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Like schools across the country, Oberlin College has gone remote in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. As students left campus on March 16, many mourned not only the loss of community and increased financial strain that returning home would bring, but also the effective defanging of a powerful and growing student-labor solidarity movement founded roughly a month earlier. Oberlin’s solidarity organizing, which is attempting to save 108 unionized campus jobs threatened by outsourcing, is part of the growing movement for labor rights in higher education. Like Oberlin, campuses across the country — most notably, graduate students in the University of California system striking for a cost-of-living adjustment — have faced unforeseen barriers to their organizing efforts as a result of campus closures. But these closures also underscore the importance of the issues organizers were already mobilizing around: in order to survive, during normal times, and especially during an emergency, people need sustainable livelihoods and health care. As Oberlin moves to outsource the positions of 108 unionized workers who are, at this moment, sanitizing the campus against COVID-19, it is leaving them at risk of losing their jobs, health care, and paid sick leave in the midst of a global pandemic. The college is engaged in a particularly deadly form of union-busting.

United Against Union-Busting Oberlin’s labor solidarity movement launched on February 18, when Oberlin president Carmen Twillie Ambar announced in a campus-wide email that the college was considering contracting with outside vendors to replace 108 unionized positions in the dining services and custodial departments represented by the United Auto Workers (UAW). This proposal, which the college claims would save more than $2 million, would eliminate roughly 70 percent of the UAW bargaining unit at Oberlin and dismantle much of the union’s power. In other words, this was a proposal to bust the union. Less than twenty-four hours after the email was released, more than 800 students — almost a third of Oberlin’s student body — gathered to protest in Oberlin’s main academic building, demanding a reversal of the proposal. Since then, organizers held a demonstration each week, rallying to support the UAW at their first negotiating meeting and delivering over 4,500 petition signatures from students, alumni, and the surrounding community, demanding a reversal of the proposal to Oberlin’s board of trustees, as well as arranging teach-ins, banner drops, and art events with workers and students. More than 2,600 alumni, including prominent program funders, have pledged to cease all donations to Oberlin if the outsourcing occurs. Statements of solidarity have come from major unions like SEIU and the Chicago Teachers Union, congressional candidates, US senator Sherrod Brown, prominent advocacy groups like Make the Road and the Working Families Party, and student-worker movements from colleges and universities across the country. Yet Oberlin administrators have so far refused to change their stance. The organizing efforts at Oberlin are part of a growing workers’ movement in higher education that is gaining strength across the nation. Graduate students, faculty members, and staff across campuses at the University of California have gone on strike in opposition to the neoliberalization of higher education, withholding their labor and disrupting the university until their demands for a cost-of-living adjustment have been met. But as students are moved off campus to limit the virus’s spread, the momentum and solidarity built through countless hours of in-person meetings and actions has been abruptly curtailed. Students can’t demonstrate during a quarantine, so the pressure on administrators has been greatly reduced.