Lt. Gov. Garamendi Headlines Democratic Rally at UC Davis

On Thursday afternoon, four leaders in Democratic politics in this region and this state came to the UC Davis campus in Freeborn Plaza for a campaign rally. There were approximately 150 students who ended listening to the speeches from these four leaders.

The event was organized by the Davis College Democrats--Don Gibson, the President,;Brandon Craig, the Vice President; and Jack Zwald were some of the many key organizers and also introduced several of the main speakers.

The headliner was Lt. Governor John Garamendi, who is going to be one of the Democratic candidate in 2010 for the Governor. Also there were two legislative candidates in Davis and Yolo County--Mariko Yamada who is running as the Democratic nominee for the 8th Assembly District and Lois Wolk who is running as the Democratic nominee for the 5th Senate District in a heated battled against Republican Greg Aghazarian. Finally, Bill Camp, head of the Sacramento Central Labor Council.

John Garamendi gave an impassioned and fiery speech attacking John McCain, Sarah Palin, the Republicans, talking about education and the state budget.

The Lt. Governor began generally:

"We are one month away from one of the most important elections that we have had in a generation, your generation. This is about you Davis students, this is about your future. It is about how this nation is going to represent itself across the world. Whether we are going to continue with the war in Iraq, whether we are actually going to finally deal with the terrorists that attacked this country, or whether we are going to be diverted on a false war brought to us on false premises, by a false president."

Garamendi then talked about Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin:

"There is a debate tonight. Oh come now. It is important who the Vice President is. You look back on the recent history of this nation and it is common that the Vice President becomes the President. This is about the Presidency. This is about who could become President and tonight we are going to see a defining moment in this election... When a person makes a choice about who they choose to be their successor, which is what happens when you choose the Vice Presidential candidate, you're making a statement about your values as President. You're making a statement about how you perceive this nation's future. There's difference here, Barack Obama made a choice, and he reached back to a very successful, well experienced individual who understands foreign policy, who understands the nature of public policy in the United States, whether it's the economy, social, economic issues, environmental issues, international issues... And he chose Joe Biden. A man with experience in the issues of this nation. A man with experience in the issues of the world. Solid. Knowledgeable. Capable of being President. It tells you about the way in which the next President thinks."

"Now at the Republican Convention, McCain came up with a surprise. You draw your own conclusions here. I drew mine. Experience--limited. Knowledge--watch TV. Go to youtube. It's there to be seen. Ability to debate--we'll find out tonight. Ability to be President... oh no we're not talking about Palin, we're talking about McCain making one of the most fundamental decisions that a President must make. That is to choose somebody who could become President at any moment. This is not an academic exercise, this is not about learning. This is about John McCain and how he thinks. Ultimately it's about governing."

Garamendi then talked about the bailout Bill:

"Wall Street walked away with tens of billions of dollars and left mom and pop in Davis and Stockton with mortgages that they couldn't possibly pay, this is time for a change. This afternoon, Congress will vote on a bailout bill. Fortunately the Democrats stood up to the President, to Secretary of the Treasury Paulson, and said wait a minute, enough already for the high and the mighty. We want this bill to at least have something for the homeowners, for main street, for the men and women out there that are losing their jobs, losing their homes, they did the best they could. It's a much improved bill. It's not the one I would like to see. But it's the one we need... But do not forget the policy that the Republican administration and the Republican congress brought before the American people. They brought a policy that once again took care of their friends at the top.

"Some people want to say this is economic class warfare, and the answer is that's exactly what they have done to the American public is to create an economic class war because they have made the wealthy, wealthier and the poor and the working men and women, poorer. And it is time for a change and we're going to do that."

Garamendi then talked about the California Budget deal.

"Here in California, this is the worst budget in all of my years dating back to 1974. The worst budget ever was signed by the Governor. And in the process of signing it, he made even worse. He took out his veto pen and he took $500 million away from the poor, from the elderly, from the disabled, and from those who depend upon the public sector for their basic health care and indeed their livelihood and lives. It was mean spirited and it was wrong.

