BU service workers hold final rally before contract negotiation deadline

Boston University service workers held a final rally Tuesday, featuring a speech by Boston City Councillor At-Large Ayanna Pressley, before their contract with the university expires Wednesday at midnight.

A few hundred members of the union and the BU community attended the rally, which took place in Marsh Plaza.

The rally began with speeches by BU service workers, along with students and faculty standing in solidarity with the workers’ cause.

Quinn Angelou-Lysaker, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences, said BU’s actions in contract negotiations could only be explained by greed, and that she was tired of BU being run like a corporation rather than a university.

“I go to a school that has broken its budget reserve asset records for the fifth year in a row and a school that gives each of its students individual lobsters every year for dinner,” Angelou-Lysaker said. “In this context, there is absolutely no excuse and no justification for the attacks on workers’ healthcare and wages.”

Pressley started her speech by commending BU students’ activism on behalf of service workers as well as their support of immigrants, LGBTQ individuals and other marginalized communities. A news analysis she had read claimed that young people are uninformed and only support “the hot and sexy thing,” she said, an idea she disagreed with.

“What you saw demonstrated here today is counter to that,” Pressley said. “[Young people] do do their homework, and boy, have they been schooling us.”

Pressley herself attended BU, and she said that the university prepared her to make a contribution to “this Commonwealth, to my community and to our country.”

“It’s high time that we stop teaching values and espousing values that we’re not ready to put into practice,” she said.

Pressley said the whole of Boston City Council has the workers’ backs.

“There’s nothing charitable about our demonstration and our solidarity,” Pressley said. “This is reciprocity for what you are owed, for what you contribute to our communities, to our workforce, to our economy every single day.”

After hearing from BU service workers, students and Pressley, rally attendees marched from Marsh Plaza to 1 Silber Way, where BU President Robert Brown’s office is located.

Marchers participated in call-and-response chants such as “Workers united will never be defeated” and “When I say union, you say power.”

Upon reaching the intersection of Commonwealth Avenue and Silber Way, rallygoers marched in a circle in the street, blocking throughgoing traffic.

More BU service workers and students spoke outside 1 Silber Way, along with Brian Doherty, the secretary treasurer of the Building and Construction Trades Council of the Metropolitan District.

Doherty said Boston construction union members will stand with the BU service workers if they choose to strike — an action the BU workers voted to authorize Oct. 24.

“It’s very comfortable when your lights work and your bathrooms work and your elevators work,” Doherty said, “but when you reach out to the trades and say, ‘Hey we need something fixed,’ we’re going to say ‘we don’t cross picket lines.’”

If contract negotiations are not settled by the Wednesday deadlines, BU’s service members have voted to authorize a strike.

CAS senior Liam Soper said he attended the rally because he thinks it is important that service workers’ voices are heard.

“When, in society, we have a lot of inequality stemming from workers’ unions declining, it is extremely important that their voices get heard and that people get their minimum fair share of rights and labor contracts,” Soper said, “because it’s the absolute minimum we can do, especially on BU campus, where we have so much wealth.”

Liam Soper’s father, David Soper, is a BU custodian and member of 32BJ Service Employees International Union. He said the workers are trying to hold on to their health insurance.

“If they go through with the plan they want to give us, this could be very expensive for us,” David Soper said. “And right now, we pay $1,800 a year just to park here.”