“I need you to treat me like a human being” Joyce said.
She addressed the audience in front of her but the statement wasn’t meant for the crowded room of college students. Joyce is asking her employer, T-Mobile, to start giving their employees the respect they deserve.
Thursday night was the worker’s speak out, hosted by the on campus group United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), that addressed the injustices T-Mobile workers are experiencing. T-Mobile workers, both call center and retail, are under an immense amount of pressure and “unrealistic expectations” to sell and perform. They are forced to try and sell customers items they don’t need and are harassed if they don’t make ridiculously high quotas. The stress is so intense that “people had committed suicide on the property”.
Joyce and two other workers, Tiara and Zelig, told their stories about working with T-Mobile and all the problems they’ve encountered. The stress, the harassment, the long hours, unreasonable shifts, lying from management, and fraudulent schemes are only some of the issues. These workers, and many others like them, are fighting for a union. They are asking for is workplace representation and the chance to bargain for a better future.
Where does Rutgers come in? USAS wants Rutgers to end their contract with T-Mobile. By cutting contracts with unjust companies, Rutgers can say they are for human rights and against corporations not caring about the people who they employ.
Recently USAS won a huge campaign when it pressured ADIDAS to pay 1.8 million dollars in severance pay to workers of a factory they shut down. That money is the difference between being able to send children to school and put food on the table or not. But they aren’t done yet! Now they are tackling T-Mobile.
The worker’s speak out was a success because three people were able to tell their stories and have their voices heard. People actually listened. Which is quite a novelty considering that most of what people hear is negative. Whether it’s the news or in class or from their friends, people are confronted with dismal information so much that it starts to not even effect them. It starts to all just sound like the hiss from a broken stereo.
But if we never listened, if we blocked everything out, how would we connect with other humans? If we never heard the bad stuff, would we fully appreciate the good stuff? There would be nothing to gauge it against. This is exactly why we all need to go out and help the T-Mobile workers unionize. We’ve heard their bad stuff, and once we win, we can hear their good stuff too. We are all human beings on this earth that just want to be treated as such.
So go meet up with USAS (Wednesdays at 9:30 in Scott Hall second floor) and do some work.
Here’s a chant to get you started:
What’s disgusting?
Union busting!
Sarah Beth Kaye is a contributor for the Rutgers Review community.
