Students at UM often remark that going to school here is like studying at a country club, but most take our beautiful surroundings for granted. Most of us walk to class and don’t even look twice at the UNICCO workers trimming palm fronds, cutting grass and generally keeping the landscaping great.

Even those who live in the towers try to ignore the workers who change the toilet paper, clean the showers and mop the floors. Not until Hurricane Katrina barreled through Coral Gables and ripped up half of campus did anyone start to appreciate how much work it is to keep the University of Miami looking like it does. If few students notice the omnipresent UNICCO workers, I’ll bet fewer than a hundred know-or care-what they get for their troubles.

I talked to a representative from the S.E.I.U. (Service Employees International Union) about it, so allow me to throw some facts at you. UNICCO employs about 400 workers on the Coral Gables campus. The high end of the pay scale is in the seven-dollar range; most employees make from $6.30 to $6.50 and hour. S.E.I.U. interviewed a man named Nelson Hernandez. He has been working here at UM for 25 years and he makes $6.80 an hour. Don’t be surprised if you find his face staring up at you from a flyer some time soon.

In addition to wages that put their employees well under the poverty line, UNICCO offers no job security, no sick days beyond two days of “personal leave,” and worst of all, no health insurance. Nice guys. We are not going to take this sitting down. A new student organization, S.T.A.N.D., is leading a campaign along with the S.E.I.U. that demands a living wage and fair treatment for the workers.

UNICCO has resorted to scare tactics to keep their employees from unionizing. To win their fight, the workers need the support, and the voices, of the students of UM.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, Sept. 14, there will be a speakout at noon on the Rock. About 10 UNICCO employees will get up with a microphone and the assistance of a translator and tell us what their lives are like. There will also be representatives from the S.E.I.U. on hand. On Thursday, S.T.A.N.D. will be hosting a screening of the film Occupation on the UC Patio at 8 p.m. Occupation tells the story of a similar campaign fought at Harvard just a few years ago. Help make a monumental difference in someone’s life. Stand with UNICCO workers in their quest for a living wage.

Patrick Gibbons can be contacted at p.gibbons@umiami. edu.

As the Fall semester neared, I began to worry about the incoming freshmen. It frightened me to think that these new students would not have a chance to meet nor attend orientation until the weekend before school began. I tried to remember how I dealt with my new environment as a freshman, but that seemed like years ago.

While anguishing over the freshmen’s plight, I continued my daily browsing of thefacebook.com. After receiving friendship requests from old high school buddies who graduated in May, I reached my summer’s divine revelation: The class of 2009 was on thefacebook. As giddy high school seniors, the class of 2009 had heard, some even seen, the Internet website of college students that is thefacebook. As the parents of these young adults wrote the University of Miami a big fat tuition check, this promising group of incoming freshmen finally received their UM e-mail addresses-their gateway to groups, messaging, walls and, of course, poking.

With intense friend viewing and group searching, I found students from the class of 2009 to be new members of the thefacebook from as early as April. If last year’s students thought they were facebook junkies, this new crop of ‘Canes chomped down on the bit until it broke. These students were excited to be closer to the next phase of their lives; I was there once, too. I continued my investigative research because April seemed a little too soon. As I scrolled through the accounts of various incoming freshmen, I noticed most fields to be completely entered.

Scrolling further, these new members were already part of several or hundreds of groups, and as I recently figured out how to turn on my wall, the freshmen already had endless walls.

Then my eyes wandered over to the right side of the page, where they bulged out of their sockets as I saw the number of friends these students had already accumulated without attending UM yet. Girls with 200 friends, others with 500. Guys with 170, another with four (he had just joined that day). One thing was for certain: The freshmen were creating massive friendships that dwarfed my measly 150 friends that I proudly accumulated in a year.

How could these new students have so many friends already? UM must have decided to have summer orientation. No, they did not, but thefacebook did.

I hope the person with 200 friends maintains every friendship or at least meets each person face to face; they owe their quasi-friends that much.

Congratulations to this Internet website. It is helping ease the transition into college; however, I am still angry with the recent surge of middle school acquaintances, who I thought I had finally lost, asking to be my friend. I did get my redemption. I kept those past schoolmates in purgatory-that area in thefacebook cyberspace when someone asks to be your friend and you have yet to confirm or reject the friendship-for weeks before I slapped myself for acting so petty and confirmed the childhood friend.

I do not know how the freshmen did it. Whether they selected the most attractive people or ones they held similar interests with, I was unable to close the case. UM is a large school, so good luck finding all these friends. As for me, I am just happy that I have a few more thousand accounts to browse; I was getting bored already. In time, you realize that you maintain relationships with five of your facebook friends. And as they will soon learn, there is much floating around on thefacebook. com, so please remember to use protection when poking. Sam Rega can be contacted at s.rega@umiami.edu.

