In Charlottesville, we like to talk about statues. We took down some statues a few years ago. Have you all seen the video of Robert E. Lee’s face in a furnace, where he gets melted into lava? I recommend it.
There are limits to what statue discourse can do. But I want to talk about statues today, because one thing we try do on Labor Day is to situate ourselves in time. We do this not because we like fun facts, although many of us do like fun facts, but because the history of labor activism is a history we can use.
In that spirit, I want to tell you about some statues that don’t exist. Not because they got melted down, but because nobody chose to make them in the first place. The writer Rebecca Solnit says “A city is a book we read by wandering its streets,” and the same is true of a college campus, especially this one. I’d like to share with you a few chapters from this book, the book we read together every day when we walk the paths of UVA to work or to class.
There is no statue commemorating Local 550 of the United Public Workers of America, which was probably the very first labor union of UVA employees, back in the 1940s. Local 550 was a group of Black workers at UVA Hospital. At the segregated hospital of a segregated university in the Jim Crow South, these workers had the astonishing courage to stand up and force UVA President Lloyd Newcomb to the bargaining table to demand a living wage. In doing so, they won higher wages, but they also desegregated some hospital roles for the first time in UVA’s history, and reduced their workday from twelve hours to eight. There is no statue commemorating Local 550 — but to be fair, it’s not like UVA has any centrally located buildings named after President Lloyd Newcomb, right?
I’m joking, obviously. We are standing two minutes’ walk away from Newcomb Hall. But there is no building commemorating Local 550.
Nor is there a statue commemorating the 1970 May Strike, when fifteen hundred UVA students refused to attend class, occupied buildings, and took to the Lawn to express their opposition to the Vietnam War — and, notably, called upon UVA President Edgar Shannon to “express public support for the right of University employees to strike and bargain collectively.” These students recognized that racial justice was impossible without economic justice, and that a fully empowered labor union was an essential tool for economic justice. There’s no statue commemorating the May Strike, but it’s not like UVA has any buildings named after President Shannon, right?
Wrong. We are standing five minutes’ walk away from Shannon Library. But there is no library named after the May Strike.
Nor is there a statue for the Graduate Labor Union, a group of graduate student workers who unionized with Communication Workers of America in the early 2000s. At the time, UVA didn’t provide its graduate students with health insurance; graduate students were forced to buy into an expensive and substandard health plan chosen by UVA, eating into what were already very low stipends. But these graduate student workers knew what they were worth. They knew that UVA depends on the discussion sections, the office hours, the research, and the grading labor performed by its graduate students, even if UVA doesn’t like to admit it. The Graduate Labor Union coordinated a protest where they marched down the Lawn with a banner displaying one letter for every grade issued by a graduate student worker that year. You can imagine how big that banner was. And in the end, they won: because of the bad press, UVA agreed to offer health insurance coverage as part of their funding for graduate students.
I want to make sure this sinks in. UVA didn’t offer its graduate students health insurance until graduate students stood together and demanded it. Is anyone here a current or former UVA graduate student? I’ll put my hand up here. We didn’t have health insurance by accident, or because UVA was doing us a favor. We had health insurance because the Graduate Labor Union took the risk of being called disruptive, ungrateful, impolite, too loud, and too impatient — they raised their voices and said “UVA works because we do.”
But is there a statue of the Graduate Labor Union?
No.
Let’s talk about one more example. From the 1990s to the 2010s, a group called the Living Wage Campaign made a simple demand: as a matter of fairness and basic economic dignity, UVA should pay all its workers a living wage. It was the same demand Local 550 had made a half-century earlier. The Living Wage Campaign tried a number of tactics to bring UVA to the table, starting with a teach-in like this one, back in 1997. But that didn’t work, so over the next two decades they kept escalating. They held a benefit concert to raise awareness. They held rallies and press conferences, standing up for workers who suffered retaliation for joining the Campaign. They formed a labor union called the Staff Union of UVA. They held a sit-in at Madison Hall, during which seventeen students and one faculty member were arrested. When that didn’t work, 26 students held a hunger strike that lasted thirteen days. Nothing.
