The Workers' Rights Organizing Committee has two laudable goals: to treat Princeton's service workers with more respect and to pay them more. Though I generally support WROC's proposals to achieve these goals, I would like to offer a modest proposal that would be amenable to both the administration and to the service workers and their supporters. Given the University's penchant for hitting students with stiff fines, the administration should issue littering fines and use all proceeds to augment workers' salaries.
Many Princeton students treat the janitors worse than they would treat their servants. They leave garbage everywhere except where it belongs — in the trash cans. Often, students will quite deliberately leave trash right next to receptacles without throwing it in, as if to taunt the janitors. They take trays and diningware from the dining halls and leave them in all sorts of random places, knowing that service workers will pick up after them. After a rough night at the 'Street,' they return to the dorms to vomit all over the floor.
We have come to accept the fact that janitors will clean up the most outrageous messes as a given. However, going around and gratuitously trashing the campus is an egregious abuse. The University hires janitors for routine maintenance and cleaning; the messes that many students make are anything but routine. Princeton should not condone conduct that, anywhere else, would constitute littering or creating a public nuisance and incur stiff fines.
Like the honor system, students who observe other students creating a mess should report them to the University, which should then do what it does best: impose fines with a vengeance. Not only would this alter many students' unjustifiable view that they can treat the janitors with impunity, but it would also result in a modest pay increase for service workers. Most importantly, it would establish common ground between WROC and the administration on which further progress can be made. Eric Wang '02
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“The right to video record is essential as a tool of accountability. Video allows journalists, activists, and spectators to capture a moment beyond what is said — it can record how someone speaks, or how someone reacts to speech.”
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Reactions: Guests respond to Eisgruber and Calhoun’s statements on protesting
Zeke DouglasRosenthal, Edward Yingling, and Wyatt BrowneGuests weigh in with their thoughts on free speech, institutional neutrality, and the role of the ‘Prince’ with respect to the University's statements on encampments.
Guests weigh in with their thoughts on free speech, institutional neutrality, and the role of the ‘Prince’ with respect to the University's statements on encampments.
