensibly because of the administrators’ busy schedules.
SWR pressed on. They escalated their demands with another petition demanding hazard pay and pay continuance which would allow all non-essential hires to shelter in place until June 15. They began reaching out to famous alums on Twitter and Instagram and organizing phonebanks and mass email campaigns to the Stanford administration. Their social media following grew rapidly; on Instagram, their follower count grew from several hundred in late August 2019 to 2500 by early September. On Thursday, April 23, SWR held a press conference, which attracted speakers ranging from former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro (’96) and Rep. Joaquin Castro (’96, D-Tex.) to Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs (’12) and Bernie 2020 California Political Director Jane Kim (’99).
Jianna So (’21), who had taken a step back from SWR’s organizing throughout much of her junior year, suddenly found herself compelled to rejoin the group’s activist efforts as the pandemic began. “When I saw everything that was happening, I just knew I wanted to be part of the group again,” So said. “They did amazing work this past year and really inspired me even when I wasn’t working with them.” Using her experience as a graphic designer, So created content for and helped manage SWR’s social media accounts on Twitter and Instagram, whose reach and influence had grown rapidly since the pandemic began.
Eventually, in the wake of the press conference and SWR’s continued = phone banking and emails, the university administration was forced to respond. In a faculty senate meeting on April 16, Provost Drell verbally committed to supporting “all workers,” while an email from two days earlier had only promised pay continuance for all “eligible” service workers until June 15. Despite the apparent victory, SWR’s organizers remained dissatisfied. The email had been sent to students first — not the workers or union it nominally claimed to support — and provided little specificity as to how that support might actually materialize. It was only on May 27 that the university — in an email from President Marc Tessier-Lavigne — formally committed to pay continuance until August, and even still the means through which that pay continuance might be implemented appeared murky. Getting the university to verbally commit to these basic demands took months of sustained organizing; each time the organizers and workers seemed to score a victory, there seemed to be a new catch.
The Shadow of Subcontracting
Part of the problem was systemic: much of the janitorial staff at Stanford is not hired directly, but instead has been hired through a system known as subcontracting. Jorge, for instance, has worked at Stanford for 21 years but has never been considered a direct employee of the school, instead working through several subcontracting companies. UG2, the current company which employs many of the janitors, has been at Stanford for roughly three years.
In recent years, subcontracting has grown increasingly popular on university campuses across the United States. Essentially, these practices — which are used disproportionately to hire low-wage laborers such as janitorial, dining hall, and security staff — allow universities to shift the responsibilities and liabilities of being an employer onto external companies. As sociologist Corey Payne explains in “The School of Subcontracting,” subcontracting allows universities to “circumvent labor laws and pay lower wages.” A study conducted among the UC schools, for example, found that subcontracted workers earn up to 53 percent less in wages than direct hires, in addition to receiving lower benefits and fewer job protections. With growing pressure from university boards in recent years to promote cost-cutting measures, crack down on campus activism, and combat union influence, subcontracting has emerged as an enticing alternative to standard hiring practices.
Given the nature of most subcontracting agreements, subcontracted workers — including many of those hired by UG2 at Stanford — have limited recourse in legal disputes. For instance, many subcontracted workers have come to accept racial discrimination and harassment as inevitable consequences of their work. While such instances aren’t necessarily commonplace, Daniel said, the workers can do little when confronted with such injustices: many of them don’t speak English or are unaware of their legal rights; even those who are aware “push it to the back of our minds, or walk somewhere else, or pretend we aren’t listening — really we can’t do anything or complain to the company. They’re not going to care.”
In addition to the already precarious nature of subcontracting, however, a large number of subcontracted workers — both at Stanford and across the country — face an additional obstacle to fair treatment: many of them are undocumented. A 2016 study surveying the state of Texas, for example, estimated that undocumented workers account for up to 8.5 percent of the workforce overall and up to 25 percent of the construction industry, where subcontracting practices are common. Bill Beardall, the Director of the Transnational Worker Rights Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin, explained that subcontracting agreements allow employers to evade culpability when indirectly hiring undocumented laborers, since employers “have no obligation to check the work obligation of someone they engage with as an independent contractor.”
