Welcome to the occupation

Tell me how the actual sit-in began.

About an hour before we went into Massachusetts Hall, we gathered one by one in a basement next door. We had been very secretive: We had a number of false communications on our university e-mail accounts, and set up Yahoo accounts to do our real planning. We had received information that the administration was reading and monitoring our e-mail. In fact at one point a school guard actually showed us an e-mail of ours that had been printed out and used in preparation for a protest we were going to have. So we were fearful that they'd discover the plan and we wouldn't be able to get into the building.

What was it like once you were inside?

We tried to do things with a light touch. It's a pretty conservative school, and we had to maintain the moral high ground if we were going to succeed. No smoking, no drinking -- we didn't even sit on the antique furniture.

The conditions in general were rough. We had a single bathroom for 48 people, and no shower. We slept on the floor. It was 21 days of never being by yourself. But a real feeling of camaraderie developed.

We only brought enough food for five days -- we hadn't planned to stay so long. The dining hall workers came to the door on the first night with food, and were told by police that they couldn't deliver it. But the workers were incredibly forceful, and began chanting, and said that one way or another they were going to feed us. So the police conceded, and that's sort of how we ended up eating. Community groups and area restaurants donated a lot of food.

The first few days felt pretty tenuous. Most workers didn't feel safe coming to the protest -- they were told they'd be fired, or deported if they were undocumented. And more subtle intimidation happened, too: not giving people overtime, or shifting them to the night shift.

What made it a success was the lesson that the way students were able to use their privilege ended up creating a stage and transforming the political atmosphere in such a way that workers started to feel empowered and emboldened to speak for themselves. They started to plan their own protests, and by the second week, they were marching on the director of labor relations' office and delivering a list of demands. That was moving to see.

What was the relationship between the workers and the students?

It was pretty amazing. There was almost a kind of social fission as class and race lines were crossed. We had spoken with workers for a long time leading up to this, so it wasn't like we didn't know each other before, but being in the struggle together brought us to a new level. Not since the 1930s has there been an alliance like the kind we're seeing now between students and workers, as far as I know.

Why did labor fall out of vogue among college activists?

I think it's partly a product of labor's politics during the Cold War, in that organized labor took a strong supporting role alongside the State Department. In the '80s, they even toed the Reagan line on Central America. That's partly a product of McCarthy-era purges that happened in the labor movement, the fear of always being attacked as a communist. A lot of activists and students felt alienated from them because of that. So I think the post-Cold War setting creates new possibilities, which might be why we're seeing such an amazing upswing of this kind of activism.

How was "Oprah"?

"Oprah" was kind of a disaster. She was doing a follow-up on a show she'd done a year earlier on making it on the minimum wage. It was moving to see, insofar as you rarely see the daily struggle of low-paid workers on mainstream television. That said, it was politically irresponsible.

The whole show built toward finding out what happened to these two workers, a year later. We kept hearing that something had improved, and that we'd be hearing shortly what that was after the next commercial. When we finally got to that moment, we learned that when these workers were on the show last year, there happened to be a multimillionaire Wall Street financier in the audience, and he decided to give them a small stipend. So apparently the policy solution for the 30 million working poor in America is to find Wall Street financier sponsors. There was a tearful thank you to the millionaire, who was smiling in the audience. Nice.

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