STUDENT WORKERS
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Sparked by Covid-19, Undergraduate Organizing May Be the Next Front in
Campus Labor Relations
By Vimal Patel
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/author/vimal-patel>
Chronicle of higher education, SEPTEMBER 2, 2020
PatelStudentWorkers-0831.jpeg
REBECCA TURNER
Jack Cheston, a senior history major and worker on Kenyon College’s
farm, sprays produce in a greenhouse on campus last year.
Daniel Napsha washes dishes at a Kenyon College hotel. There’s no
academic value to it, said Napsha, a senior political-science major.
It’s not preparing him for work beyond college, and it’s not
intellectually stimulating. “You’re not really exercising anything but
your hands,” he said. It’s labor. Like any other labor.
Across campus, Alasia Destine-DeFreece is learning leadership skills as
a resident adviser — or community adviser, as it’s called at Kenyon. The
modern-languages-and-literatures major, a senior, acknowledges those
skills may be beneficial after college. But her work, which includes
talking freshmen through their anxieties late into the night, is also
central to the Ohio college’s student-success mission, she said.
Meanwhile, Dante Kanter gets to pet goats in his work-study job at the
Kenyon farm. But he also lifts heavy equipment, cares for those goats
if, say, they’re giving birth at 2 a.m., and occasionally deals with
dogs pestering the chickens with loud barking. It can be stressful at times.
The jobs are different. But those three students and many others are
united in the belief that their campus roles are labor, and they should
have the right to bargain collectively. On Monday they kicked off a
union drive sparked by the uncertainties of student employment —
uncertainties that became clear this past spring, when the coronavirus
pandemic hit and campuses emptied out,ending many student jobs
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/when-covid-19-closed-colleges-many-students-lost-jobs-they-needed-now-campuses-scramble-to-support-them/>.
If they succeed, their bargaining unit, affiliated with the United
Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, will be the first
campuswide undergraduate union.
Could undergraduate unionization represent the next front in campus
labor relations? Recent developments have opened the door. A2016
National Labor Relations Board ruling
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/for-research-assistants-nlrb-decision-marks-a-big-win/>involving
Columbia University gave graduate students — and, for the first time
ever, undergraduates — the right to form unions at private colleges. In
recent years, undergraduates have attempted, sometimes successfully, to
unionize. Student dining workers at Grinnell College formed a
collective-bargaining unit in 2016. Some unions of graduate assistants,
including at Harvard and Columbia Universities, now include
undergraduate workers.
The effort at Kenyon would unionize all student workers. Organizers want
more positions available for students with work-study scholarships,
increased mental-health support for student workers, and a greater voice
in shaping the college’s decisions on workplace issues. Their concerns
have been brewing for years, said Destine-DeFreece, but the pandemic has
amplified their urgency.
We’re advocating for ourselves in a world in which it increasingly
seems like no one’s going to advocate for us.
“We’re graduating into a world of instability, and we’re grasping for
unpaid internships,” she said. “We’re advocating for ourselves in a
world in which it increasingly seems like no one’s going to advocate for
us.”
“Whether it’s in our college jobs or whether it’s in the streets saying
we deserve to live,” she continued, “we’re finding agency, and this is
just one way we’re doing that.”
Students’ lives, like everyone’s, have become more uncertain during the
pandemic. As colleges shifted online, low-income and vulnerable students
worried about where they would live. Many colleges, including Kenyon,
under pressure from their students, agreed to continue paying student
workers for the duration of the spring semester.
The uncertainty caused by the virus has led to a resurgence inlabor
organizing
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/will-covid-19-revive-faculty-power>on
campuses, often inbroad coalitions
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/how-covid-19-united-the-higher-ed-work-force>.
The pandemic has instilled a sense among many campus employees that that
their fates are connected, and in several states, unions are organizing
“wall to wall” bargaining units that include faculty, staff, and
graduate assistants. In the University of North Carolina system, faculty
and staff membersjoined forces in a lawsuit
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/unc-system-faculty-and-staff-prepare-lawsuit-to-delay-opening>to
delay its opening this fall.
Undergraduates have also called for protections. At the University of
Virginia, they helped create a union, affiliated with the Communication
Workers of America, over the summer “as a direct result of growing
dissatisfaction with the university’s repeated sidelining of student and
worker input when developing its pandemic response,” according to a news
release. The union wanted the university to abandon its in-person plans
for safety reasons.
