Webinar: The Student Staff are Unionizing [Webinar Recording]

DeAndre Taylor:
Good afternoon or happy late morning to you all. My name is DeAndre Taylor. I’m the chair for the Commission for Housing and Residential Life, and this afternoon we have Tyler Bradley from the University of Massachusetts Amherst here to talk about student staff unionizing, how does that work, and everything on what does that mean? We are so excited to have Tyler round out our fall webinar series that’s been presented throughout this fall semester. Before we get started, there’s a few housekeeping things I want to do. One, of course I want to thank ACPA, and then, of course, I want to also thank our other sponsor, Roompact, for their diligence support for the Commission for Housing and Residence Life. Again, my name is DeAndre, and I am speaking from the University of Wisconsin Parkside, the ancestral lands of the Oneida Potawatomi, and Ho-Chunk Nations. With that being said, I will now turn it over to Tyler. Tyler, the floor is yours.

Tyler Bradley:
All right, thank you so much, and happy to be here, and thank you for having me. But first, I want to start things off, I already got a wonderful introduction by doing a land acknowledgement of my own from where I’m presenting to you from, from UMass Amherst, so we wanted to honor additional homeland of the Pocumtuc peoples, who joined their Algonquian relatives to the east, south, west, and north. That includes Mashpee, Aquinnah Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Narragansett, Mohegan, Pequot, Mohican communities, Abenaki and other nations of the Wabanaki Confederacy. We want to recognize that relationship for the land that they are still connected to, to this day, and also recognizing that my institution is a land grant institution, where 82 native nations lands west of the Mississippi were sold to provide resources, found, and build many of these institutions of higher ed today, and also recognizing the namesake of Amherst. Lord Jeffrey Amherst has a little bit of a problematic history in relationships with Indigenous folks too.

So I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that as well. Then, also something that I’ve been seeing more in presentations is a labor acknowledgement as well, and while our institutions don’t have an official statement along these lines, but recognizing that most modern day US institutions had benefited from stolen labor at the foundation of this nation, and one I respectfully acknowledge our debt to enslave people, primarily from African descent, from the labor and suffering that grew the economy and infrastructure that we know the US as today. Then, finally, a note on inclusive language. There’ll be opportunities for folks to engage in the chat and ask some questions and whatnot, but as we go through that, just recognizing individual gender pronoun use, using contemporary language around social identities, using language that’s not ableist, and recognizing varying abilities, utilizing language that’s inclusive of diverse global concepts, and recognize we’re all learning and growing too. So if someone’s not as familiar with certain concepts, that’s okay, and we can work with that together.

All right, so a little bit about who I am. Besides that I just work at UMass Amherst, I’m a child of two at non-union auto workers. So I grew up in Michigan, and both my parents worked in the auto industry. Growing up, I thought all auto workers were unionized, because that’s all you hear about in Michigan, is the auto industry, the unions, and that relationship there. So as I got older, I was a little surprised to learn that they weren’t unionized. And now looking back at it, I’m like, “That makes a lot of sense, seeing the working conditions that they had to experience.” I currently work as a res instructor. Also, worked in some non-unionized positions before coming to UMass Amherst, but I’m a part of union myself, so I’m in the professional staff union. We have several unions on our campus, so that’s just one of many. And they have a parent organization, which is the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which is a fairly common practice. A lot of unions will have a parent sort of organization that provides a little bit more infrastructure support and guidance throughout a lot of that work.

And a great way to get connected to other locals, and then they also have the parent organization of the National Educator Association. But in the professional staff union, I serve as our delegate, which is really just a way to kind of keep memberships informed, a way to bolster grassroots organizing. I also serve as our chapter board member at large, which is generally a hodgepodge of a lot of different things. I also threw up a couple images of my two dogs on here too, because they’re the lights of my life here, so if you’re wondering, “Why are there two dogs?” that’s who they are, Captain and Bridget. Then, kind of more importantly, for our focus of the day, I supervise a UAW graduate assistant and UAW undergraduate RAs. We also have undergraduate unionized peer mentors that are in the same union as RAs, but those are supervised by other staff in our department. We’ll get into a little bit of those logistic of what that looks like in a few.

But wanted to make sure y’all kind of see my experience and my perspective as we go throughout this presentation, so we’re going to have a poll queued up here, just to get a little bit of a sense of folks in the room. And if you’re joining as a little bit of a group, kind of work with what you can, and feel free to check all the boxes that apply. But there’s some prompts that should be showing up on your screen that just kind of select if you feel familiar with what a union is and does, if you have family members who are in a unionized workplace, if you are in a unionized position yourself, and then if you’re actively supervising unionized student staff, which can also mean graduate staff. I didn’t just include undergraduate in this question. Then, if you’re at an institution where student staff have had efforts to unionize, so we’ll give folks a minute or so to submit those, and we’ll kind of see where folks are at. I can’t fully see where we’re at in percentage completion, so leave it up to our folks to make the call.

