The UW-Madison Student Labor Action Coalition announced Wednesday it has decided not to actively oppose the Student Union Initiative.
This decision may come as a surprise to UW-Madison students because, according to SLAC, the group is largely responsible for the sizeable turnout that overwhelmingly voted down the initiative three times last year before the results were thrown out due to a botched electronic voting system.
Eric Hoyt, UW-Madison sophomore and SLAC member said one of the main reasons for the group’s non-active opposition was UW-Madison administration’s compliance in passing the Limited Term Employee policy, which gives all UW-Madison LTEs a living wage of $10.23 per hour and will begin to convert some LTE positions into full-time ones.
“Basically, we saw the administrators at the university were the ones pushing for the initiative, and they also factored the LTE policy, a bargaining point, and we are happy with that,” Hoyt said.
SLAC member and UW-Madison senior Ashok Kumar expressed a similar belief.
“The university gave us a huge victory on this because they increased the wages of 2500 employees by $3 an hour, our exact demand, and they allowed 500 workers to unionize,” Kumar said.
Another reason for the group’s lack of opposition is the generous corporate and alumni funding the SUI has received, Hoyt said.
Although they are not actively opposing the initiative, Kumar and SLAC member and UW-Madison sophomore Molly Glasgow said they have reason for not being in favor of it.
“We still feel there are parts of the initiative that could be altered to make it a better rounded policy, such as an opt-out option for students who may not be able to afford the added student fees and a clause that illustrated the union’s commitment to workers’ rights,” Glasgow said in a release.
“We’re still in opposition of the plan because we believe that the state should pay for these differences and that students in general are kind of being conned into this, but in general we believe that the administration has given us what we’ve demanded after a 10-year campaign and that’s why we’re not fighting it,” Kumar said.
