For the past 10 months, University of Texas USAS and the Texas State Employees Union have been campaigning against UT’s plan to outsource campus services and layoff workers. After almost a year of hard campaigning, we just won our first victory: the UT Administration has made a commitment not to outsource food service and increase student fees!
This decision comes after ten months of community protest against the “Smarter Systems Plan,” which included recommendations to eliminate jobs and outsource campus services, raise student rates, consolidate, commercialize, and downsize. After the plan was released, USAS and TSEU formed the “Save Our Community Coalition” (SOCC) to denounce the plan and its impacts on campus workers and the greater Austin community. The coalition, which now includes numerous student and community organizations, held over a dozen protests including a recent “study-in” on Halloween, where we called on the the administration to “not let poverty haunt UT.”