Rhode Island School of Design’s custodians, groundskeepers and movers will continue striking after discussions with the school on April 12 did not lead to an agreement on wages.
The workers have been asking their employer to raise their minimum wage from less than $14 an hour to $20 per hour. Union organizers say this factors into the reasons for their strike, which they say began on April 3 because of labor violations.
The workers say increasing the minimum wage is a quality of life issue. Gusjanto Limiadi, a custodian for nearly 21 years at the college, said he is barely getting by on his current salary of $17.73 per hour.
“It’s really hard. How can you live on that?” Limiadi asked.
Limiadi is among a group of 62 RISD workers who voted to unionize with Teamsters Local 251 in June 2022.
He started at the school shortly after he moved to the U.S. from Indonesia in 2002. Back then, he made about $10 an hour. Now, he makes $17.73 an hour. Adjusted for inflation, that amounts to a raise of less than a dollar over two decades.
Limiadi’s wife Christina is a custodian for RISD, as well. Adjusted for inflation, she makes about a dollar less than when she started 13 years ago, her salary going from about $12 an hour to $15.97 an hour.
“Oh it’s terrible,” Christina Limiadi said. “I really need to save, because I have bills, mortgage, everything — food.”
The Limiadis say they have been cutting down on extra expenses as much as possible. At the laundromat, Christina has started forgoing drying their clothes to keep the extra quarters in their pockets. And she has pretty much stopped buying meat.
“Almost every day I eat the egg,” she said.
Their union representative, Tony Suazo, said negotiations were initially going well. The union and the school had come to agreements on almost every item in the contract, but “we obviously hit a snag when it came to wages,” Suazo said.
Since the strike began, the groups have met twice, on April 6, and April 12. According to a spokesperson for the Teamsters, the school asked the union to remove its picket line, saying it plans to provide a proposal on Thursday. The school says the groups will meet again Thursday.
From the administration’s standpoint, the workers are asking the school for more than it can afford.
“They have continued to demand benefits and wage increases that go well beyond what RISD considers fiscally responsible or that would allow us to maintain equity across the college,” RISD said in a press release.
David Oberlander, a RISD custodian, said staff like him show up every day, are more present in the lives of the students than administrators like the president, and put their bodies on the line by working in person during the pandemic. Meanwhile, RISD administrators can make over $200,000/year.
“In our opinion, we’re more important than they are,” said Oberlander.
Each of the four workers The Public’s Radio spoke to for this story say they were injured on the job. Three of them were injured to the point that they had to spend months away from work.
“This kind of job – so we do a lot of dirty stuff, and we have to deal with a lot of chemical every day,” Gusjanto Limiadi said. “And a few of us already got hurt with the back, the shoulder … everything. And then they don’t appreciate that.”
In the end, Oberlander, who has been working for RISD for 34 years, says he just wants workers to be compensated fairly.
“All we’re asking for is to be brought up to the level of other colleges in the area. And they think we’re outrageous for doing that,” Oberlander said.
Custodians at Brown University are unionized and start at about $19 an hour – about $5 more per hour than the lowest-paid RISD workers make.
Oberlander adds that, throughout his time at RISD, he has seen raises decrease, too.
“We started getting 7% raises at the beginning, then all the sudden it started going from seven, to six, to five to four, down to two percent,” he said.
The school declined to confirm or deny those figures.
While the workers are on strike, they are being compensated by the Teamsters Union proportionally to their salaries at the school.
Workers also allege that the school is paying subcontractors filling in for them $20 an hour. The school did not respond to that claim.
RISD called the increases demanded by the union “excessive,” in an emailed statement and did not respond to further follow-up questions from The Public’s Radio.
Metro reporter Olivia Ebertz can be reached at olivia@thepublicsradio.org. Follow her on Twitter @OliviaEbertz.
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