Make Room for Love

Chapter 29

29

“The administration has given us no choice,” said Patrick, Mira’s counterpart in the history department, more loudly than was necessary. Most of the rest of the executive committee murmured or nodded agreement.

The university had been stepping up its tactics. Every day there were new emails, fliers, and so-called information sessions. The pay raise was evidence that the administration cared about the grad students, so they claimed. Money was tight, and there was no room for health insurance or parental leave or housing in the budget, so there was nothing more the union could do for anyone. If the grad students tried to unionize, they’d waste their money on dues and get nowhere. That was the way of things, and the grad students ought to shut up and be grateful.

The worst part was that it was working. They were losing support and enthusiasm, and Mira couldn’t blame anyone for it. The grad students were all exhausted, and the administration had money and time on their side and could spend endless resources campaigning against them.

“I agree that we don’t have much of a choice,” Shreya said, at a normal volume, clearly chagrined to be agreeing with Patrick. “The closer we get to the scheduled election, the worse things look?—”

“Right,” Patrick said. “I’ve been saying, we can’t even trust our data about who’s committed to voting yes anymore. People have changed their minds. I?—”

“—and we don’t have time to talk to everyone and convince them that the university’s lying to them,” Shreya continued. “Let’s get started on filing an unfair labor practice complaint as soon as possible, get the administration to stop, and then maybe we’ll be on a more even playing field. That’s better than taking the chance of losing the election entirely.”

“But that’s going to postpone the election indefinitely,” someone else said.

“It’ll probably be a few months,” Patrick said. “If we have the election now and lose, it’ll take years to try again.”

They had been going in circles for the last two weeks, their meetings running over time even more than usual. Shreya sometimes complained to Mira that this was the biggest group project of their lives, with hundreds of flaky, difficult group members, and Mira saw her point.

Mira hadn’t said anything so far. She was the newest committee member, and she’d mostly limited herself to giving updates in these meetings. Everyone else knew better than her—didn’t they?

The room was leaning reluctantly toward postponing the election. Maybe they were right, no matter how much Mira hated the idea. Disagreeing with Shreya felt wrong. But the idea of delaying everything for months, maybe longer, was unbearable.

She had enough money to scrape by for now, but not enough to save anything. What if her prescriptions became much more expensive? What if she had an emergency? What if the university screwed up their payroll and took their sweet time fixing it, like they’d done in Mira’s second year? And—she didn’t like to think it—what was she going to do when she wasn’t living in Isabel’s apartment at a discount anymore?

Mira was so fortunate. She was going to be fortunate for as long as this lasted. The truth was, they weren’t taking things slow. Their relationship, whatever it was, was somehow both exhilarating in its newness and comfortable like they’d been together for years. But a fling being this intense didn’t mean it would last.

She wasn’t about to make financial plans for the next several years of her life. No matter how good Isabel made her feel, no matter how tempted she was to fantasize about the future. When she left, she would need a place to go.

“I don’t know about this,” said Liz, on Mira’s right. “We’ll lose a lot of our momentum if we have to wait until next semester. We’re going to have to get all the first-years on board. And the administration might try something worse in that time.”

Mira had thought of that too. She had been too nervous to say it. Patrick looked like he was about to respond.

“I agree with that,” Mira said. Everyone turned to look at her. “I think we can win next month if we focus on canvassing and stay on message?—”

“We’re already canvassing all the time,” Patrick said.

Mira tensed up. She tried to regather her thoughts. Did Patrick ever interrupt the men on the committee? The worst thing was, she couldn’t write him off entirely; he had a point. “When I’ve been talking to people recently, what seems to work is when I emphasize that it’s not just about the money and benefits, because the real point of unionizing is having power. And it’s not good enough for the administration to give us more money if we don’t have a voice in the decision-making process.”

She took a breath. Patrick cut in, saying, “That doesn’t?—”

“Let me finish.” Mira trembled with frustration. This shouldn’t be bothering her so much. But it was one thing to have strangers be rude to her, and another to have someone who was supposed to be her equal on the committee treating her this way. “I know we’ve won people over by emphasizing how little money and how few benefits we get, because that’s what matters to people who are just trying to get by. But I think if we emphasize the difference between the administration deigning to give us something, versus us having the power to demand what we deserve, we’ll win more people over.”

She was gathering conviction, determined to just get her words out without interruption as much as anything else. “What this pay raise really means is that the administration is afraid of us. They’re afraid of the power we have. And we should encourage people to see it that way. We can take the administration’s attempt to weaken us and use it to our advantage.”

The room was silent. Everyone’s eyes bore into her. Maybe Mira didn’t know what she was talking about. She’d only been on the committee for a few weeks, and if Patrick and Shreya agreed on something, they were probably right.

“We’re already having trouble getting people to sign up for canvassing shifts,” Shreya said. “How do you think we’d get this message out to everyone in the next four weeks?”

“I’ll personally go door-knocking every weekend and make phone calls every day. I’ll run more trainings,” Mira said impulsively. She sounded more confident than she felt. Maybe she was actually right, and they stood a chance. Or maybe she was trying to lead them down a path that would destroy everything they’d worked for in the last four years. “We can go all in on that, internally and externally. Tell people who have volunteered that if they’ve dropped off recently, they can come back. I’ll do as much as I possibly can.”

“I like that idea,” Liz said. “Focusing on how the administration is afraid of us. If it were true that the union wasn’t going to do anything anyway, there’s no reason for them to give us a pay raise and go all out trying to defeat us.”

Other people were nodding. That was more terrifying than reassuring. Patrick was silent for once.

Shreya said, “We need to decide today. Is this what we want?”

Around the room, people voiced their agreement, which mostly filled Mira with dread. She had said something, and the committee agreed with her, and she was going to be on the hook for this. She just had to hope she’d made the right call.