Her Campus sat down with Leah Effron this past week and discussed her position as co-chair with Philip Bene on Jumbos Janitor Alliance. Read the interview to learn about the groups goals and activities, as well as how you can get involved.
Can you tell me a little bit about the Jumbo Janitor Alliance?
We’re a student-run organization, we’ve been operating for four years. It was started by Kevin Dillon who graduated last year. Our goal is to foster both collaboration and a community among the Tufts community and the Tufts janitors and also to fight for labor rights. We’re divided into four task forces – community outreach, which is in charge of dorm clean ups Thursday nights and Sunday mornings. It’s where we clean alongside the janitors. The main goal is to talk to them, we try to help out but a lot of the time it ends up just being us talking to them and keeping them company while they work. It’s a lot of fun though, and it’s just nice to see the campus through the eyes of the janitors. Their shift is Thursday nights from 11 PM to 7 AM so we try to be with them for two hours at least. It’s really hard, they’re in this building all by themselves between those late hours.
And then also on that same task force, we do soccer games, so when it’s nice out, we just host soccer games and the janitors come on Sundays and we mix up the teams and we play. We’re also working on doing some holiday parties. One of the janitors is pregnant, so we made her a little care package. So basically it’s about trying to create connections, that’s the main goal of that task force.
Labor is another task force and their task force did contract negotiations two years ago and they’re in charge of petitioning. They just did a petitioning drive for the new president to take a neutral stance against unions because the previous – Bacow and his administration – took a negative stance, they kind of dissuaded the janitors from unionizing. So that’s what that task force is working on, just a lot of labor issues. They bring in speakers and attend events. They also collaborate with similar groups at Northeastern and Jobs for Justice, which is another non-profit.
Another task force is Bulletin Boards, so they’re responsible for putting up the Meet your Janitor bulletin boards in all your dorms. So they interview the janitors in Spanish and English and they take pictures of them and put up the bulletin boards.
And then the fourth task force is Resource Booklet. We’re in the process of formatting this resource booklet that has information on health care and litigation services and computer access and a whole bunch of things that’s then translated into Spanish and Portuguese and we’re in the process of forming that and printing that and that will be distributed to the Janitors, hopefully soon. That’s like the over-arching thing that JJA does.
What do you think inspired Kevin to start the group at Tufts?
Umm I don’t know if there was a specific event, he’s just very social justice oriented. He’s working with Americorps now. I know that he worked in Carmichael and I think he just saw some of the treatment the workers in the dining hall were getting and the janitors were getting, but I’m not sure if there was one formative thing. He may have been inspired by clubs at other schools too.
What would you say is the way you get the most advertisement for your group to get more people involved?
Well a big thing is Tuftslife, I think people see on Tuftslife that we have meetings and attend. The dorm clean-ups are fun. I think word of mouth is really big, and facebook word of mouth.
Another way, is when we’re cleaning up in the dorms with the janitors on Sunday mornings, a lot of people think we’re doing it for punishment or community service, so now we started wearing our Jumbo Janitor Alliance t-shirts so I think people understand that we’re doing it as a club and not as punishment.
Are you a TCU recognized club?
Yes.
What do you think is the most important part of Jumbos Janitor Alliance?
When I joined last year, I joined the community outreach section because that’s what I thought was immediately affective, I know a lot of clubs on this campus are great and they just have these huge lofty goals, but I could really identify with JJA because it’s something that directly affects what’s happening on campus, and something that we can actually see an impact in. So I identify strongly with the community outreach perspective, just because I feel like it’s something tangible and it’s something that affects our lives and it’s not a huge goal that we can’t tackle, I feel like it’s that something we can work at progressively. My co-chair takes more of the labor stance, I think he’s more attracted to that aspect of it. But I think the combination of them is really important, the labor and the community outreach.
I’m just curious as to how you think the janitors feel about JJA and how the response has been.
This year, in terms of community outreach, we started by only doing Thursday night dorm clean ups and then the day time janitors were kind of wondering where we were so then we heard some talk about that, so we started doing more Sunday morning ones. It’s hard to reach everybody though. We tried to create programming that reaches everyone but A) it’s hard to let janitors know about these things that are going on cause of the language barrier and B) they don’t really look at the Tufts Daily or posters around campus, so the best way to do it we find is to just talk to them and ask them to spread it by word of mouth. We found that when we did soccer games, it was mostly only guys that would show up, so now we’re going to try to do some cooking events so we can attract more females. But that is definitely an issue, reaching out to janitors. I know that when the petitioning drive – the contracts with the janitors were recently put out to bid, so it was thought that they’d be in danger of losing their jobs. So as a club we would go to where they clock in and clock out and say “yo te apoyo,” we support you, and I know some janitors thought that was kind of like, that’s all you’re doing? You don’t support us, What are you doing to support us?, so I think it’s hard with the language barrier because not everyone in our club speaks Spanish and Portuguese and it’s definitely hard to make it seem like we’re making an effort because there’s only so much we can do but at the same time we want to do everything we can do. So I guess that’s been a struggle of ours, trying to reach all of the janitors. I know some janitors I haven’t been in contact with, and I think the way to address that is by contacting their supervisors of each shift, and asking them to tell the janitors when they clock in and clock out, or going to when they clock in and clock out since that’s when you’re guaranteed to see all of them.
How many people would you say are in JJA?
It varies. I’d say our weekly attendance at meetings is about 20, but then we have people that just come to our events too, which can reach to about 50 – 60 people.
Where do you guys go for your clean ups?
It depends on the night, I’ve been to the gym and Cohen. The Sunday morning ones are usually the dorms, and the Thursday night ones are normally the big buildings.
When does your club meet? And what is the group like?
We meet at 9PM on Monday nights in Eaton. Another thing is, you don’t have to decide which task force to be in, you can just rotate and feel it out for awhile and see what works for you. There’s no concrete commitment you have to make, you can put as much into it as you want, if you just want to come to some events you can, if you want to be really dedicated, that’s great, there’s space for everyone. We appreciate any help that we can get.
We’re having a JJA trip to the lodge in April, we try to foster community among our group too. It’s a really cohesive group, and every body brings something different. Everyone has different interests and different passions, which I think is how the club is so far reaching, it affects so many different parts of the community.
Learn more about the group by checking out their facebook page here !