Tyler Bradley:
All right. We can go ahead, close it out. It’s okay if you didn’t wrap it up. Just a little pulse check of who’s with us today, and we can share those results out. Let’s see who’s all here. Great, so that’s really optimistic to see a lot of people familiar with what a unionism does, so won’t have to spend a whole lot of time on that, and then a majority of folks have had student staff who have had efforts to unionize, and if they haven’t, I would make an argument that there’s a good chance that they might try in some cases. Obviously, state law is going to have a little bit of variance on if they can or not, but we’ll get into some. All right, so a little bit of our agenda today, we’re going to look a little bit about the big picture, how it’s connected to the broader labor movement.

We’re going to look a little bit of the history at the Resident Assistant peer Mentor Union at UMass Amherst, because we’ll see, in a lot of cases, how this history is showing exactly up in the same ways and a lot of the movements that we’re seeing on other campuses. Then, we’ll talk a little bit about what is it like working with unionized student staff. A lot of our newer unions are very new, so it looks probably a little bit intimidating in some ways, because you don’t know what it’s going to be like, but we’ve had ours now for just around 20 years, so there’s some things to share there. Then, we’re going to zoom out again to just talk about some other union knowledge. Probably won’t spend a whole lot of time on these pieces, because it sounds like folks are pretty familiar as it is, but we’ll give some little resources for our additional learning if I’ve piqued anybody’s interest in particular areas too.

So we probably all heard about some of the modern corporate labor movements that we’ve been seeing:: Amazon warehouses, Starbucks, the first unionized Trader Joe’s, Chipotle, Barnes and Noble. I’m very excited to even share that the Trader Joe’s and Barnes and Noble’s, the first locations to unionize, are just down the road from us, so these are the places that our college students are shopping at on a regular basis, and so there’s some pretty cool stuff that’s happening there. But we’re starting to see this new trickle of things that are coming up, and I think when we look at the recent years, some of the things that have led up to that, when we think about the mid to late first decade of the 2000s, we saw that big talk about the 1% and the growing wealth inequities that we’ve seen, and more recently, there was this thing that happened in 2020 that a lot of people were getting really skeptical about working conditions.

A lot of corporations were still announcing record profits despite all the concerns that they were having about inflation and all these different pieces and workers, and a lot of [inaudible 00:09:54] are stepping up and being like, “We want our fair share too.” We’re also seeing a big increase in strikes across the nation. So we’ve had those conversations about the railroad workers potentially going on strike the teamsters, but seeing some successful strikes carried out by the Writer’s Guild, SAG-AFTRA, the United Auto Workers all just finishing, settling their strikes pretty recently. Then, also on the bigger page, we’re seeing massive political support for unions in a lot of surveys that have been done, where 88% of people under 30 are viewing unions favorably, which is an all time record, and even if we look across party lines, when you look at Republicans and independents, they’re still getting majority of people reporting that they support unions.

They’re more likely to stand with striking workers than the corporations themselves, and this year we also saw first of us presidents joining a active union picket line with the UAW strikes that were happening. Then, at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, they released this really great report on the state of unions, and in it they have a section on higher education. This is a really great read if you get the chance to, and I’m sharing a couple charts from that today with y’all, but in terms of growth in student worker collective bargaining, we’re seeing an increase in those. You can see, very specifically, 2020 is that season where we see this kind of pretty big increase of things happening. This is inclusive to graduate unions too, I believe. Then, when we see how they’re affiliating, largely they’re affiliating with these larger parent organizations.

But there are a lot of these one-offs where they’re going to represent themselves in a lot of ways, like the Union of Grinnell Student Dining or Columbia University Resident Advisors, so there’s a lot of people that are like, “We understand our own interests. We’re going to kind of govern ourselves,” but that’s not unlike what we’re seeing in the corporate world too. Trader Joe’s has their own union. They’re not partnering with a parent organization for that, as it stands for now. Then, in terms of strikes, we’re seeing increases in that too. They draw comparisons to how that’s kind of equaling out to faculty and postdoctoral scholar strikes, and we see they’re both kind on the rise since the pandemic occurred, but we’re seeing a lot more student worker strikes than we’ve ever seen before. Three of these strikes in the last year-and-a-half were related to undergraduates who were seeking union representation, so a lot of moving pieces there.

And maybe some folks’ institutions are represented on this webinar today, but in terms of the different institutions, at least that I’ve caught wind of different movements that have been happening, we have been seeing just such a slew. If you ask me what the slide said back in March when I gave this presentation, there was a lot less institutions represented here. And so, almost every week, I was copying in here and adding some more things that I’ve heard about happening, and so it’s a very evolving situation and definitely something to keep an eye on. Some of these have been successful movements. Some of them are still kind of working their ways through the system, but we’ll talk a little bit more about that, but want people to kind of gauge the list that is presented here about what are the themes that folks are seeing among these institutions, where these movements are occurring. I’ll give folks a second on that.