Consequently, labor exploitation and wage theft practices run rampant throughout the subcontracting industry. Subcontracted workers in Texas often report receiving minimal payment — if any payment at all — for their work, despite the initial promises made by their employers. While the situation at Stanford is, admittedly, far less predatory on its face, many of its janitors, such as Daniel and Jorge, face the same challenges as other subcontracted workers across the country. “Because we work with these contracting companies, our situation is always a little delicate,” Daniel said, “because many of us subcontracted janitors and laborers are undocumented.” This not only limits the leverage that many subcontracted workers have in labor disputes, but complicates any efforts to combat workplace harassment, discrimination, and mistreatment: ultimately, subcontracted workers have minimal leverage. “The truth is we can do very little,” Daniel said, “because a lot of us don’t speak English, or don’t know our rights, such as how to defend against an accusation, or in the face of a situation of racism or discrimination.” As a result, subcontracting companies — as well as Stanford, more broadly — are seldom held accountable for such incidents.
“Lamentably, we’re in the dark about the exact reason why Stanford subcontracts its janitorial services,” Jorge said. “But the logic is that they do it to evade responsibility.” Both Daniel and Jorge were reluctant to speak further on the matter, afraid to endanger their colleagues.
As a consequence of subcontracting practices, Stanford’s lack of responsibility and accountability for its subcontracted workers has presented an ongoing challenge for both SWR and Stanford’s workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. One consistent frustration centers on a pledge which Stanford made earlier in the summer to “fully support all its workers” and provide pay continuance until August 31. Despite this initial promise, however, many of the workers were only paid until June 15. When Stanford Politics inquired about the reasons for this apparent renegement of the initial pledge, university spokesperson E.J. Miranda provided the following response: “Stanford continues to uphold our current commitment to contract workers through August 31…. As the contracting firm, UG2 coordinates the financial assistance from Stanford for UG2’s employees. We needed information from them to determine the amount to pay. They have provided the information and we have sent the payment to UG2, who will distribute it to their employees.”
Stanford Politics also made multiple requests for comment to Grover Brown, Director of Operations for UG2 at Stanford; though he initially agreed to an interview, he did not reply to any further questions.
Chua himself has expressed his and SWR’s mounting frustration with Stanford’s consistent lack of transparency. Since Stanford announced its initial policies on pay continuance, Chua, along with many of SWR’s other organizers, has repeatedly emailed University administration to seek more clarity on the policy’s implementation. “There’s no accountability when it comes to subcontracting,” Chua said. “Things are very decentralized, which is really infuriating, but it speaks to the larger issue around why subcontracting is so insidious — and there are many reasons, but one of them is precisely that this accountability can be passed on like a baton.”
And although the issues with subcontracting certainly aren’t unique to Stanford as a university, Stanford nonetheless remains an outlier in providing support for its subcontracted workers. Other institutions such as Duke, the University of Chicago, and MIT all committed to paying their subcontracted workers until the end of the 2019-20 academic year by mid-to-late March; Harvard followed suit soon after. Stanford, by contrast, did not announce their preliminary plans to support workers financially until April 14, and even those plans only provided support for “regular Stanford employees (both full-time and part time benefits-eligible).” According to the Provost’s initial email, subcontracted workers — the vast majority of whom are not “regular Stanford employees” — would be able to apply for a new grant program which would provide financial support to “eligible Stanford employees.” The email did not specify how eligibility would be defined.
Even now, many of the workers remain unpaid despite Stanford’s more recent promises to pay all service workers. Jorge, for his part, believes there needs to be a more thorough investigation: “Stanford has to investigate because UG2 is not complying. If Stanford said ‘I’m going to pay until August 31’, the question is why didn’t UG2 comply? Did UG2 pocket that money, or is it that Stanford has lied? Who is hiding the truth?”
Workers’ Rights before COVID
Though SWR was less visible on campus before the COVID-19 pandemic, SWR’s efforts to improve working conditions for campus workers began long before the current crisis. Before COVID, SWR — which was previously known as the Campus Workers’ Coalition — had focused its efforts on a series of initiatives targeted at improving the quality of life of service workers: combating workplace harassment, building affordable housing (many workers commute from places as far as Sacramento, where housing prices are far cheaper than in the Bay Area), and piloting a new bus line from East Palo Alto to Stanford, where many other workers reside. Working with the local union, SEIU Union 2007, SWR planned teach-ins and rallies to help educate and mobilize students in the months and weeks leading up to contract negotiations. On May 1, 2019, hundreds of students gathered in White Plaza for SWR’s May Day rally, marching alongside service workers to University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s office where they presented a list of demands.