Politics corrupt Hurricane Katrina analysis Partisan exploitation of Hurricane Katrina tragedy by the Left makes Bush the convenient scapegoat while protecting certain Democrats who are as guilty as the President. Bush failed. But what about the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, a Democrat? Why does he get a clean bill of innocence from otherwise active critics? Ray Nagin did not initiate New Orleans’ own evacuation plan, which calls for use of school and commuter buses to provide transportation to thousands who cannot evacuate on their own. Today those buses are flooded and useless in their parking lots. Imagine the seats in those buses and lives they could have saved.

As a matter of fact, Nagin declared mandatory evacuation only after President Bush personally urged him to do so in a phone call. Nagin did not prepare the Superdome, a designated shelter for hurricane. Why was there no food, no water and no medics at the Superdome?

He also failed to provide adequate security. New Orleans has murder rates 10 times higher than the rest of the United States. It is a city notorious for its lawlessness and corruption. Then why were there only 1,500 cops in the city of 500,000 under threat of a Category 5 hurricane?

President Bush declared a state of emergency in Louisiana on Aug. 28, two days before the levees broke, one day before hurricane itself. Why did Nagin not ask President for federal troops to beef up security, or for supplies, before the hurricane hit? Why is it that although Katrina missed New Orleans and hit Mississippi instead, everything is under control over there? Perhaps the local government in Mississippi is more qualified? Perhaps, instead of screaming profanity on national TV, they are actually prepared for the disaster?

Thousands lie dead in New Orleans as we speak. It is our duty, in order to honor their memory, to seek those who are truly guilty, regardless of creed or color. Stop exploiting their deaths for political gain!

Local and federal officials, Democrats and Republicans alike, were guilty of this disaster. To say that only Republicans or Bush failed, would be to drown victims of Katrina all over again for the sake of political bigotry. Arsen A. Ivanov

A good website should convey the personality of the organization it represents, be consistent with its design and content, and most importantly, be easy to use. Yet despite having the resources to make a great website, when UM changed its main miami.edu website last year, it failed to hit the mark in these three areas. Rather than phasing in changes gradually to allow users the chance to get accustomed to them, the University took us by surprise last semester and did a complete revamp immediately. Now that we’ve had time to try them out, many of us are disappointed. When users click on the site they’re greeted not by Hurricane orange and green, but with blue and pea green. Users clicking on one of the links are taken to a page that doesn’t look anything like the home page except for the appearance of some seemingly random variation on orange and green. Each page has its own set of colors and layout and lacks consistency. It reminds us of Hecht Residential College-you walk in the lobby and see one thing, but upon further investigation find that the rest of the building certainly doesn’t match the welcome mat laid out.

This inconsistency doesn’t just contain itself to the main links off the home page. In fact, the more links you hit, the more random the pages that appear. Each school and college, and even some departments within schools, have their own drastically different sites. Not all of these pages are bad, but none of them follow the format of the main miami.edu page. The School of Communication site is visually pleasing and user friendly, with information being exactly where you’d expect it to be-but then again, this School offers a major in visual communication. The Miller School of Medicine has a professional, up-to-date homepage, even though its color-scheme is blue. These pages are, unfortunately, the exception, not the rule. The College of Arts and Sciences, which houses the greatest number of programs at UM, has some departments that follow its format and others that do not. The Biology page looks like something you would learn to do in CIS 120. There are quite a few departments that follow a standard format, and that look quite professional, but not all the pages are up to par.

The School of Business’ page hasn’t been updated in ages, with content issues such as Dr. June Teufel Dreyer still being listed as the department chair for political science. Finding information on this site is difficult and ends with the random clicking of links in the hopes of coming to the page you need. Anybody trying to gain information on any program in the School of Business has a high chance of leaving frustrated and empty-handed.

While students attending UM can always walk to an office on campus to get the information they can’t find on the Internet (even though they shouldn’t have to), potential students don’t have that same luxury. In an age where almost everyone has grown up with the Internet, we’ve come to view an organization’s web site as a pretty good indicator of what that organization is really like. The messages that our site is sending to seems to be that our individual schools and colleges are out doing their own thing without communicating with each other or the main University, that we aren’t up-to-date, able to offer assistance or provide useful information.

Prospective students looking at a variety of colleges and universities to apply to will consciously or unconsciously be attracted to those they find most attractive and friendly. Where does that leave us? Not to mention that current students, community members, staff and faculty deserve a site that’s easy to maneuver around and that doesn’t cause us to pull our hair out while looking for information. For a school that was named as one of the top places to work in information technology, our web site is in need of some serious help.