"That budget also had another problem, and it's right here on this campus, just to keep pace, with the number of students that come to the campuses of the University of California and inflation, we needed $300 million more. Not to add, not to enhance, not to provide the classes so that you can graduate in four years rather than five or six, but to simply keep pace. The budget is $200 million short of that and of that $100 million that was added, you the students throughout the university campuses, you paid $130 million of that amount of money. It is wrong and I'm telling you we have got to stop it. We must stop it now.

"The great California society and education was built on a free public education at every level, K through 12, the community colleges, the University of California, the State University System, and it is rapidly disappearing because of some wrongheaded policies and total lack of history of California. A free public education no longer exists in California. The taxes that were increased in this budget were minuscule except for one... The single biggest tax increase was a tax on students. It is called a fee indirectly because it is nothing but a very direct tax on students."

"Some of you are studying government, some of you are studying economics, I want you to study a particularly stupid tax. When you tax students you have done something incredibly stupid. President Yudoff, you've listened to me and I want you to listen right now, NO MORE STUDENT FEE INCREASES. Not in this budget. Not in the next budget. And not in the budgets ahead. Because you will deny access to the students who will build the California economy in the future, who will be the teachers, who will be the engineers, who will be the researchers. Stop it! Stop it now! No more tax on students."

"Study the history of California. Study how this state became the 7th wealthiest economy in the world. It was done with the best education system in the world. We are not there today... You cannot do it on the cheap. Starve the education system and you will starve the future of California. And we are well on the way to slow starvation diet today. In 1990, the state, the economy of California, the people of California supported the University of California students to a tune of $15,000 per student. Last year, the people of California, the economy, the seventh largest economy in the world, supported the students at the University of California at a rate of $10,000 per student. A full one-third decrease in the support that the people of California provided to the students who will be the future economy. That is stupid economy policy. That is bad tax policy. And I want every student, on every campus, to rise up and say, enough already. We will not have this anymore, we understand the history of this great state. We know that when the wealth of this great state is spent on the future generations, that economic wealth occurs along with social justice."

Bill Camp was the first speaker. He urged people to put elect Mariko Yamada to the State Assembly and Lois Wolk to the State Senate. He said he was a strong supporter of Mariko Yamada, candidate for the State Assembly, but Lois Wolk is the one now who faces the tough challenge.

"Lois Wolk will be a fighter because she's from Davis. You put her in the State Senate and she'll make sure that everyone that comes in to be a regent respects you and respects your educational opportunity. You want to do something about the misuse of power by Arnold Schwartzenegger and the UC Regents, you get Lois Wolk elected. She's the one who will be your voice and fighter."

Bill Camp told the students that he talks to people in Honduras and all around the world, and everyone is watching this election. He told the students, "It is you who can turn the world around." He emphasized how important this election was to this country and this world. "I beg you to be a part of this Democratic process, to be the champion to lead this nation."

Assembly Candidate Mariko Yamada was introduced by former Davis School Board Candidate and Vice Chair of the Yolo County Democratic Central Committee Bob Schelen as an underdog who won the nomination and a fighter for the values of the underdogs.

Yamada told the crowd:

"It was a very very tough and grueling primary that we came through. Yes, we were the underdogs. But we went direct to the people with our message. It goes to show you that all the money and all the hype in the world, does not replace good old fashioned hard work, effort, and connecting directly with the voters. And that's what this theme is today. Just what brother Bill Camp just said, the whole world is watching us..."

Finally Senate Candidate Lois Wolk addressed the crowd. She attacked her opponent, Assemblyman Greg Aghazarian and Assembly Republicans.

"I am running in the Senate, as you've heard, against someone who won't even mention the fact that he's a Republican. He won't mention his party. He's not proud he's a Republican. He never mentions it and I understand why. In the Assembly, the Republicans and my opponent have opposed some very interesting bills.

They have opposed the successful effort to ban lead from children's candy. Think about that for a minute. The Governor, a Republican, signed that bill.