Really, there’s about three different takeaways that I’ve seen with this list. Probably the first observation, because we’re also sponsored by the Commission of Housing Residential Life for this webinar today, is that they are largely housing and residential life positions. I think that makes sense. When we kind of approach our training with student staff, sometimes we are telling them there’s really no role like there’s on campus, so it’s really good to build those relationships with their coworkers. Some go as far as saying it’s one of the toughest jobs you can have as an undergraduate staff member on campus, and so there’s a lot of room for potential worker exploitation, thinking about the varying compensation packages that institutions offer, duty expectations, crisis management. There’s a lot of things that people might rightfully not enjoy doing the work that they do or missed expectations that happen.

Some of the other things that we see is they’re very largely represented by private institutions here. I don’t have a lot on the why there, but I think in a lot of sense, when we think about the student’s capital to be able to advocate for themselves in these ways, that might have some leeway in rationalizing why that is the way it is. Then, demographically by region, we see very largely northeast institutions, New England very well represented among these institutions. Out west, we’re starting to see a little bit more, and then we’ve got little, lonely Grinnell out here in Iowa representing the Midwest, and we’re starting to see a little bit more coming up from there, but a lot of different pieces happening. We’ve sort of got this lone representation of Dartmouth men’s basketball out here. That’s pretty recent as of September. Not going to dive deep into the logistics of that. The big question is going to be if they’re going to be considered employees or not.

That’s where things will kind of go from there, but apologies to folks who have color sensitivities, but to give you a little bit of a breakdown of where the movements are at, almost all of these have been successful movements and have an active labor union at this point. There are a couple of failed movements, like George Washington RAs, the Georgetown RAs, and then there’s a number of them that are still kind of in those stages of working things out. So I just talked about Dartmouth men’s basketball, where they submitted intent to the labor relations board to unionize, and we got to see how it pans out. The Kenyan student employees, they are waiting to have a hearing. I think they might have finally announced a hearing date to determine if they have the ability to collectively bargain. Then, very recently too, California State University student workers, they recently reached the threshold to be able to have enough people to host an election, so we’ll talk about it in a little bit.

But they have to gather so many signatures on union cards or on a petition with intent to unionize, and I believe they collected 8,500 signatures across the system, which should initiate a vote that could happen sometime in the coming months. Across all of these, about 35,700 students gained representation across 30 collective bargaining units in 2022 in the first half of 2023. This would also be inclusive to graduate student unions that have been created too, but we’re not going to spend a lot of time talking about them, because there’s a little bit more of a precedent for those being created. On average, in the last year-and-a-half, of those elections that happened, 91% of eligible student workers voted in favor of unionization, and those are the folks who did vote. So if it gets to an election, there’s a very good chance that they could win.

So zooming in specifically into UMass Amherst, because they are the nation’s oldest US RA undergraduate student union that exists, I want to give a little bit of a context of what led up to that moment, because these things are unfolding on other people’s campuses too. So back in 1958, the public employees got a right to join unions. Ultimately, it meant, at the time, that the employer didn’t have to collectively bargain with them, so a lot of it was based on a voluntary basis, and so there wasn’t a lot of power in doing that. There was a couple of unions that happened here on UMass campus, but there wasn’t a whole lot of power behind it. About 15 years later, full collective bargaining rights were granted to state and municipal employees, and that’s when UMass really saw a boom in union. So if you come to our campus, you will see most positions have a union. So we have professional staff union, Massachusetts Society of Professors, the University Staff Association.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg there. The folks who aren’t unionized are typically like your deans, chancellor, vice chancellors, folks in those more specific positions. Obviously, HR folks probably wouldn’t, because they’re some of the folks that are in the labor management meetings. Then, we’ll flash forward a little bit, and talking more specifically about students on campus, the graduate employee organization was recognized on campus in 1991, and they’re a pretty powerful union. They are a little bit different in operation, because a lot of their bargaining and agreement, they get clearance like through the chancellor and labor relations, and things generally seem to end there, but for other staff on campus, things usually wind up in the legislature and ultimately signed off by the governor, so things are a little bit more dragged out in those cases, but more specifically, when we talk about the resident assistant and peer mentor union, things really got started for them in 2000.

So we had a resident assistant council, which was a great way for the department to hear what are the concerns that staff are having, pivot things accordingly to make things better of a working condition for them and work environment. They were voicing a lot of concerns about compensation, discipline, code of conduct, and then, ultimately they expressed the need for a union at that time too. Around compensation, they were talking about how their housing fees were getting taken out of their paycheck. So in some cases, they were making $50 a week for 20 hours of work. If you do the math, that it’s definitely way lower than minimum wage, and there’s a lot of institutions where it is just the housing scholarship, and you’re not getting paid additional funds to serve in an RA capacity. Then, in terms of the code of conduct and discipline, around this time, there were two RAs who were terminated for student code of conduct violations. The RAs generally thought that the firings were questionable and arbitrary.

