Many in the Ohio State community probably found themselves quite puzzled, or perhaps angered, about the group of 19 people who plopped down in the middle of High Street until the police took them away in handcuffs [on Thursday, April 15]. It is so easy to look at this event and just see a group of rabble-rousers, students who are just trying to find a way to be rebellious, and union organizers who just want to increase their base of due-paying members.

Before just accepting this negative viewpoint as the truth, however, maybe take a minute and really think through why a group of people would voluntarily get arrested.

I am a sophomore at OSU and I have been involved with the group United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) almost since the beginning of my university career.

I got involved because in high school I had been taught a lot about injustices against workers, especially in garment factories abroad, and I realized that this was really the issue that mattered. If there are no jobs, or if workers are not paid enough to live, then poverty ensues, health issues arise from the extreme poverty, governments become corrupt and collapse under its weight, and a vicious cycle ensues. While this picture is extreme, it is an accurate depiction of what is going on in varying degrees around the world, even here in the United States.

So what does any of this have to do with the protest last Thursday? I cannot speak for the other protestors, though I imagine their reasons for joining are rather similar to mine, but my reason for sitting down in High Street, being arrested and sitting in a jail cell until 2 a.m. stems from my belief that if we can improve jobs, really pay our citizens decent wages as they serve us food or clean our offices, then we will be able to improve society as a whole.

Right now there are workers here at OSU who cannot afford to buy food and have to go on food stamps, who can’t afford health care and who deal with sexual harassment by their managers. True, these workers could try and find a job in OSU’s campus dining services and probably get much better treatment, since these workers do have collective bargaining agreements, but then new workers would just fill the stadium jobs and the same abuses would continue to occur.

The jobs need to change, and in order for that to happen the company has to change. And who is it that hires the company? Ohio State. We should not tolerate people on our campus being treated this way while they work hard to support themselves and their families, and that is why I stepped onto High Street last Thursday, because I will not tolerate it.

The rally was meant to get peoples’ attention and to make people aware of how campus workers are treated, and at the same time to pressure President E. Gordon Gee to actually do something to make sure that all workers on our campus are treated with respect and dignity and are paid enough to support themselves and their families.

If we as students, as a university community, do not stand up and support workers fighting for their rights, then who will? Only together will our voices be heard and will we actually change things for the better.