By SHANNON O. WELLS
One only needs to hear Molly Ritter speak for a minute to pick up on the pride and inspiration she finds as a project coordinator in the Department of Psychology.
“I love it. The work is engaging,” she said during a staff union-related campus rally on Oct. 25. “Our lab’s mission to prevent child maltreatment is deeply personal and motivating to me. And I get to work with the most amazing team of women.
“They are brilliant,” she added. “They are passionate, and they inspire and teach me every day.”
Ritter is equally passionate about her co-workers’ well-being and how the University compensates them for their service and devotion. She said Michaela Davis, her psychology department colleague, has directly contributed to “bringing significant funding and prestige” to the University,” and yet “still makes so little that she’s having to choose between paying off her student loans or starting a family.”
Despite Davis’ eight years of service, a “really pricey degree that was a prerequisite for her job,” and devoting her career to serving parents of young children, Ritter added, “she can’t afford to become one” herself.
Ritter was among several women who shared their passions, concerns and workplace expectations with a spirited throng of hundreds gathered for the United Steelworkers “Women of Steel” rally and march on Bigelow Boulevard outside the Cathedral of Learning. Activists from all 12 USW districts in the U.S., Canada and beyond, who were in Pittsburgh for a weeklong conference, chose to lend support to Pitt staff and graduate student employees seeking to unionize.
Staff members, who are organizing under the USW banner as the Staff Union of Pitt, filed for a union election in June with the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board, while graduate student workers on Oct. 2 kicked off a card-signing campaign with the goal of forming a union. Two years ago, more than 3,000 Pitt faculty members voted to join the USW.
Soon after the USW members — donning “Women of Steel” t-shirts, some armed with noisemakers and union flags — poured out of a fleet of tour buses, they commandeered Bigelow between the Cathedral and William Pitt Union, where dancing, singing and chanting ensued. Led by Maria Somma, the USW’s organizing director, several USW members and Pitt staff and graduate students shared their concerns and commitment to union ideals with the celebratory crowd.
Somma provided a capsulized history of Pittsburgh’s economic journey from steel manufacturing capital to today’s “eds and meds”-fueled job market.
“Pittsburgh’s entire economy back in the day was based on those good union steel jobs. Now we’re here in the present,” she said, making note of the surrounding Pitt infrastructure. “Look around, sisters. What you see is the new economy of this city. They’re the ones that replaced the steel mills, the steel mills of today: our universities and hospitals in this city. We’re now an eds and meds economy.
“While some of the old steel mills have gone, our union has not. We’re still here, and we’re thriving,” she added. “Our union’s mission is to help workers of the present-day economy — the eds and meds — to gain the benefits of a good union contract. We’ve begun that mission here. We’ve begun to try to fulfill it.”
One of the Pitt-related speakers, Alison Mahoney, a Ph.D. student and member of the graduate-student union organizing committee, drew parallels between the graduate and staff campaigns to unionize, saying they are “the same fight: grads and staff both work long hours in offices and labs and studios and libraries, supporting students and providing the backbone to the incredible research that happens at this University.
“And despite the work that we do to make Pitt all that it is, we are told time and again by the University administration that our work is not valuable. Grads and staff have both seen wages shrink dramatically, compared to the rising cost of living in Pittsburgh,” she added. “Grads and staff have both seen changes to our health insurance with no consultation or warning … both struggle to support ourselves and our families despite working for the second-largest employer in this city.”
Despite Pitt’s “multi-billion dollar endowment,” the University “tells us over and over that they cannot afford to do better for us,” she said, “but somehow they can afford to do better for our chancellor, who makes almost a million dollars a year. Somehow, they can afford to spend millions every year on new construction. …
“This isn’t about money,” Mahoney said. “It’s about priorities. We organize because it’s our turn to be prioritized.”
Following the speakers, which included USW members from Puerto Rico and the United Kingdom as well as Pittsburgh, the crowd funneled into a line and marched around the Cathedral of Learning perimeter, chanting “Union Yes!” and “Pittsburgh is a union town!”
As the march concluded and visiting marchers headed to the buses, Michaela Davis, Molly Ritter’s colleague in the psychology department, said she felt the rally drove home the need to establish fair pay and benefits for staff and graduate students.
“We’re told ‘no’ by so many different parties,” she said. “We’ve seen a lot of good people leave over the years. It felt good to have the support of other people who have unionized.”
Noting the drawn-out nature of negotiations, Davis acknowledged that unionizing staff will “be a hard, uphill fight. It’s been at least two years now,” she said. “There’s no other option. We love it here. We want to stay. It just has to be affordable to do so.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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