In the seven months since the Workers for Justice campaign began, I’ve often felt uncertain about my participation as a student organizer. From the beginning, different aspects of the campaign have rubbed me the wrong way: the secretive nature of the original student group, the way certain students were included and excluded arbitrarily, the campaign leadership structure. I still worry about the appropriate role for students, the tactics and decisions of the workers, and whether or not a union would even make sense at Pomona. In my head, I’ve quit and re-joined the campaign a hundred times.

Dozens of people who have been involved with the campaign share my concerns. I would guess that there are dozens more whose hesitations have kept them from wanting to get involved. Many more have been turned off by the politics of the campaign, the obscurity of the details, or even the people involved.

Questions about the nature of the campaign are not only healthy, they’re crucial. It’s these questions that help us from running headlong into supporting something that we may look back on with shame or regret. Our ability to think critically about the Workers for Justice campaign is the only responsible way to approach it.

But for all my worries about the campaign itself, my greatest worry is that when students think about the campaign, we place ourselves at the center. When we do so, our greatest concern is not that the dining service workers succeed in earning a just outcome but rather that our involvement or lack of involvement is ethically or ideologically sound. We privilege our personal concerns above the concerns of the workers, concerns that have driven them to risk their jobs to change their work environment. When we center ourselves, we lose sight of the real center of this issue: the dining service workers.

I’m not suggesting that we stop thinking critically about this issue because the workers are “just that important.” Nothing is important enough to warrant that. But I do want to suggest that in the process of critical thinking, we exercise caution about critically thinking our way entirely out of participating. The liberal arts education reminds us how important it is to be deliberate and thoughtful about how we choose to live and act. Rarely does it remind us of the value of humility, of suspending our troubles for the sake of compassion, so that we might confront those troubles without compromising our commitment to people whom we care about.

I am asking us to do something difficult: take our uneasiness, our hesitations, our risk of screwing up, and bring it with us to the next meeting. Come listen to Rolando speak about the campaign every week. Ask him questions. Let’s not avoid our concerns, let’s confront them. Let’s remind ourselves who and what is at the center of this campaign. Let’s walk together in the risk of contradiction, knowing that above all else, we’ve acted with compassion.

Workers for Justice holds student-organizing meetings every Tuesday at 8PM in the Women’s Union.