And then, in 2019, shortly after taking office, UVA President Jim Ryan announced that UVA would pay all its workers $15 an hour, which was, at the time, a living wage — though that raise was not indexed to inflation, and has since fallen far behind Charlottesville’s actual living wage.
Anyway, do you think UVA put up a statue commemorating the Living Wage Campaign? UVA did not. In fact, you would never have known, from any of UVA’s own public communications at the time, that a group of students, faculty, and staff had spent twenty years practicing disciplined, principled direct action in service of precisely that goal.
The problem wasn’t that UVA didn’t see the Living Wage Campaign. The problem is UVA can’t acknowledge that activism works. The notion is literally unspeakable to them. Let me tell you what I mean by that.
I teach classes on this stuff, right? And in the spring of 2023, I taught a class about the Living Wage Campaign. Since President Jim Ryan was deservedly proud of ensuring a $15 wage for UVA’s workers, I asked if he’d come talk to my students. He said yes. He came to my class, and my students asked him lots of questions, and of course one question that came up was, Did the Living Wage Campaign have any effect on your decision? And here’s what he said about the Living Wage Campaign. This is a direct quote, because he let me record him: “What we didn’t do — and I regret this — is give credit to those who had been involved in the campaign from 1996, because they kept the issue alive. […] They were the ones who kept the issue front and center. I have learned, ever since: give credit to the people who have been working on issues for a really long time, and don’t think that they didn’t play a really important role. Because they did.”
Nice, right? But in the end, he didn’t say much more about the Living Wage Campaign. Why? Because a week after that conversation, President Ryan called in the Virginia State Police to assault and arrest a small group of students, faculty, staff, and Charlottesville community members who were peacefully — peacefully! — protesting Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.
No college president is going to acknowledge that protest works, or even that a disruptive, polarizing protest might conceivably be in support of a just cause. No college is going to put up statues encouraging you to see yourself in continuity with successful direct actions, whether by organized labor or student activists, even if those actions brought about changes that UVA is rightly proud of. We cannot expect UVA to build those statues or name those buildings, because the administrative apparatus known as UVA — the part of UVA that erects statues and names buildings — does not want to remember these things. That task is up to us.
Here’s why I’m telling you this. I’m going to read a quote from the novel Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon. It is not typically quoted in this context, but I’m an English professor and I’m going to go for it. The narrator of the novel comes up with this concept called “temporal bandwidth,” which is defined as follows. Here’s the quote:
“‘Temporal bandwidth’ is the width of your present, your now… The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are [that is, the weaker you are, the more precarious]. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago.”
That’s from 1973. I don’t know about you, but to me, the notion of limited temporal bandwidth is a useful description of being alive in 2025. I hear about something breathtakingly cruel that has happened, and I am still catching my breath when something else happens, and it’s somehow even worse. The effect of this onslaught is that we can’t do much more than respond to what’s immediately in front of us. If you are like me, you’re feeling a lot of fear right now, and when you’re afraid, your temporal bandwidth, your sense of Now, is thin as paper. You have trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago.
I don’t have to tell you that this is a very lonely feeling.
If you remember nothing else from my talk today, I hope you leave feeling like your temporal bandwidth is just a little bit wider. I hope you can imagine yourselves in good company — and not just the company of the people standing beside you today, but the people who stood here years ago, right here, and found it possible to be brave.
I told you that this campus is like a book that we read by walking its paths. Now you know a little more of what’s in that book. I hope you can see, too, that this is a book we are still writing. We’re writing it right now. And if we manage to stretch that temporal bandwidth just a little wider, just a little further into the future, maybe we can imagine somebody else reading this same book, many years from now. They’ll be standing right here, looking back at us.
We have no way of knowing what they’ll need from us, or why, but I like to think that we’ll have something to offer, even if it’s just to say, “You may feel like you’re alone, but you’re not. I promise.”
Happy Labor Day, everybody.
Piers Gelly, Labor Day, September 1, 2025, University of Virginia