Despite the ostensible success of the rally, however, SWR continued to face a series of challenges following the contract negotiations that summer. They spent much of Fall and Winter Quarter pushing for a bus pilot from East Palo Alto to Stanford, only to have the pilot cancelled abruptly by Stanford Transportation, who had fully supported the initiative just days before the pilot. In January, organizers learned that Stanford was contracting Core Management Services, a “janitorial and custodial consulting company,” to conduct a “time and motion study,” threatening to increase the workloads of an already-overworked janitorial staff; when SWR tried to glean more information about the study and its approach, however, it received only a token response from Residential & Dining Enterprises.
It was in the wake of these challenges that SWR’s planning around COVID began. Chua, who had read the Collective Bargaining Agreement between Stanford and SEIU 2007 over winter break, said that his familiarity with the CBA allowed him to help SWR draft specific demands based on existing language from the agreement. So, who had helped create content for SWR’s social media accounts, noticed a sudden explosion in engagement immediately after they started posting graphics about COVID-19. Further support from alumni such as Michael Tubbs and Julian Castro only amplified their messaging and reach.
But the network and infrastructure which allowed SWR’s organizing to take root during the pandemic had been built through years of organizing. Student organizing groups had existed since Daniel and Jorge first arrived, even though their presence wasn’t always as visible as SWR’s in the current moment. In Daniel’s early years, when he worked as a janitor for the night shift, student activists played a vital role in circulating fliers and reaching out to local publications to support service workers in contract negotiations. More recently, with the May Day rally, for example, student activism also helped shed light on the ongoing struggles many service workers continued to face due to unfair working conditions and unlivable wages. “The students have always been a pillar of support on which we have relied,” Jorge said. “They help us feel like we’re not alone.”
More importantly, Daniel said, they also helped the service workers feel like part of a community. Though the overall engagement of student activists often varies between years, students have consistently made an effort to invite service workers — and their families — to different student events, such as Day of the Dead festivals and poetry readings. “It’s small,” Daniel said, “but it makes us feel good. It makes us feel like we don’t just work here taking out the trash — like there are people who care about us having a good time.”
Nevertheless, because students generally spend only four years on campus, sustaining long-term student activism has often been difficult. Both Daniel and Jorge noted that many of the victories they secured often took many years of organizing, longer than the typical undergraduate career. Before Students for Workers’ Rights officially formed, there had been other campus activist groups focused on workers’ rights initiatives: in 1998, the Stanford Labor Action Coalition (SLAC) formed during a joint action conference organized by Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) and Students for Environmental Justice At Stanford (SEAS). While SLAC’s activity and membership fluctuated from year to year, they had established a strong campus presence by 2014 when they officially changed their name to SALA (Student and Labor Alliance) to avoid confusion with the linear accelerator laboratory on campus. Soon after, there was another name change, and for a while SWR was known as the Campus Workers’ Coalition — a name which Chua said the organizers decided to change given that the majority of its membership was still composed of students.
Given the challenges facing student organizers, teachers and faculty have also played a vital role in sustaining long-term activist efforts. When COVID-19 first hit, several professors — Jonathon Rosa, David Palumbo-Liu, Allyson Hobbs, and Rush Rehm — helped draft a letter of support for laid-off service workers, which garnered 104 signatures from faculty around campus in less than 24 hours. Palumbo-Liu, who knew some of the students who were involved with SWR and had spoken at the May Day rally the previous year, had already been in contact with student organizers when the pandemic first began. Following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Palumbo-Liu had created a campus-wide initiative called StandFor which emerged from an Anti-Fascism and Anti-Racism course he’d taught that year; it quickly morphed into his course Scholarship and Activism, which brought together students who were involved with organizations such as SWR, Fossil Free Stanford, and SCoPE 2035.
Rehm, who himself was not directly involved with drafting the letter but helped circulate it among faculty members, sees his role as providing support to the student organizers spearhead and lead these movements. He first became involved with labor organizing efforts as an undergraduate at Princeton while working at a local bakery, and has remained connected to campus activism since arriving at Stanford in 1990. “The administration has to pretend to listen to students, who provide the university’s public raison d’etre. Sometimes the administration really does listen — I’m not cynical, but we know that depends on all sorts of things,” Rehm said. “The problem is that students come and go, so the key is that there is continuity in student movements.”
“I would put it this way—SWR is part of the Stanford community. SWR and faculty working together got hundreds of signatures from all over campus—hundreds more than we could have expected,” Palumbo-Liu said. “There is tremendous goodness in people, but again we have become accustomed to think of ourselves in very individualistic ways. SWR was a catalyst that unleashed the potential for Stanford to be its best. I think the more that faculty and students both work together on these issues that affect all of us the better—but first we need to understand what we mean by ‘all of us.’”