They have opposed cleaning up the polluted air in the valley. One in four children takes an inhaler to school. Think about that.

They have opposed most recently the effort to clean up the shoddy mortgage broker practices that have been occurring in this state. Think about that in a Senate district that is probably number one in terms of foreclosures.

They and my opponent have opposed flood protection for homeowners in the Central Valley--an area that floods all too commonly.

And they voted against protecting seniors from those whose caregivers would steal their money.

That's why Republicans are running away from being Republicans."

Wolk faces a tough challenge for the Senate seat left open by termed out Senator Mike Machado. It is a district that has a 15 point Democratic advantage, but it is one of just two open and targeted seats by the Republicans who are pumping in millions in support of Assemblyman Aghazarian. Mariko Yamada faces an easier challenge in the heavily Democratic 8th Assembly District that encompasses Yolo and East Solano County.

Lt. Governor John Garamendi announced this summer he will run for the Governorship. He ran back in 1994 but lost to then State Controller Kathleen Brown. Some of the possible opposition are San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome, Los Angeles Mayor and Former Speaker of the Assembly Antonio Villaraigosa, Attorney General and Former Governor Jerry Brown, and possibly State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell. That would be in 2010.

In the meantime, the Presidential race and the legislative races are focal points in this area. Democrats are relying heavily on strong student turnout for Barack Obama and a host of other issues.

---Doug Paul Davis reporting

Lamar Heystek's Persistence Pays Off in Consensus on Living Wage for City Employees

It has been a long and at times difficult road that Councilmember Lamar Heystek has taken en route to the first step towards a $13 per hour living wage for city employees and city contracted employees.

Some of the same Councilmembers, specifically Stephen Souza and Don Saylor, who praised the persistence and patience of Councilmember Heystek on Tuesday night, had put up roadblocks in the past toward achieving a living wage ordinance.

In Councilmember Lamar Heystek's second meeting on the Davis City Council, on August 1, 2006, he brought up the issue of having a living wage for all businesses in Davis larger than 50 employees. The Council led then by Don Saylor and Stephen Souza voted by a 3-2 margin not to agendize the item for discussion. Instead they encouraged Councilmember Heystek to bring the item back as a Councilmember item--which meant it would not have staff prepared remarks or a recommendation.

When Councilmember Heystek did this back in September 19, 2006, he was excoriated by both Councilmembers Souza and Saylor for "playing politics."

Councilmember Don Saylor was particularly vicious in his criticism:

“There’s just a number of questions about this,” Councilman Don Saylor said. “To bring it up as a discussion is appropriate. To bring it up as a full-blown ordinance for a first reading, that’s not talking about policy, that’s talking about politics in a lead-up to an election.”

It was thus not without irony that Don Saylor remarked on Tuesday night, that this was how he preferred to have the item brought up--with a full staff report that weighed in on how other cities have dealt with living wage ordinances, what the pay rates for such an ordinance might be, and the overall cost to the city in terms of increased wages.

Bill Camp from the Sacramento Central Labor Council and Guy Rinfrow from the United Healthcare Workers both came forward during public comment to press for a living wage.

Don Saylor had first requested a special study to be commissioned on the impact to the city budget and business, but the labor leaders rejected this as a delay tactic. It was in many ways, akin to punting on first down.

Again it was Lamar Heystek who took the lead and spoke passionately about the need for people to be able to afford to live in Davis on what they are earning. In particular, he looked toward at minimum paying people what they could afford to pay if they received affordable housing in Davis. Our pay scale at present does not even pay that amount to the workers earning the lowest wages.

The point was brought up that the City of Davis was pressing UC Davis to bring its food service workers in house, yet how can the city have standing to complain about UC tactics, if they themselves do not practice what they preach.

There was strong consensus on council to bring back a living wage ordinance, with a full economic impact report, for discussion and approval by the summer.

Meanwhile, the council had to determine what to do with two outsourced contracts to landscaping and janitorial services.

