I was three years old, in diapers and pigtails, the first time I canvassed for a politician. My mom pushed me around in an off-brand Hello Kitty stroller as we went door to door for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign.
By the time I was 11, I had developed my own interest in politics, and a corresponding nightly routine. Like clockwork, I would sit cross-legged on the living room floor and watch Inside City Hall on NY1, then crawl under my covers and listen to hyperlocal political podcasts.
While stuck at home near the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, I received a piece of mail that changed my life and prompted my formal foray into politics. The mailer featured a young woman wearing a “Feminist” t-shirt, proclaiming she was “transforming values into action.” I’m a feminist, I thought. I have values. I want to take action. Though I was new to electoral politics, I was restless to learn, and it wasn’t long before I was training volunteers even newer than myself.
As election night came to a close and the vote tally ticked into the tens of thousands, it finally dawned on me what we had made happen. I, along with a close-knit team of dedicated volunteers, had successfully elected the first Muslim woman to New York City Council. I cried the whole way home.
Five years later, I can barely remember my life before. Through my organizing in social justice movement spaces over the past five years, I’ve had the opportunity to engage with my community in a unique and beautiful way, speaking with neighbors I otherwise never would have met — sometimes over an intercom, in Spanish or through a half-open door — to hear their visions for our collective future.
When NYC Mayor Eric Adams cut my high school’s budget by $200,000 despite a fiscal surplus — and as he increased funding to the NYPD — I saw the establishment politicians who proselytize austerity for what they were: liars. The question lingering in my mind was, why is there always money for violence and terror, but never for our communities? My politics have always been rooted in a belief in people over profit.
I came to Cornell for the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. The labor movement allows us to tangibly improve people’s material conditions and serves as a unique opportunity to organize millions of working class people around larger issues of economic inequality and social injustice. During my time at Cornell, I’ve stood on the picket line with UAW Local 2300 members on strike, protested the university’s complicity in a genocide in Palestine and fought for critical protections for international and immigrant students.
Today, as institutions of higher education, gender-affirming and reproductive healthcare, the labor movement and all of us face unprecedented challenges, I believe we must learn from our history — and our more recent past.
Though our institutions may not have any values, we do.
From my work in organizing and my time at a union this summer, I can tell you this: you can’t negotiate with a party that isn’t working in good faith. Fascist dictators and corporate oligarchs certainly do not reward compliance.
While there may seem to be surface-level incentives to give in or give up, we the people can learn from the labor movement motto: “One day longer, one day stronger.”
Workers seeking to resist exploitation by mega-corporations can’t simply sit by as their real wages deflate, their safety conditions worsen and their employment becomes more precarious. No, workers who win have persevered in their solidarity, holding out for historic contract wins. Recent inspiration can be drawn from the massive 2023 strike wave, which included half-a-million writers, actors, healthcare workers, teachers and autoworkers at the “Big Three.”
Historically, students at Cornell have forced our University to act. While many know of the 1969 armed takeover of Willard Straight by Black students, Cornell’s annals hold tales of countless examples of successful student activism. The Asian American Coalition, now Asian Pacific Americans for Action, fought for decades until they won the establishment of Asian American Studies at Cornell. In 1993, Latino students took over Day Hall for four days, resulting in the creation of the Latino Living Center and an increase in funding for Latino Studies, Latino professors, and coursework on Latino history. In 2023, students took over Day Hall once again, kicking Starbucks off campus in protest of its union-busting.
That legacy is why I organize and why I write to you today: When we fight, we win. So stick with me for One Day Longer.
Adriana Vink '27 is an Opinion Columnist and a student in Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Her fortnightly column One Day Longer takes aim at campus politics, international relations and labor exploitation. She can be reached at avink@cornellsun.com.
