photo by Matt Nemeth
Nate Kilbert, Vice Organizing Chair of Fight Back Pittsburgh, discusses rights within the workplace during the Fight Back Pittsburgh: Next Generation meeting. The event took place on Monday night in the United Steelworkers Building. Point Park’s Student Solidarity Organization was in attendance and spoke about the importance of student involvement.
The Student Solidarity Organization (SSO) took part in Monday night’s ‘Fight Back Pittsburgh: Next Generation Night’ meeting at the United Steelworker’s building to discuss topics such as workers’ and students’ rights along with the importance of students’ involvement in their schools.
“Our main goal is building solidarity and camaraderie among students,” Samey Lee, the founder of the Student Solidarity Organization and a senior Global Cultural Studies major, said at Point Park in an interview after the meeting.
The mission of the organization is to provide students at Point Park with a safe, comfortable place to air grievances and fight back against the problems or inequities students face.
“I just started the organization by talking to 12 to 15 students and it grew from there,” Lee said.
“I heard of the organization and immediately wanted to get involved,” Hana Valle, a Psychology and Global Cultural Studies major, said.
She believes it’s an important organization for students to be involved in.
“We want to create an outlet for students to make their voices heard,” Lee said. “We believe the student’s voice should be involved in everything the school does.”
The United Steelworkers Union held the meeting and began it with an overview of workers’ rights in the workplace, and then quickly turned to the SSO and other grassroots groups like Take Back Your School and The Fight for 15.
Take Back Your School is led by a group of high school students and aims to brainstorm ideas with innovation and creativity to help students within their schools better learn. The group wants to rely on student-teacher alliances to help build a better, more focused curriculum.
The Fight for 15 is a nationwide effort to raise fast food workers minimum wage to not only a livable, but a sustainable level. They have held protests and strikes to fight for better wages, better working conditions and improved hours for workers.
Both of these groups were well represented alongside the Student Solidarity Organization and speaker Carl Davidson, former leader of the Students for a Democratic Society.
The Students for a Democratic Society was a student-led activist movement that began in the early 1960s and dissolved in 1969, but Davidson still supports students’ push for better learning environments and enhanced curriculums.
“Schools must serve the people, and students are a critical moral force in society,” Davidson said at the meeting. “What you do is you hold up a mirror to society, and say, ‘Look at this, this is what you’ve become, is this the kind of society you want to be?’ And the answer is usually no.”
Lee echoed Davidson’s sentiments, saying, “We want the school and everyone around [it] to take the students’ opinions into consideration.”