Councilmember Don Saylor moved that we approve the contract for another year and then once the living wage ordinance was in place, they could sign a new contract when this one expired. However, this motion did not appear to have support.

Once again Lamar Heystek passionately said that he could not in good conscience agree to an outsourced contract that did not pay living wage. He pushed for the contract to contain a minimum of $13.11 per hour. For a time it appeared that this might be the consensus of three Councilmembers.

However, then Don Saylor moved for a substitute that would expire at the end of the calendar year and thus not extend the contract beyond this year.

One could see that Councilmember Stephen Souza was conflicted on this. Both Councilmember Saylor and Assistant City Manager Paul Navazio pushed him on the item, particularly with their view that the city had not yet done an impact study to see the economic impact of a $13.11 wage. This pressure eventually got to Councilmember Stephen Souza and he joined Saylor and Mayor Pro Tem Asmundson to pass the contract extension by a 3-2 vote. Mayor Sue Greenwald remained firmly with Councilmember Heystek in opposition to any contract extension that did not carry with it a living wage provision.

It seemed clear that Councilmember Saylor thought he was going to get full council consensus, but Heystek and Greenwald remained adamant in their convictions. The same could not be said for Stephen Souza who eventually caved under the pressure of his colleague.

However, this setback should not overlook the great progress made on the issue of living wage. But it is not enough to merely implement it for city contracts. The city of Davis should ensure that employees of large businesses--not the small business that has a handful of employees--but the large businesses that can afford to pay a bit more in salary so that people can afford to live in Davis are paid a living wage.

We are always talking about affordable housing and providing housing for people of moderate means and yet we usually only deal on that side of the equation and never look toward the wages side of the equation. The information that came from this discussion was sobering. Our lowest wage earners for the city do not make enough even to live in affordable housing projects. That simply cannot continue.

Many of these workers live outside of Davis and have to commute 20 to 25 miles to get to work. Thus, the lack of a living wage is not merely an economic issue, but it is also an environmental issue. The amount of carbon emissions and gas consumed indicates that our wage policies in Davis are a detriment to the environment and efforts at curbing global warming.

Were it not for the vision and tenacity of Lamar Heystek, this issue would not even be on the radar. He has exhibited true leadership on this issue that has earned the respect even of those colleagues who have opposed him from the start.

---Doug Paul Davis reporting

Labor Leader Bill Camp Outraged at UC Davis for Treatment of Food Service Workers and Protesters

Bill Camp is an old-time, bare knuckles, labor organizer now with the Sacramento Central Labor Council. The Sacramento Central Labor Council is a council of the all of the unions in the six counties around Sacramento, including Yolo County. The workers and their unions send delegates to a council meeting each month, they select officers every three years, and those officers hire staff. Bill Camp is the chief executive officer selected by the elected board. Their job is to speak for working families, mobilize support for organizing, and mobilize political support to elect people for office who will support working families.

Last Wednesday Bill Camp, 63, was one of several protesters who entered Mrak Hall, sat down on the first floor and was arrested for failure to disperse. And in fact, the protesters including Camp, were charged with not only failure to disperse but also trespassing.

The protesters went into the building in advance to see how to enter the building. They tried to see Chancellor Vanderhoef, but access to his office was blocked, and he was not there. Camp, wearing a tie and slacks, appeared as though he was some “old professor,” to use his words. The protesters went up to the second floor because they couldn’t get up to the fifth floor where the chancellor’s office is located. So, they went to the fourth floor and were going to walk up to the fifth floor.

“What is different is everyone has text message, so we could text message all the time about where everybody was. So all of a sudden my phone gets a beep that says ‘cops in the stairwell be careful.’ You don’t even have to talk to each other, you just text message. ‘So meet you on the second floor.’ Text messaging was our secret,” said Camp.

So they all went into the conference room on the second floor and that’s where they hung out and hung out the window to rile up the crowd.

Mr. Camp felt that their approach really threw the university off in terms of what to expect and how to approach the protesters.

