UH Students for Fair Trade: The Fight for Fair Food
Today we have a guest post from University of Houston PhD candidate Tim O’Brien who has been fighting for social justice in UH campus food service since 2006.
The University of Houston Students for Fair Trade (SFT) has been fighting to bring social justice to their corporate ruled campus for over three years. In February 2006 there were no fair trade certified products available on the University of Houston (UH) campus. At the time progressive student activism was non-existent at UH, a commuter school with over 34,000 students.
Currently SFT is working on three campaigns. The first is their long time overall goal to make UH an all fair trade campus, the second is to get a living wage for Aramark workers and the third is the fair food campaign in solidarity with the Student Farmworker's Alliance/Coalition of Immokalee Workers current food service providers campaign.
Recently SFT met with the campus business services manager to start a dialog about a living wage for campus food service workers and address the poverty in the supply chain issue as related to the tomatoes being served on campus. Unfortunately the manager tried her old duck and dodge tactic instead of addressing SFT’s concerns. The manager, Emily Messa, claimed that an SFT member had put one her employees in fear of their life. When SFT members asked Ms. Messa is she called the police, Messa said no.
After that meeting SFT escalated their campaign with a house protest at university business service manager Messa’s house. We recruited some allies from the Revolution Club, the Houston Peace and Justice Center, the Black Panther Party, and the Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement. Early one Saturday morning in June a little over twenty of us carpooled out to a suburb of Houston where Messa lives. We held signs and listened to speeches and got everyone’s attention. We passed out flyers to all the neighboring houses and curious onlookers. Ms. Messa never came outside but her husband and her neighbor did. Eventually five police cars came and after one very polite law enforcement officer checked our sound permit, they left but not before one policeman said he wished his children were there to see the first amendment in action.Check out this youtube video for a little taste of the protest.