ADVERTISEMENT
At Kenyon, the pandemic led student workers to connect with one another
about their pay and broader job security. Community advisers, for
example, banded together after the administration asked them to decide
whether they’d work in the fall on just a few days’ notice, a time frame
many students felt was unfair without more information on what
conditions would be like.
Destine-DeFreece said the students had already demonstrated the power of
collective action. The community advisers this summer won a $1,000 rate
reduction for their rooms and a pay increase of roughly $1.50 an hour.
The administration, she said, also gave them more time to decide about
working in the fall.
But aren’t those accomplishments evidence that union recognition isn’t
necessary for a productive and responsive relationship with
administrators? “This whole process that community advisers went through
would have been expedited if we had a union contract in place that would
ensure we would be having these conversations,” said Destine-DeFreece.
“I see the union as a way for us to improve communication. It doesn’t
have to be necessarily antagonistic.”
We’re doing a job that a staff member would be doing. The school is
saving a lot of money by having students do this.
Foremost, she wants recognition that she does labor for the college.
When Destine-DeFreece was a freshman, her community adviser was a role
model who made her feel welcome. It was especially important for her, a
Black woman at an institution that struggles for student diversity, to
see someone who looked like her. “She was this incredibly smart Black
woman,” she said. “She would talk for hours throughout the night if we
wanted to talk.” Nowadays, Destine-DeFreece keeps her in mind as she
supports others who are navigating college life for the first time.
“We’re doing a job that a staff member would be doing,” she said. “The
school is saving a lot of money by having students do this. Of course
we’re gaining really valuable experience, but we’re still employees, and
I think our compensation should reflect that.”
On Monday afternoon, the first day of classes, Kenyon students presented
President Sean M. Decatur with a letter seeking a path to an
undergraduate union.
They want a card-check neutrality agreement. That means they want the
administration to allow a union drive outside of a National Labor
Relations Board election, and to recognize the bargaining unit if enough
student workers simply sign union-authorization cards. It’s a strategy
designed to avoid litigation with a National Labor Relations Board
dominated by Trump appointees, so as not to give the board a chance to
overturn the right of students to unionize provided by the Columbia
ruling. (Even so, anunusual rule-making process
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/grad-students-at-private-colleges-could-lose-the-right-to-unionize/>,
now underway, might overturn that right.) For now, student organizers’
best hope is to pressure their administrations, on a campus-by-campus basis.
Why would a college agree to a card-check neutrality agreement when it
doesn’t have to?
For one, it would sidestep a protracted battle with its own students and
the negative attention that would ensue. It could also be a matter of
values: an effort to align a college’s rhetoric about labor with its
efforts to be inclusive and to protect vulnerable populations.
Georgetown University and Brown University have signed such agreements.
And the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor recently adopted a policy
that calls for neutrality in future organizing.
“Whether or not colleges agree to that depends on how they view
collective bargaining and labor rights,” said William A. Herbert,
executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective
Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, at the City
University of New York’s Hunter College. “There’s a split in
higher-education leadership. Some institutions have worked well in
developing collective-bargaining relationships. Other schools are just
adamantly opposed to unionization, particularly among student employees.”
Decatur’s reaction gave student activists hope. Within a couple of hours
of receiving the letter, he told/The Chronicle/that he was not
necessarily opposed to an undergraduate union. But given that such a
union doesn’t exist anywhere in higher education, he said, he couldn’t
commit to recognizing a wall-to-wall undergraduate bargaining unit or
signing a neutrality agreement until he knew more.
ADVERTISEMENT
“One of the arguments that’s often made, especially around
graduate-student unions, is that if it’s connected to the educational
mission, then, by definition, it isn’t employment. That’s not a position
I would take,” Decatur said. “There are multiple dimensions to the role
of student employment on campus. I don’t want to underestimate that it’s
a job. There’s a traditional employer-employee component to it.”
But Decatur had questions. He said it’s easier to envision the contours
of bargaining units of graduate assistants or even student dining workers.
“Here student workers range from community advisers in the dorms, to
interns in the art gallery, to graders in academic departments, and
those are all very different positions,” Decatur said. “I’m thinking of
these questions not in the spirit of rejecting the idea out of hand, but
in the spirit of wrapping my head around understanding what the path
forward is.”
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