“The students were super, super nice to the university, nobody could complain about the students, but on the other hand they were very militant. So they were not going to get pushed around. So this was confusing to the university because they saw the militancy and they said, no this is a principle and we’re staying with the principle, we’re going to jail. But we’re not going to be jerks about it. We’re just going to go jail.”

The university let them have the conference room but they had to vacate at 5 pm. They went back inside and sat in a circle.

“But before we left we closed all the windows, put the chairs under the table, we picked up all the trash. You couldn’t ask for anybody to be more respectful. On the other hand, all of us were going to get arrested; there wasn’t any question about that.”

“It was an interesting mix, because it strategically really threw them off. They expect us to be jerks, but we’re not going to be jerks, but we’re not going to refuse not to get arrested, so they were very confused about that.”

So they were inside and could not see what was happening outside.

“I don’t know what happened, but my suspicion was that they freaked out about the students outside and they got scared. So they started arresting us guys. The reason they arrested us was to get us away from you [the protesters outside].”



The police officer came in and was sweating the whole time. He tells them it’s an unlawful assembly, they have to leave and if they don’t leave in three minutes they will get arrested. So of course, they all refuse to leave because it is their intent to get arrested. So one-by-one they arrest each of the protesters, read them their rights and asked them if they understand. It took over an hour to arrest all of the protesters including Camp—that is how methodically they did it.

“I’m sixty-three years old and it was clear I don’t move very fast, so I’m getting up and they ask me if I want a chair. I said yes. So they got me a chair. That’s about the funniest thing about it.”

They take them to the bus. They ask them if they would cooperate in the interest of good faith. Camp believes it was the city of Davis Police who took them to the bus.

As they take them to the bus, Bill Camp starts yelling “Si se puede!” “It freaked out the police officer, maybe she doesn’t know Spanish, I don’t know. But she got rattled. So she starts dragging me toward the bus. She was a UC Cop. She was mad that I was chanting. Maybe she didn’t know what I was saying. I almost fell down. I was kind of sorry that I didn’t fall, because she was in a hurry to get me onto the bus so I couldn’t chant anymore”

The bus was extremely hot, Camp felt that they had intentionally cut the AC to make it hotter. And they had the handcuffs on with their hands behind their back. They stretched the tendons in the arm and they left the handcuffs on for several hours. They didn’t take them off until about 6:00 pm. and they had put them around 1:30 or 2:00 pm. Even a week later Camp still complains about pain in his arm.

“That’s against procedure; you don’t put handcuffs on for that long. You simply put them on there to make sure I’m not going to do something bad.”

Mr. Camp was skeptical not only about the way they were treated after the arrest, but also he believes that the charges were being trumped up in order to punish and discourage the protesters.

“Normally you would simply cite and release, this is not a crime, it is simply a failure to disperse.” He believed that someone called the police and told them that they cannot put people in jail for a failure to disperse, that they therefore needed a stronger charge.

“Failure to disperse is nothing, this is a free speech thing, you don’t put people in jail for union organizing.”

What Camp argues now is that the nature of the police in this circumstance would change and that the police began to operate not as a civil authority that would protect the public from lawbreakers and moved into the realm of a more traditional role for the police in labor disputes and actively became the arm of the university as the employer who intended to break the labor dispute using heavy-handed tactics.

“At this point, the UC Davis police quit being police officers as a civil authority and became agents of the employers who were out to punish people for organizing the union. That is a classic characterization of what we call animus, animus meaning in my experience, meanness. When an employer gets real mean, about the way they treat the workers who are trying to unionize. The Davis University police officers quit being police officers and they became agents, anti-union agents of the chancellor [Chancellor Vanderhoef].”

They then took the protestors to the Davis Police Department and cited them for trespassing.

“I said ‘what the hell do you mean we were trespassing?’ We were sitting in a small circle; we weren’t blocking anybody’s egress and access. People were all doing business there in the building. We weren’t trespassing, this was public property at 2 pm in the afternoon, what the hell are you talking about, we weren’t trespassing. This is a government building, it’s 2:00 in the afternoon, we’re not trespassing.”

