September 16, 2004

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THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2004

100th Anniversary

THE INDEPENDENTDAILY AT DUKE UNIVERSITY

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ONE HUNDREDTH YEAR, ISSUE 20

Mt. Olive boycott inauguration to move inside ends after 5 years Paul Crowley THE CHRONICLE

by

Kelly Rohrs THE CHRONICLE

by

After five years of pickets and protests that entangled Duke in many ways, the boycott of the North Carolina-based Mt. Olive Pickle Company will officially end today. Officials from the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, a union-instigating and farmworker rights group, reached a settlement with Mt. Olive earlier this month about farmworker conditions and cucumber pricing that enabled FLOG to end its call for a boycott. The North Carolina Growers Association, which includes most farmers in the state, agreed to a separate contract with FLOG that ensures union recognition and includes several steps FLOG said will improve worker conditions. More details about both agreements will be released at a 10 a.m. press conference today

in Raleigh, but officials from both Mt. Olive and FLOG are de-

claring victory.

“It’s just been a

matter

of

time,” said Brendan Greene, boycott organizer for FLOG. “We were always really confident that we were going to win the struggle.” FLOG called the boycott in 1999 as part of its efforts to help unionize and improve conditions for migrant farm workers, who pick many of the cucumbers that become Mt. Olive pickles. Mt. Olive and FLOG have struggled over the issues and conditions of the boycott since the beginning. Mt. Olive ought to use its position as the dominant purchaser of North Carolina cucumbers to regulate worker conditions on farms, FLOG organizers said. They added that better working conditions could arise from a three-way contract among Mt. Olive, growers and FLOG, as the representative of the workers. Such an agreement would be against Mt. Olive policy, said Lynn Williams, community relations director for the company. Like Duke, Mt. Olive has always taken the position that it is inappropriate for an institution to force the workers of its subcontracted vendors, in this case the growers, to unionize. Williams said Wednesday that Mt. Olive still held “exactly the position we’ve always had.” The agreement with FLOG was possible because NCGA worked SEE MT. OLIVE ON PAGE 8

ANTHONY CROSS/THE CHRONICLE

Union organizers say workers like Fulgencio (bottom) will benefit from an agreement between Mt.Olive (factory shown above) and theFarm Labor Organizing Committee.

SOOJIN PARK/THE CHRONICLE

VARUN LELLA/THE CHRONICLE

As workers put up tents and continue preparations for weekend inaugural festivities (above), President Richard Brodhead has had a full slate of meetand-greets with students, including dinner at the Marketplace Monday (left). Despite inclement weather predictions, some inauguration celebrations will take place outside.

Those spectators who will have to watch President Richard Brodhead’s inauguration on television rather than in person can blame it on the rain—or at least the threat Of rain. Planners decided to move Brodhead’s Saturday afternoon inauguration from the Chapel Quadrangle to the Chapel’s interior to avoid possible inclement weather resulting from Hurricane Ivan. The ceremony will be broadcast on closed-circuit television in nearby Page Auditorium as well as Reynolds and Griffith Theaters in the Bryan Center. The move will reduce the number of available seats by approximately 500. The inaugural ceremony is the only component of the weeklong celebration that has been moved to date. Other outdoor events, like today’s gathering in the Sarah P. Duke Gardens at which Brodhead will meet and greet auxiliary staff members, have not been relocated. The official inauguration was moved Wednesday because of the amount of preparation needed SEE INAUGURATION ON PAGE 4

DSG money may fund kegs by

Julie

Stolberg THE CHRONICLE

Alcohol and politics took censtage at the opening session of the Duke Student Government Wednesday night, as the assembly started the year off with a full schedule of legislation and controversy. Student government leaders presented the first reading of a bill that proposes to use money from a DSG surplus account to fund alcohol subsidies. Seniors Andrew Wisnewski, executive vice president, and Dave Rausen, Student Organization Finance Committee chair, hope the bill will improve on-campus social programming by supporting alcohol purchases. The legislation allocates $5,000 a year from DSG’s approximately $120,000 in excess funding, discovered last spring during an audit, for alcohol-related expenses such as kegs and University bartenders for campus organizations’ events. The current cost of $3OO per ter

Duke for Kerry receives official group financing, recognition keg assessed by the University, which includes labor costs for

mandatory University-supplied bartenders, has reduced the ability of student groups to afford alcohol at their events, Wisnewski and Rausen said. Although the SOFC by-laws specifically ban the use of DSG funds to purchase alcohol, all of the subsidy money would come from the surplus fund, meaning it would not detracting from funding currendy slated for student groups, Rausen said. “One thing we’re trying to do with this is providing an impetus to create more visible, better at-

tended on-campus programming,” he added. The bill, which will come before DSG for a vote in two weeks, is contingent upon the passage of a new constitutional bylaw creating a board of trustees to oversee the surplus account. The proposed five-person board, which will include the DSG president, executive vice president, chief of staff, treasurer and SOFC chair, would be responsible for allocating budget requests from the excess funding and presenting them to the Senate for a vote. Money from the fund would be directed toward “really special projects that couldn’t be normally funded by the programming fund... we’re thinking of those great idealists out there,” Rausen said. With the national presidential election less than two months away and on many minds, the main source of controversy at SEE DSG ON PAGE 6


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