They said that if a resident that wasn’t in an RA position had done the same thing, they would’ve just received a written warning, and so some of the RAs went on record and said they felt they had less rights than residents, so feeling like they could lose their housing over something that a resident would just have a written warning over. At the time, the director of housing responded, saying, “Well, the reality is we have twice as many applicants than there are RA slots available,” and in the past two years, only 13 RAs were fired out of 700 people who had the job, and they all had a right to appeal the termination, but that statement didn’t really resonate with them. I also acknowledged that the role had a 50% turnover rate annually, which probably makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways. If you’re a first year student, you’re probably not jumping into an RA role, so we’re usually getting people that sophomore, junior year. Folks go and study abroad. How that compares around to how our department’s doing now, I think we’re sitting around a 60% return rate.

So, only a 40% turnover. Yeah, so that would be the turnover or something like that, but anyway, the RA submitted a proposal that would outline a little bit more of a detailed process of how to do accountability a little bit more fairly and a little bit more transparent in how that works. The department rejected it and didn’t really want to give it a lot of consideration, so it was at that point that the RAs felt really defeated, unheard, and not listened to. So a couple representatives went and met with GEO to talk about, “How did you get a union? How can we do that too?” So they started collecting signatures to try to initiate an election. Then, around April the university became aware of that plan to unionize, and they went ahead and sent them an email letting them know, “Hey, we heard you’re collecting signatures. We’re not going to give you voluntary recognition, so you’re going to have to do a formal certified election if you’re going to go this route,” And also, acknowledge that they don’t think they have a right to do that in the first place.

So the RAs filed with the Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission to initiate that process. So a little bit about what that looks like. So things, like I said, are going to vary by state law. If you’re in a right to work state, things are going to look very different, and probably not going to take shape in any way, shape, or form. I’m not an expert on how right to work shows up and impacts things, but at least in Massachusetts, things go through a Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission, but in a lot of cases it’ll go to the National Labor Relations Board. So it can kind of vary who oversees that election, but ultimately, institutions have an option to do voluntary recognition if the state law, state law permits it, which just means a majority of the staff signed a union card or a petition, and the employer says, “Yeah. We’re going to bargain with you,” and Wesleyan University was believed to be the first university to do voluntary recognition. I think, since then, Mount Holyoke was one of the other institutions that gave voluntary recognition.

But otherwise, we see a representation election, and that’s the more common route a lot of institutions will do. Generally speaking, those elections occur once 30% of staff agree to vote, so versus voluntary recognition, where it’s a 50% plus one, to get that recognition, you only need 30% to initiate the election process. Then, at that point, the MLRC or the NLRB will issue a statement to the university, saying, “You need to provide the local union access to the voter rolls of who is eligible to vote in this election.” Then, they host that election, and if it’s a win by 50% plus one of those who voted, they generally have won their union and can start collectively bargaining. I will say, a lot of times when these elections occur, there’s going to be a number of people who don’t vote, so institutions will largely use that as an argument after the election. It’s like, “Well, X percent of the current members are graduating, so they’re not even going to be able to participate in the union when it happens, and then X percent of people didn’t even vote.”

But then look at how those numbers compare to regular American democracy and our presidential and midterm elections. We still elect leaders who are not elected by a majority of people at the end of the day, based on who votes, who doesn’t, so it’s a little interesting argument to make at the end of the day, but that’s kind of a little bit of a zoom out of the process. So in June 2001, the Labor Relations Commission had hearings between UMass and the Union to really flush out, “Do the RAs and the community development assistance have a right to even collectively bargain?” So they were looking at the legal terminology about what it means to be an employee or public employee, and what those exceptions were, which were largely, if you work for the MLRC, if you have the state treasurer, state auditor, attorney General, those people would not be able to collectively bargain. So in a lot of ways, it didn’t really touch on higher ed very specifically, but this was kind of what they kind of focused in around. Then, ultimately, a few months later, they came out with a statement.
The university had made a very compelling case like, “No, you can’t get rid of their student status. They have to be a student to be employed here. There’s a minimum GPA requirement. All these different pieces would indicate they don’t have a right to bargain.” But the Labor Relations Commission really gave them a slap and said, “No. They have an absolute right to bargain.”

I want to read with you this paragraph, because I think this is really the really telling part of where the legality of these things sit. They said that, “RAs and community development assistants don’t receive academic credit for their work, nor do they have any formal academic responsibilities. The only kind of discreet academic aspect of RA position is the minimum GPA requirement.” They talked a little bit after that about how that is something that they could bargain over technically. Most of the concerns the university raises turn largely on speculation over what the union might seek to achieve in collective bargaining. The university was like, “They’re going to try to bargain over this and that and things that they can’t bargain over,” less than like, “Here are the things that they want to bargain over,” and so they said, “In conclusion, where the university requires, the students have to sign employment contracts and job descriptions has prepared comprehensive RA residence life manuals containing detailed terms and conditions of employment, evaluates those employees at least three times a year.”