So why did they give them a trespassing charge—because it was the only excuse they had to put them in jail. Otherwise they really did not have any reason to put them in jail. That took a couple of hours; they took them from the Davis Police Department to the county jail in Woodland. The bus driver had turned off the air conditioning. It was a very hot day and they were extremely hot and uncomfortable on that bus. They did not get the handcuffs off until around 6:00 pm and they couldn’t call anyone until they were processed.

They processed others through and they let the protesters just sit there for quite awhile. They kept one guy in jail until 12:30 am.

“I know Ed Prieto, and Ed in my opinion is not an anti-union guy. So someone told those cops, someone told those officers in that jail to mess with us and to leave that guy in there until 12:30. That ain’t right. I think Ed needs to be asked about that because this is stupid, this is for a failure to quit. They are trying to punish people for trying to get a union contract.”

There is a principle involved here too. As Camp suggested, “We are not trying to get a contract for people making 50 bucks an hour, we are trying to get a contract for people making nine bucks an hour.”

One of the most interesting aspects of this to Camp was the tradition at UC Davis as an agricultural university that often relied on contract labor. “The most exploitative contract system in the world is the labor contract system. So this tradition of using labor contractors like Sodexho, to deny that there is a collective bargaining relation is nuts. It’s not nuts, but it should be embarrassing. It should be embarrassing that the university has adopted this old labor system that has been discredited by the entire state. When we wrote the labor law, we wrote that you can’t do that.”

He found it exciting to work with and be with the students. He found it a great group of students and they got to talk about the history of the labor movement--how it got organized before and civil rights. He found it a great experience personally and grew to have great respect for the students.

I asked Bill Camp to elaborate as to what this fight is about. Why they are fighting for fair wages and good benefits for the food service workers.

According to Camp there is a deep tradition going back to Lincoln where “everyone should have a chance to try to build a middle class life.” And the civil war was a battle as much over class as over race. The landowners in the south concentrated wealth at the expense of everyone else—not just the slaves. There were a few people super rich and everyone else was poor. Reagan came along and tried to destroy the unions, “he came up with the philosophy that Bush has, let’s make everyone super rich, if a few people become super rich, then somehow this money will trickle down, which is a lie. The only way you build a real healthy economy is if you build economic demand, and the only way you build economic demand is to give people enough money so that they go out and spend.”

“The fact of the matter is, the war that’s going on, this fight, is about you create jobs that pay enough money so that people can have a reasonable life, that’s what drives economic growth. The reason everybody in this state has a stake in the fight of these food service workers, is if we establish a principle, now the food service worker deserves to get a fair wage, that’s what this country is about, that’s what we’ve been about since the day we were founded...”

This fight is about good jobs and a healthy economy.

“You don’t build a healthy economy, without building healthy jobs. And you don’t have a healthy society without healthy jobs. If you keep everyone exploited and low wage, you create a set of values like the southern slave system.”

The fight is about taking these 500 food service workers and training them to get better jobs where they can get even better wages. We are losing out on an opportunity when we take the approach of trying to exploit the labor of these workers.

“George Bush represents a set of values to make a few people super rich and the rest of us slaves. We represent a set of values that says that everyone ought to have their work respected and they ought to have a chance at a middle class life.”

What does this mean for these particular workers?

“It means if they join a union, they will join a union of about 20,000 members statewide.” They will be members of AFSCME local 3299, “every other campus, those workers who do the same work as these workers, get paid about 12 bucks an hour, they get health care, as far as I know they work out some strategy for a pension.”

“Would they ever get paid enough? No, no one ever gets paid enough, but the fact of the matter is that they wouldn’t be vulnerable, they would have the same protections that other state workers have.”

He sees this as a way to empower the food service workers, make them part of a larger group with political power and leverage over bargaining. They would not be able to be fired indiscriminately, they would get health care, and they would gain real political power.

Some people have suggested that the way to go about this is by unionizing Sodexho workers rather than making the food service workers university employees. Camp very strongly disagrees with this.

