Who's Really Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place???

Quick:

Who would you say is actually caught between a rock and a hard place?

a) a group of janitors who earn poverty-level wages and struggle to make ends meet, yet must look their children in the eye and say the future is going to be better?

or:

b) the president of the university where those janitors work, who has the power to either help or hinder those workers in their quest for a better future?

I'm guessing you'd say the janitors have the worst of it. But don't tell that to Donna Shalala.

For the past six weeks, nearly 200 janitors at the University of Miami, where Shalala is president, have been on strike over unfair labor practices by their employer, UNICCO, the contractor Shalala hired to clean the campus. A hunger strike by several of the janitors has led to the hospitalization of three janitors and left the others in a significantly weakened physical state.

One of the hunger strikers is Clara Vargas, a 32-year-old mother. An immigrant, she came to the U.S. in 1994. Her first job was working in a gas station, where she made $4.35 an hour. She then worked in a hotel and, for the past four years, has worked as a janitor at UM, cleaning two, six-story residence halls each week, for $7.10 an hour, without health benefits.

Yesterday, Vargas said that, entering the ninth day of the hunger strike, she is feeling physically weak. But, she says, she is determined to keep up her fight for justice -- even though she can tell from her son's voice that he is deeply worried about the toll the strike is taking on his mother's health.

Shalala, who was secretary of U.S. Health and Human Services in the Clinton era, truly has the power of "health and human safety" in this case. She can do the right thing and encourage UNICCO to recognize the right of the janitors to unite their strength and form a union so that they can win better wages and working conditions.

But she has, instead, been playing politics with the strike behind the scenes, and yesterday sent an open letter to the university community which ended with a pitiful line about how this strike has put her between a rock and a hard place.

The truth is, she's backed herself into a corner and is angry.

The workers on her campus are striking for the simple reason that they want their work valued and respected.

They are hard-working Americans. They play by the rules. And they are passionately committed to their right to have a collective voice in their workplace.

It is not acceptable to them that they are spied on and threatened of losing their job. Their colleagues have been fired already for simply expressing a desire to have a collective voice in their workplace.

As we saw this week, the passion of the immigrant community is deep and their pride is strong. They simply want to be respected for their contributions to this great country.

The passion of American immigrants is perhaps best demonstrated by those workers who are right now engaged in a hunger strike.

Unfortunately, 3 of them have already been taken to the hospital after 8 days of no food. They are in the midst of the 9th day of this struggle that appears to only have a tragic end in sight.

Yet University President Shalala continues to ignore the pleas of many elected leaders including Senator John Edwards and former Congressman David Bonior who have personally called and asked for her to act responsibly.

It's fitting that as people all over the world are celebrating Passover -- a story of great personal risk and sacrifice of everything for a better future -- that we also celebrate these workers.

And, as we enter this Easter weekend and its message of hope and redemption -- that we not lose sight of the hope that these workers are clinging to in this struggle.

Some people, like Ms. Shalala, can't understand why people would risk their health for a better life for themselves and their family... Her inability to understand is exactly what this is about.

Read more about the UM janitors' strike at www.yeswecane.org.