That’s an employee relationship. There’s no formal academic requirements on the position. The fact that they have to be a student doesn’t really mean that they can’t bargain over their working conditions, and so they made the case like, “No, they have the right to collectively bargain with the university,” and so it was also at this time the chancellor wrote a letter to the RAs and the community development assistants asking them to reject the union. In this letter, the chancellor maybe didn’t choose the right sort of words and right audience, and said in that letter that the RA role is not a job, which yes, that’s exactly what they were saying in those hearings, but telling the people directly that this is not a job was not what they wanted to hear. So the chancellor later had to issue an apology in a town hall a week before the election happened, so not really good PR at that moment. The Boston Globe, at this time, was also suggesting that administration was going to eliminate RA positions, do something different altogether.

There were some rumors of, maybe they’re going to do something with the hospitality department. Maybe it becomes a for-credit experience. Ultimately, I don’t think they went this route, because it probably would’ve resulted in some unfair labor law practices and some additional things that would’ve unfolded, so anytime that you see these movements underway, there’s a very, “Got to be cautious, because some things can be seen as retaliatory,” so they could file unfair labor charges against institutions for that too. So they had the election in March, and the RAs voted to unionize 138-88. Like I had mentioned earlier, administration-led institutions love to write off like, “No. Well, not that many people voted.” There was 300-some people on the voting role. A lot of people didn’t vote it. A lot of them were seniors. Even though the vote was certified by the Massachusetts Labor Relations Board, the university said, “We’re still not going to bargain with you, because we feel like this whole situation, you don’t have a right to do it.”

And so folks were rightfully upset. The RAs hosted a sit-in the Vice Chancellor’s office. 35 people got arrested. I believe, largely, those arrests were community members that were standing in solidarity with them, because that would’ve kind of endangered their jobs a little bit since they weren’t formally recognized by the institution at the time as being in a union, so they could still be kind of fired arbitrarily. There wasn’t formalized due process for that, and those folks were charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrests, trespassing, typical things you might see from a sit-in. It was also at this time, the chancellor published an OP-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education called Why a Union for RAs Makes No Sense. You can still go read this article today. It’s a pretty interesting read. I think some of the arguments might be a little bit out there, but this was something very new at the time for institutions. So she argued that UAW, their parent organization was super frustrating to work with, because the graduate student union keeps trying to bargain over non-work matters.
She talked about the changing leadership. Because it is just college students that hold this position, they’re in and out within a couple of years of holding the role, and maintain the argument that they’re not workers, and so you’ll see that at a lot of other institutions, if they’re trying to have these hearings and wash the movement, they’re saying that they’re not employees, and I’m not a lawyer by any means, so I don’t know how these things unfold, but a lot of institutions have updated their language to remove things like employee from their RA position documents. They’ll call them student leaders or paid student leaders. They’ll see a lot of these different pieces. I think my gut feeling is that courts would still find them in an employee relationship, because you still have training, these work expectations. Your residence director interview process probably still has questions about supervision and if there’s supervision, does that imply a worker employee relationship? There’s a lot of pieces there that I’m a little skeptical about, about how that unfolds in the courtroom.

But we really haven’t seen that unfold in the same way in going that far, because in a lot of ways the courts have just, time and time again, said, “Nope. Students have a right to unionize,” so interested to see the folks who are quietly updating these documents, how that will unfold in the long term, so ultimately months went on, and the university was holding out, and they kept refusing to bargain. This is probably something that’s a little bit more UMass specific. At this point, most institutions have agreed to collectively bargain, and they’re going through it, but because this, again, was a very new experience at the time, they were holding out. We don’t really know what tipped the tide to make them agree that they were going to bargain. We do know that other unions on campus made statements. They released things that like, “An attack on one union is an attack on all of us,” and really garnered a lot of community support, encouraging, “Administration like you should bargain with these people.”

So they did wind up agreeing to bargain in July of that year. Then, they would limit it to the terms and conditions of employment, which would include wages, hours, benefits, but they would not negotiate academic policies or matters pertaining to student life. The RA Union wound up submitting 21 pages of proposals. Admin submitted five pages. You’re going to see that’s pretty commonplace when you go into collective bargaining. Usually the union elects a collective bargaining team, which is a select amount of representatives, usually some people from your leadership team, who create proposals, submit them, and then you just kind of go back and forth about what makes sense. Sometimes they’re private meetings. Sometimes they’re public, and usually you got to learn to read people’s cards a little bit, because a lot of times administration, if they’re on that end, they’ll just ask some questions about proposals, and they don’t really want to show their true feelings about, “Do we like this? Do we not?”

And similar on the reverse side of the table, and then usually the unions are going to submit more things because they want to envision how that position could look in the future. Admin tends to like the status quo in a lot of senses, so if you have a unionized department and you want to overhaul your RA position and re-envision what that looks like, you might actually have more pages of proposals than the union in that case, but more often than not, there usually isn’t a whole lot coming from the admin side, but after 14 months, the RA Union finally reached an agreement with administration. Then, once you reach a tentative agreement, then that agreement goes back to that union’s membership where they vote on it. So it’s very grassroots and democratically driven, and they ratified it 96 to 1, so a lot of people just didn’t vote, seemingly, but their wages increased by 23%. Within getting that contract signed, they created a distinction between new staff members and returning staff members having different levels of compensation, because they have more experience and training in the position.

