They may have kicked Nike out of the bookstore and have helped get on-campus janitors a raise, but former members of UB Students Against Sweatshops have set their sights on what they call the latest scourge of society: snowplows.
"Snowplows are responsible for everything from air pollution to potholes," said former UBSAS member Colin O'Malley. "They are evil, salting-the-earth machinations."
O'Malley and fellow ex-UBSAS member Davia Caridi have formed a splinter group to their former club, borrowing the acronym to create UB Students Against Snowplows.
"Since we've already made the workplace safe for little Asian kids, we decided to make the roads safe for little Asian cars," said Caridi. "Snowplows cause so much undercarriage damage, and their vicious blades are environmental terrors."
The group has already been active on campus, dumping reams of flyers at the Student Union and throughout campus, including the furthest reaches of South Campus. They also have organized parking lot sit-ins, preventing plowing in the lots, but also impeding parking for both students and faculty.
"I almost always support their efforts, but I have to draw a line when I can't get my usual parking spot," said English Professor James Holstun. "I mean, I get here at 4 a.m. to prepare my lecture, and there they are, all up in my spot."
O'Malley and Caridi were unfazed by the criticism of a former supporter.
"The ends justify the means, man. Park your gas-burning mechanical monster at home and huff it," O'Malley said.
"It's an unfortunate side effect, but the results have been showing," added Caridi. "Since we started the sit-ins a couple weeks ago, it hasn't even snowed."
Vice president for Student Affairs Dennis Black said he and other administration officials were not sure how to placate the group on their latest crusade.
"With sweatshops, we just had to join some organization on the cheap, and we were going to go back to union janitors anyway, because they're just better," he said. "But seriously, this is Buffalo - how do we get rid of snowplows?"
Director of Facilities Planning Kevin Thompson said plow overuse is a problem, but that UBSAS protest tactics are magnifying it.
"We try to stop plowing sometime in early March, but these kids' flyers force us to bring them out almost every day," he said. "Their sit-ins have become less of a problem since we started using vegan pot-lucks to lure them from the plows' paths."
Black was bittersweet discussing the group, however. He pointed to his framed "I survived the Blizzard of '77" tee shirt on his office wall and said the group's current efforts recall the anti-snowplow movement of the 1970s, whose most successful protest resulted in the aforementioned infamous blizzard.
"I get choked up thinking about it, actually," said Black, a former anti-salt advocate. "But nowadays with so many people driving from Ellicott to the Spine, it's just not practical."
For their part, UBSAS were optimistic of their group's chances of enacting change.
"We think we'll be able to keep the plows at bay until at least September or October," said O'Malley. "By then the bourgeois administration will see the light and halt the march of the snowplows."