“Sodexho is not an employer in the true sense of the word. Sodexho does not decide how much people get paid and whether they get health benefits. That’s decided by the university, so Sodexho would have a fake relationship.”

The key here is that there has to be an actual collective bargaining relationship and that requires a discussion with the entity that controls the purse strings. In this case, that is not Sodexho, who is a third party, but rather the university.

“You can’t have collective bargaining with someone who doesn’t have the power to make the decisions about wage and worker conditions. In all of the other bargaining that goes around in the country, you represent workers and I represent management, I have a pile of money and I get to decide what I do with that pile of money. You have to have a direct relationship with me, not through some third party that doesn’t control the money. It’s the university that collects the student fees and decides how much of that is going to go to food service. So it is the university who is the employer. You can’t have collective bargaining unless you have the real employer who has real power. It only can work within the confines of what the university wants to tell them.”

Vanderhoef sent a letter to the organizers, that was read last week, basically suggesting that the university has a contract with Sodexho until 2010 and that they intend to honor that contract. According to Camp, this does not matter. They have no obligation to honor a labor contract with Sodexho. “The university is the employer, so they cannot say they can disobey the law and not honor our contractual obligations to these employees.” As an entity of the State of California, the University has an obligation to bargain with their employees, and these are their employees regardless of whether or not there is a middle man. “They have admitted, though they’d never use these direct words, that these workers are their employees.”

There were complaints by people in the building about the behavior of the protests—loud banging on the windows, intimidation, and fear. I asked Mr. Camp if he saw any of that.

“I think someone gone and lied to those employees and told them this was dangerous. There wasn’t anything dangerous about that event.” You can feel if there is danger and Camp did not feel any danger or concern while he was in the building. He admitted that they made a loud racket, but that’s their free speech right. People have the right to complain about the exercise of free speech rights, but that doesn’t mean people do not have the right to express themselves. “People are angry about the exploitation and abuse of these workers.” He felt that the employees should be more upset that the university is treating fellow employees in that way.

According to an UCD employee who works in Mrak Hall and with whom I spoke some of the banging on the doors and windows was from students who wanted to get in because they had appointments and or had to get paperwork processed. They called stating that they couldn’t get in.

Camp said he never felt any fear, but he did see people acting as though they were afraid. “We told them, you have nothing to be afraid of, this is just a labor organizing demonstration. But somebody freaked them out, I guess they told them that someone would come in and hurt them. But I don’t know. Somebody freaked them out, it wasn’t us.”

I also asked him whether he thought they overreacted by locking down the building. He felt that they overreacted by the way they treated the protesters by keeping them in handcuffs as long as they did. He thought that was an overreaction.

“They could easily have left someone at the door; they were not going to get into a shoving match.” He was not outside and could not see outside. However, “everyone inside was sure super nice, I couldn’t imagine someone shoving people. So I don’t think they had to lock it down… They did and it kind of created a fortress mentality. And that’s behaving in a way that motivates us to even be more loud. I think there were other ways to do it.”

It is clear that this is a dispute that is not going to go away anytime soon. The protesters and the workers are committed to their cause, but unfortunately the university believes that they can break the will of the workers and the protesters by out-waiting them. This dispute is likely to carry into the summer. It is time that people put pressure on the administration and Chancellor Vanderhoef to put an end to this. The policies of the university are frankly an embarrassment in a liberal and progressive community such as Davis that cherishes the rights of protest and the rights of workers to organize. Serious questions must be asked about the role of the university police, the Sheriff’s Department, and Jeff Reisig’s District Attorney’s Office who made the decision to charge the protesters with trespassing as opposed to the more reasonable and moderate charge of failure to disperse. Are these law enforcement organizations acting on the behest of the university as an agent, as Bill Camp so eloquently states, in order to help crush the protest. If so, Davis and Yolo County residents must ask where the priorities of this Sheriff’s Department and District Attorney’s office lie.

---Doug Paul Davis reporting