They got improved parking privileges, where their parking pass costs more similar to what it looks like for staff members. So to put that in perspective and what that looks like now, RAs parking permit permit compared to a student parking permit, on average, a student’s permit costs almost six times as much in some cases as an RA’s permit would. Then, at this time too, all of the RAs had to pay, either it was 1.5 to 2% of union dues. Then, since then, we’ve seen the Janice decision make it where not everyone has to pay union dues, so I don’t know what their true membership looks like nowadays, but being a highly unionized environment at our school, they still have quite a membership. So there’s this great document that kind of gives a little bit more detail of the history and talks about what those first few contracts look like. Among some of those things, you can see the stipend changing and increasing steadily with each contract. So, thinking in your own departments, when’s the last time you went back and looked at the stipend?

Has that kept up with the cost of rising tuition, or are you just kind of increasing it when the state minimum wage increases? But some of the other notable changes that happened in their third contract was premium pay for work during break. So a lot of institutions in their RA role, if it comes to spring break or winter break, and you need duty coverage for RAs during those periods, they weren’t paid anything extra. A lot of times, it was like, “Well, you don’t have to pay the extra money to live in the break house, so you just have the housing scholarship covering that.” That third contract, they won additional compensation for those pieces, and that’s something we’re seeing a lot in the other unions spring up as well. Then, just to compare what it looks like nowadays, that’s a pretty stark different in number. We have organizationally about 400 RAs and about 100 peer mentors. Our peer mentors are, for lack of a better way of saying it, are the re-envisioned community development assistance. They are more focused on the academic side of things.

In their most recent contract, they also got language around dining dollars, so our student staff aren’t required to have meal plans as something that they bargained over however many years ago, and because we have a residential curriculum and we encourage them as part of that curriculum to get meals with your residents, but if they’re not required to have a meal plan, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. So they successfully reach an agreement where they get 150 dining dollars per semester, including the summer term, that they can use for different things like having meals with residents. Then, also, this is the last semester of their current contract, so they’re about to start new bargaining, probably starting in January, because our university likes to only bargain as early as they are legally obligated to. So January is going to be a very busy month for our labor management people, because a lot of unions have expiring contracts in July, and so it’s a very, very fun time for them. But I want to talk a little bit now more about what that day-to-day looks like.

They’ve won their union. They have their contract, and for the most part, as a supervisor of unionized staff, the day-to-day looks no different. They’re still carrying out a lot of the functions of their job in the same way that the RA role has looked at, like at other institutions. Some of the big differences is that we hold time during the RA training schedule for a union orientation. If they’re going to work in a unionized environment, they should probably know a little bit about what that means. We don’t require attendance because of the [inaudible 00:39:22] decision largely, but we highly encourage them to go so they can learn about that. But probably, most notably, is accountability looks a little bit different, and so most folks do like progressive discipline, developmental discipline, because we recognize, in a lot of ways, people are learning. These are the first jobs that people are holding. There’s a lot of stake when things are tied directly to where they live, but this kind of formalizes it a little bit.

So it kind of mirrors, in a lot of ways, our student conduct process at our institution. If a student staff member does something that doesn’t seem to align with work expectations, and it’s something that wouldn’t be a developmental conversation because it’s pretty egregious, or we’ve had those developmental conversations and we’re not seeing a change in behavior, we might move towards a performance concern meeting where the student staff member will get an email that is their letter of charge, that details, “here are the things that we think that don’t align with the work expectations that we want to know a little bit more about to determine if you are responsible for missing work expectations or not,” and then detailing some of those possible consequences if they are found responsible for it. Then, also giving them other resources where they can turn to for support to navigate that process. Because it is a very formal letter, I like to call or connect with my student staff members beforehand just to give them the heads-up.

Like, “Hey, you’re going to get a very formal letter. I Want to let you know this is why we send it, because you’re in a unionized workplace, and we want to respect your rights as a unionized employee, that we don’t want you to have to overshare information because you have a right to union representation. So in our performance concern meetings, just as they have a right to an advisor in a conduct meeting, they have a right to union representation. And similarly, that union representative can’t talk on their behalf and end up advocating for them, but they’re really there to observe and make sure that the process is fair and that we’re holding people accountable in a way that insurers due process. Other pieces that go along with that were ensuring equitable work. Just because we have a rockstar RA that’s doing really great work, we’re not going to overburden them with all these other things that we need to do from our department and burn them out faster, because they’re getting paid the same as everyone else.

