A Matter of Facts
Maxwell Fertik
→MFA 2023
Now that crits and commencement are over, allow yourself a moment of reflection. A strike happened this semester. It ended successfully for the Teamster 251 Union. The posters have been quietly taken down and students are basically all gone. But there are lessons we will not forget. If there is one I hope we all remember in particular, it is simply that in the face of confusion and lack of clear information around the strike, RISD students went out of their way to seek out and share the facts.
For most of us, emails from HR and the President’s Office were the primary source of information about what was going on with the strike. But, while repeatedly citing “good faith,” the language of these emails was opaque. They included phrases like “unreasonable demands related to benefits and excessive demands for compensation” (3/22) and “unwilling to have productive discussions about wages and benefits” (3/31) that took sides (fair enough) but also provided no concrete financial information through which anyone might better understand what was actually at stake. This lack of transparency gave the impression that everything had to stay behind the closed doors of a negotiation table. Students were not having it.
After receiving these emails and repeatedly getting bounced around campus by RISD administration when she inquired about details, Sarah Alix Mann (MID ’24) took it upon herself to get information from the union itself. It was Day 3 of the strike when Sarah went down to the picket line and spoke to a Teamsters leader who was happy to talk and share a binder full of information and data tables. She asked if sharing this type of information was okay and he said yes, please share. This data soon became the prominent series of bright yellow posters put together by a team of first-year Industrial Design graduate students. At last, some basic, clear accounting!
Suddenly Sarah had an idea. Inspired by the monumental, reply-all “Nah this ain’t it” message (3/25) from student Isaiah Raines (aka Prophet) that was approved by an unknown Student Affairs moderator and sent to the entire RISD community, Sarah wrote an open letter to President Williams disputing RISD’s claims that financial and negotiation information “cannot be shared publicly” (4/7) despite the union saying and doing otherwise. The letter ends by stating, “We are ready for your actions to align with your words” and a request for a detailed response. Sarah’s attempt to email to all RISD addresses her letter about transparency was, it turned out, blocked by account administrators.
And so, she tried another way, posting the letter around campus as an analogue “Re:[Students].”
So again, here’s the lesson: students want information about their institution and its issues, and they will figure out how to get it. Which begs the question: why not just make it available in the first place? Wouldn’t that be an apt expression of “good faith”?