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Can we start off with your name and position at AU? Yeah, my name is Dan Pringle, P-R-E-N-G-E-L, and I am the assistant director of data analytics at the Kogut School of Business. And do I have permission to record today's conversation? Yes.

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And is there anything in particular you want to cover or don't want to cover? No. I'm ready. Everything. Great. All right. Well, today is Monday, March 20th, 2023. I am Gabriella Folsom here with Dan Pringle on the quad at American University. It's around 1230 and

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we're conducting an oral history interview for the Preserving the Lincoln Line AU Staff Union Archive. Thanks again for joining us here today. We'll start with how would you describe your involvement in the union or in the strike? So I have been at AU for a while now, a little over five years. So I wasn't really involved in the initial unionization effort, but once got word of it, got a ballot, and very gladly checked yes for reunion, and then I kinda didn't really do anything. I kinda waited around until last April, March or April, I believe, when they opened up bargaining to all the union members. I went just to kind of see what was going on and then I got mad. It was a very eye-opening experience to how the administration was reacting to what I think were very nice terms for our contract. So I went to one of those and then I volunteered to be a strike captain. So I helped coordinate with the people at COGAD who are union eligible to see if they could be involved, help them once we started planning on a strike, help to get some people strike ready, things like that.

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And what was the, walk me through what the week of the strike was like for you. Week of the strike, I was planning for one day. I was convinced that we were gonna go out on Monday, we were gonna have a nice cohort of people. We were gonna call it a used bluff that we wouldn't go on strike and they would immediately come back to the table. That was not the case. I think, you probably know that it took the whole five days of our authorized strike to come to an agreement. But the first day was fun. Like, you know, we were at the Washington College of Law. There was a lot of marching, a lot of chanting, which I think is kind of fun. I, you know, live in D.C., so obviously there's a lot of protests and stuff, and they're always, you know, fun to join. And it was, you know, it's like a good time hanging out with people, a little hot. The second day, it got a little bit more real because there was nothing from the administration, like they didn't want to talk to us. So I believe the second day was when we did our campus tour. We walked around campus and I got to kind of get some insider knowledge of what was going on for some orientations in Kogod and some events. So we kind of crashed some of that. It was still really exciting, very empowering, very fun for what it is. Wednesday we shut down move in, great, very high spirits, felt for sure that something's gonna happen that night at our post strike meeting. And nothing. So Wednesday was a bit of a bummer, or Thursday was a bit of a bummer, like showed up bright and early. You could feel like it was just not going, like the mood was just not there. Like, we'd been out there three days already, we're on day four, it's hot, everyone smelled. Like, I washed my shirt every day in the sink. Like, it wasn't great. But, you know, we got a little hope at the end of Thursday. We got word that administration want to talk to us on Friday. I was lucky enough to be able to be someone who was in the room with them on Friday as we negotiated. So Friday morning I was feeling a little good, we thought this is going to be something. Then we walked outside of, what's it called, Bender? Where they have the convocation. And we were out there, I was just kind of hanging out in the back. I think I was playing on my phone while we were chanting and like doing stuff and all of a sudden everyone started clapping. And I thought by stupid thought like, they're done like we're, we they didn't get the entrance they deserved by everyone normally clapping and welcoming them. So we are giving them the exit that they deserve as new students. But I looked at the guy next to me because I saw that they were, the students were gathering. I looked at the guy next to me, his name's David. I was like, David, what are they doing? He goes, they just walked out of convocation. I immediately started sobbing. It was the best end to the week because we knew. We knew that with the students on our side that we were able to, we were going to finish it today. We weren't gonna have to go to the next week. We were gonna get a good contract. And after that I headed over to SPA building and we had negotiations for like five hours, four hours maybe, and we walked out of there with a contract and it was wonderful. I never want to strike again but I'm so glad I was able to do it. Like being fortunate enough to have the resources to go without a week's pay, like having people, my family, my life support me, like it was just a wonderful experience. Like I've met so many people at AU, I never would have met. And we walked out with a good contract. Like, it was for the best reasons. It was hilarious. Can you talk a little bit about that last bargaining meeting and what it was like? Yeah. It was weird. It was, you know, we all, I think there were 15 of us. No, maybe not. There were maybe 10, 15 of us that were there. So we left President Burwell's lawn where we had camped out for, I guess it wasn't lunch yet, but that's where we had camped out. We walked over, had the initial, you know, welcome, hellos. I think we might have introduced ourselves to the AU bargaining team, maybe not. Larry, our negotiator, kind of just laid it on them, was like, what do you got for us? And they came back with some stuff and then we caucused and we thought they could do better. So we pushed them on a few things. Some of it was, I think I'm remembering correctly that the annual raise, we moved, I think we moved half a percent from merit-based to guaranteed. And a few other things, we went back and forth for a few hours. And the feeling in the room on their part was that they were defeated, that they knew that they had lost. And I think that those of us that were there, we really got a lot of, not necessarily joy from it, but we got a lot of encouragement that like, we did it. Like we were able to accomplish something and not just, you know, for us, like, but for everyone on campus, like, you know, we've seen the administration expand, you know, the vacation time and improvement leave to everyone else. And It just was so great to have that realization kind of like, while Chevron, that we did it and we didn't do it just for ourselves. We did it for, like, everyone. It was great.

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That's amazing. And what would you consider to be the effects or the legacy of the strike? I think that We showed AU, I think we showed a lot of people in the city, like at higher ed around that, you know, we're done just taking what we're gonna get. We have a voice, we have opinions, we have families, we have needs, and if we can't get those met here, we're gonna do something to try to change it for the better to get to get what we deserve as a part of this community. Is there anything else you'd like to talk about that I haven't asked? I don't know. I've been pretty, like I come from a pretty strong union family, like a lot of my relatives are teachers or they work in manufacturing, so it's kind of something that I was really positive with to begin with and never been a part of a union before this, but getting to see how it works and all that it was just like really fun and exciting. It gave me like a great outlet for my time. That's something that's really worth it for us. Like I started here as an admin assistant. I made, I want to say like $40, 000, which I came from Starbucks, which is a great raise for me, but also I was so excited to quit my job and just work here. It lasted a year. I didn't get paid enough here to not have to get a second job. I went back to Starbucks and I worked there for more years at Starbucks. So I finally was able to get a promotion to a new position in Kogod, the one I'm at now. It finally was enough money that I could quit. And it was just so exhausting working two jobs. And this is a job, I really like working at AU. I really like my coworkers in COGOD, my coworkers across campus, the students. I'm not really student-facing anymore, but I was with my previous job. But it was just, it was hard. It was, every day was a long day because if I didn't have, you know, my other job, I had just, you know, like, Couldn't afford to take the bus because two dollars counts if you're working two jobs. I'm not doing it for fun I'm doing it because I need to so a lot of walking a lot of time wasted just to save money and That was a nice long ramble

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Stellar Well, thank you again for joining us today. We really appreciate your contribution to the archive. You're welcome to record more stuff if you have anything else you'd like to share or donate your materials. We'll be processing this interview in the coming weeks and transcribing your recording, so at that time we'll share a copy of the transcription and you can make any edits that you'd like. We're collecting these videos on behalf of the AU Staff Union and the collection will

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be turned over to the AU Archive to be digitized and made publicly accessible for research. That's with the exception of any materials that the union wants to maintain privately. So your contribution has been incredibly helpful again. Thank you so much. Oh no, thank you so much for doing this. It's... I could never talk about it too much. It really is the probably the proudest of something I've ever been a part of in my life. Like, I mean, you know what it's like.