At the end of the day too, we’re always going back to the documents that we have, like our RA contract, our expectations, position description. Technically, there’s a bargaining agreement too, but usually I’m not citing that in a performance concern meeting, because most of the things are covered by the RA expectations document in different ways and how that shows up. So if a student’s missing duty or regularly behind on deadlines, those are covered in these documents. I think one of the things that it teaches you is how to be a really strong supervisor, in some senses, because a lot of grad programs don’t have good supervision or they don’t cover supervision at all in their graduate programs. So whenever someone misses expectations, it makes us go back and like, “Did they receive the proper training? Should they have known that this is a work expectation?” and the answer is usually yes, because we’ve covered our basis for 20 years. It really flushes things out, and the position descriptions are very clear.

That’s something that I appreciate a unionized workplace, that a position description is more than just a paragraph. And so that way when you’re looking back at how your duties kind of played out, you’re not spending 80% of your work commitments on other duties as assigned, so it really makes sure that you know what you’re signing up for when you get into the role. Excuse me. Some of the other things that are in their contracted outlines, their compensation for student summer employment. I talked about the meal plan requirement. Something that was relatively new in some of their more recent contracts is they bargain for anti-racism training for all of the staff to undergo essentially four times throughout the year, so during fall and spring training, and at some point in time during mid-semester during staff meetings. So that is something that we committed to and reached agreement on. So when we talk about the contract, it’s always something that the university management agreed to.

So if there are things that the unions are submitting that just are not something that we may even want to consider, generally, we’re not going to put that on the bargaining table. We’re not going to acknowledge it. I’ve been able to observe some bargaining meetings, but I haven’t sat in on them as a bargainer myself, so I want to acknowledge that too, so those things show up a little bit differently. But it also talks about minimum and maximum working time, so in RA training season, I know there’s a lot of institutions, where RA training, it goes from sunrise to 10:00 PM in a lot of cases. Then, the full-time staff members still have to do a little work after that to prep for the next day of training, which is really great for building those really deeply connected relationships, but our institution, because RAs are contracted for 40 hours a week during the training periods, we stick to a nine to five working schedule and we’re pretty good about that, so we block in that admin prep time for them to work on their door decks, their bulletin board.

So we’re really conscientious about, how long do they need to have for these different topics, and that’s unlike anything I’ve ever been at an institution, and really appreciate it, and I think a lot of institutions are moving in that direction too. Then, the other part is having outlined time off processes. So if there’s bereavement leave, medical leave, what does that look like? It also outlines their grievance process. So if they feel like the administration’s not upholding the RA PMU contract, how do they go about that? Generally speaking, when that happens, they’re usually grieving the department, not an individual. They’re grieving the process. If it’s a bad supervisor, that’s a totally different situation that unfolds there. I want to talk about briefly the failed attempts that have happened. So at George Washington University, their organizing started around meal plans, fair accountability, very similar things that we’re seeing at other institutions, and they felt they were pushed out. If they went and studied abroad, it was hard for them to get back into a role.

They were scheduled to have an election. They had a hearing. The board said, “Yes, they have a right to unionize,” and just days before the election, the local union said, “Nope. We’re not going to sponsor this,” and there’s not a lot of known reasons of why that happened the way it did. I have a suspicion that they weren’t able to get enough yes votes and to avoid just hindering the movement altogether. It was easier just to pull out. I don’t know if that’s the reality of the situation or not, but after that time, the university updated its language during the RA contract, probably gave some of those smaller things that they were asking for to kind of quell some of those movements, and then a lot of those folks who were involved in the original movement had either been essentially furloughed or laid off when campuses had smaller populations during COVID, or they graduated. So that movement appears to be at a near halt, but with the modern resurgence that we’re seeing right now, there could be efforts that are happening again that at the institution.

But I want to zoom out a little bit about some of these institutions. What are the things that they’re bargaining over? I will say, UMass, while we’re the oldest union, I don’t think we are the most active because it takes a lot of effort to organize to create a union, and then things kind of tamper down once that happens, so we’re seeing a lot more activity happen from these other institutions that are just in the starting stages of this, but almost all of them are talking about compensation, financial aid. Excuse me. In a lot of senses, they’re talking about making sure that they get stipends. They’re talking about duty expectations and having that more flushed out, and that’s connected to the international student support, undocumented student support, in particular. They talk about, in a lot of ways, if you’re having RAs on duty during weekends, in some sense, if they’re on call or on duty 24/7 during those weekend periods, that might be a violation of international student visas, where they can only work 20 hours a week.

And so a lot of administrators, when they get into those negotiations, are like, “Yeah, that makes sense,” and then they pivot and have created some emergency management protocols for that support during the daytime structure if they’re not having RAs on duty during the daytime. They bargain for meal plans, health and safety, which makes sense, because we’re just coming out of COVID, and a lot of residents life positions were put into quarantine and isolation management positions. I’ve talked about just cause. At Barnard, they are working towards organizing for a right to a second job. Then, I haven’t seen it laid out in any contracts so far, but mental health support is something that a lot of students, staff members have been rallying behind too. They’re signing up for jobs where they’re doing a lot of crisis and incident response management, and not really knowing how intense some of those things can be sometimes.