Organizing for a Better Future
In his 20 years at Stanford, Daniel has worked both on the night shift — work he performed for his first three years on campus — and day shifts. Though working conditions have improved somewhat in his time on campus, Daniel maintains that there remains much work to be done; the current pandemic has merely re-exposed existing structural flaws in the university’s organization and structure.
Workers, for example, are often given assignments in which maintaining social distance is virtually impossible, despite company guidelines. Often, Daniel said, multiple workers have to clean a confined space — such as an empty dorm room — at the same time in order to finish the work on time. “What the company, or Stanford, has to understand is that they can’t order us to clean this much space in one day — ‘oh, you have to clean 10 dorm rooms,’” Daniel said. “Because if we want to maintain social distance, we can’t have several janitors in the room at the same time — one dusting the furniture, the other vacuuming, and so on.”
Jorge, for his part, had been assigned to a cleaning shift in Green Library. When he spoke to Stanford Politics, he had just finished a shift cleaning four floors, disinfecting the chairs and desks where students might return and study in the near future. When the pandemic first began, the Stanford Daily reported that UG2 had released instructions to workers on how they might make their own masks at home, in lieu of providing masks themselves. While the company has since provided gloves and masks of its own, Jorge noted that many of his coworkers have still been forced to buy their own protective masks, because the ones provided by the company often don’t offer adequate coverage or protection. Instead, many of the workers — who are, according to Jorge’s estimate, covering twice or three times as much space as they normally would — have been given knee pads to help expedite their cleaning.
Further complicating matters are the company’s current policies on sick leave. Under the current Collective Bargaining Agreement, which lasts until 2024, workers accrue roughly one sick day per month and (since sick days and vacation days accumulate based on hours worked). When the pandemic occurred in early March, most workers had thus earned, at best, a total of two or three sick days in 2021, meaning Harvard, by contrast, has given all of its employees the opportunity to use up to 14 days of additional sick leave during the pandemic in order to quarantine or care for sick family members, even if they haven’t technically “earned” them yet according to University policy. In the past, these stringent sick leave policies meant that workers often showed up even if they felt ill, as long as they didn’t have a flu or fever. “Why? Because if we don’t work, we don’t get paid,” Daniel said.
Even now, workers like Daniel and Jorge continue working with a sense of trepidation. Many have already used up their sick days, and so a 14-day quarantine would force them to use whatever vacation days they might have remaining — and possibly go several days, if not weeks, without pay. “What do we expect? To be told ‘ok, do you feel sick? Don’t worry, you’re going to have a salary’ — that would be ideal,” Daniel said. “But the problem is that if we’re at home in quarantine, we’re not going to get paid.”
In the wake of Stanford’s apparent renengement of its promise to provide pay continuance to all laid off workers until the end of August, SWR has continued its social media campaigns with a new message: #StanfordLied. Earlier this summer, two members of SWR, Sefa Santos-Powell and Armaan Rashid, wrote a piece for the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity on re-imagining the future of labor at universities like Stanford. Coupled with skyrocketing housing prices in the Bay Area — which have forced countless workers to commute from places as far as Sacramento — and the already-pernicious system of subcontracting, COVID-19 exacerbated structural inequities which have forced “those at the bottom of Stanford’s race and class hierarchies to choose between health and economic security,” they wrote. Though their efforts are currently focused on providing temporary financial support for workers like Daniel and Jorge, Rashid and Santos-Powell wrote that the mission of SWR extends far beyond COVID-19: “In many ways, our organizing is a kind of counter-organizing — that is, challenging the existing organization of society that Stanford and institutions like it produce, reflect, and, it must be said, often work to ideologically justify through forms of knowledge production….We can only hope new forms of organizing ourselves emerge from this moment of crisis, so that theory and practice need not lie so far apart.”
Despite their efforts, however, they continue to face an uphill battle: Stanford has yet to formally respond to their latest social media campaign, and a recent petition for hazard pay signed by custodians was, as Jorge noted, rejected by UG2 management. As the pandemic continues, the situation appears increasingly bleak for the University’s service workers.
“With Stanford, we don’t have any protection, because the company has the final say,” Daniel said. “Stanford doesn’t care about us.”
Kyle Wang, a junior, is an editor and staff writer for Stanford Politics.