The newest union members are students

Sam Betsko quickly learned that being a dorm assistant would take more than helping out-of-school students and begging sophomores to turn down the music for the love of God.

Her role at Boston University included days of mandatory, unpaid training and the specter of arbitrary discipline from bosses. She had to prepare for emergencies such as an anxiety attack or sexual assault against a student. Then she learned that some resident assistants were having to work much more than others — without extra compensation — in a job that offered little more than housing, a meal plan, tickets to school events and a weekly stipend that could barely buy a drink.

The residential assistants, she thought in 2021, needed a union. Last March, they voted overwhelmingly for one. Contract negotiations began Friday, lasting up to a week, during which employees at Swarthmore College and Smith College voted to unionize.

Resident assistants, known as RAs, are on the rise, part of a wave of unionization among students who work in places like dining halls and libraries and attend schools like Harvard, the University of Oregon and Western Washington University. This year alone, about 20,000 students, many of them at California State University, the nation’s largest four-year public university system, have cast ballots in union elections or been given the opportunity to vote.

“It’s really not hard to see that universities have had all the influence so far,” said Ms. Betsko, now a senior majoring in English. “We see that students are being exploited because of this.”

The students who have joined the labor movement represent a fraction of the approximately fifteen million students in the country. But the movement is nonetheless a glimpse into how campus culture is changing. As families increasingly wonder whether a college education is worth it, students like RAs often ask the same question about their on-campus jobs. And RAs, who have often been compensated with benefits like free housing, are now seeking wages and workplace protections that were scarce a decade ago.

“We’ve spent most of our lives navigating systems that weren’t built for us and weren’t built for our benefit,” said Nathan Duong, a junior at Boston University. “So you take that, and then you put that in the context of a broader upswing in labor organizing across the country, and I think it makes a lot of sense.”

Many university leaders believe they already provide student workers with generous enough benefits, such as housing that can be worth $15,000 or more per year. And some have sometimes launched aggressive legal efforts to derail union organizing.

But they face a generation of students who are much more receptive to organized labor than young people, even in the recent past. A Gallup poll found that in 2013, 60 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 34 supported a union; this year that figure was 78 percent, the highest in more than two decades of polling.

And students, who have watched the organizing campaigns unfold at cultural cornerstones like Amazon and Starbucks, are wondering whether they, too, can benefit from the flood of workers.

“It wasn’t a hard sell for most people,” says David Whittingham, a senior who helped form a new union for RAs at Tufts University, just outside Boston. “The struggle, I think, was less convincing and more focused on excluding people.”

With help from groups like the Service Employees International Union and the Office and Professional Employees International Union, students consolidated their support for headline-making elections, contract talks and protests. Their muscle has surprised longtime observers of the labor movement, some of whom have wondered where exactly young adults learned some of the finer points of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. (Part of the answer: direct messages on Instagram with organizers on other campuses.)

“These students have clearly studied this and have applied these procedures in a very sophisticated way,” said William A. Herbert, executive director of Hunter College’s National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions.

A central challenge for the students is to reframe decades of institutional preaching about the purpose of student work. “It was a fundamental gap,” said Anisha Uppal-Sullivan, a Tufts junior. “We saw ourselves as employees, while the university saw us more as student leadership.”

A Tufts spokesperson said administrators were not available for interviews, but other universities questioned whether unions were necessary for assistants.

The University of Pennsylvania, where RAs voted to unionize in September, told the federal government that collective bargaining was “incompatible with the unique nature” of the job, which it portrayed as an opportunity “to learn how to be effective student leaders in an educational institution’. environment.”

At Tufts, RAs said some school negotiators did not seem to understand their work and downplayed their contributions.

RAs there and at other schools recounted how they had helped crime victims go to police, enforced coronavirus protocols and dealt with mental health crises. Their work, they said, did not fit neatly into a shift schedule.

“Kids are losing their sleep, kids are losing their studies,” Ms. Uppal-Sullivan said of the resident assistants. “That is something that needs to be compensated for.”

At Tufts, the RAs struck on one of the busiest days on campus: student move-in day. The university, which had provided them with housing, quickly reached a deal that promised a stipend of $2,850 per academic year, an increase from nothing.

That money can be crucial, RAs say, because colleges sometimes, explicitly or implicitly, limit their ability to hold down second jobs. And many RAs said they’re struggling to make ends meet.

“I have a kitchen and I love it, but that’s not what I need,” said Jasmine A. Richardson, a junior at Boston University. “I need food.”

Ms. Richardson understands why people are often bewildered when they hear about unionization efforts, partly because she herself had not initially understood the scope of the role and was not fully prepared for it. One restaurant prepared its employees better, she suggested, than Boston University prepared its RAs

“If training here makes me feel like my training at Red Lobster was the best thing I could have ever done, then there’s a problem: nothing against Red Lobster,” she said.

Colin Riley, a spokesman for Boston University, declined to comment on the union other than to say in an email this fall that the university expected “to begin negotiating a fair contract with them in good faith soon.” He did not respond to a query about the accounts of some of the university’s RAs.

Students did not gain the national right to organize until 2016, during Barack Obama’s presidency, when the National Labor Relations Board concluded that undergraduate workers could be classified as workers with union rights. (Federal law does not cover public institutions, which are governed by state statutes and regulations. For example, RAs at the University of Massachusetts Amherst were unionized in 2002, but their efforts did not spark a broader movement.)

According to Mr Herbert’s data, at least 41 new bargaining units involving graduate or undergraduate students have been formed since the start of 2022. In the previous nine years, Mr Herbert’s center reported, there were a total of 21 new units.

Union officials know they may have limited time to organize on more campuses as a future Labor Council could overturn the 2016 ruling, especially if a Republican wins the presidency next year. But Mark Gaston Pearce, executive director of the Workers’ Rights Institute at the Georgetown University Law Center, predicted that even then, few schools would rush to rid themselves of new unions.

“Regardless of one’s philosophy on this issue, universities are interested in achieving stability,” said Mr Pearce, chairman of the Labor Council and in the majority for the 2016 decision.

One of the biggest challenges for the new unions is the constant flow of members as students graduate, drop out and change jobs. At Tufts, RAs are trying to figure out what their union should look like on a day-to-day basis, knowing that the next bargaining battle will come after many current students have left.

And at Boston University, students like Ms. Betsko know they will have a limited time to enjoy the benefits of a deal. She was philosophical about the time crisis.

“It’s not just for us,” she said of their potential contract. “It would be for every CPR worker who comes after us. There’s no point in being selfish.”