Then, so far, to my knowledge, we have two other institutions that have formal, agreed upon contracts that have been ratified by their union with Wesleyan and Tufts, and I haven’t seen Tufts in writing yet, but they’ve promoted some of the things that they’ve won on social media. But at Wesleyan, they talked about, in detail, their discipline and discharge process, where you need to have all of those sub bullet points, like proof that it was a fair process. They talked about a standard duty shifts, recognizing that staff sizes are very different, so there’s going to be a little bit of discrepancy, but if there’s different staffing changes that happen and you’re stuck on duty for more than 20 days during, I think it’s a school year, they get paid on a per diem rate. Then, going along with that for holiday considerations during holiday duty, if they are on call during Labor Day or something like that, that would count for two days instead of one.

They were also successful in getting seniority pay, so difference between you and returner staff members and the summer housing stipend. They also did themselves around emergency management for extensive crises. That was as a result of COVID and a flood that had happened on their campus. Then, the Tufts contract, they essentially, before that, to my understanding, just received the housing scholarship, but they asked for a stipend and a meal plan, so essentially a 46% raise. Something interesting that I didn’t see in any of the movements themselves, but is in their contract as a resident to RA ratio maximum, so an RA will have no more than 30 first year students or no more than 50 total students, so I’m interested to see if that becomes a trend in other RA contracts too. Excuse me. They also adjusted summer training dates. So before they were able to be called back, I think it was up to three weeks before the start of the semester for different training periods, and it kind of varied year to year.

This kind of more made it concrete of no more than eight days before first year move-in, and they also negotiated pay for holiday breaks, similar to how UMass did as well. So for the sake of time, I’ll skip a little bit of this, because we talked about right to representation, we’ve talked about due process, we’ve talked about retaliation. The other part that I didn’t talk about was work to rule, which essentially means that if folks do that, they’re working off of exactly what their contract says. It’s kind of like, what is that word? Like, malicious compliance, where it’s like, “This is what our work expectation says, so that’s what we’re going to do,” and not going anything beyond that. That’s essentially what, in a shortened version of what work to rule is. I wanted to share a thing that some of the union movements at some of the institutions have shared, where they talk about some of those common things that administration will share to try to do union busting, where they’ll say like, “Oh. We’re a family student leaders.”

They talk about this union as a third party, when it’s realistically just run by the employees themselves, so a lot of different pieces that use to kind of mystify that, and I’ve seen institutions have websites about movements that are a little bit more neutral in tone, and then some that do kind of take those anti-union stances in all of that too, so very interesting to see how those dynamics take shape. But looking to the future, there’s some things that we still have a lot of things to work out, so I would’ve love to have a map about, do undergraduate students have a right to unionize it public and private institutions and how that varies per state, but we don’t know yet, because those movements kind of have yet to happen at a lot of places, and in large part are governed by the current state laws that exist too. There was an opportunity in the George Washington case, where they could have appealed if they had a yes vote in the election, but because the election never happened, the university never got to appeal.

So I’d be curious to see if that ever happens and how that fight would happen. If student athletes have a right to join a union, I have yet to see how that’ll take. Then, ultimately, what do those final contracts look like? We saw, at the beginning of the presentation, so many institutions are actively bargaining as we speak, and there’s a lot of contracts that are going to come out of that, and I think they’re going to be using UMass, Tufts, and Wesleyan probably as kind of those standards of what that can look like, but what do those massive undergraduate student worker unions look like too, that are a little bit more broad in scope? Certainly, they can create parts in their contracts that are more specific to the subsections of their workers, like residential life staff, but they might be a little bit more narrower in scope, so curious to see what Grinnell, Kenyon, or California State University, those different contracts are going to look like too.

But wanted to wrap up with opening it up for what questions people have. My contact information is on the slide as well, but one of the great ways to get a little pulse on the action is to see what current unions are doing, sharing on their stories. What are their advocating for? So I put a bunch of them on the screen here, and just general labor knowledge. There’s labornotes.org. The Chronicle of Higher Education does really good pieces from time to time on the undergraduate labor movement, and I also included a book that kind of broadly talks about untold stories of labor, which is called Fight Like Hell by Kim Kelly. It doesn’t really get into a higher ed focus, but it’s still a really good reading nonetheless. So I will open it up and see what questions people have, but also happy to connect outside of this to see what folks want to learn. I recognize some people are in a conference spaces, so it might take them a minute to get up, type, or do what they need to ask a question.

And I’ll share too, whether they unionize or not, these are really good things to kind of get a sense of some of the things that student staff might ask for at some point in time, like the housing scholarships and how that impacts things, so UMass contract has language around students who can opt out. So if their financial aid package covers a lot of their housing already, they can opt out and receive that as a stipend, which becomes taxable income. It impacts a very few amount of our students, but it made it a little bit more equitable in that sense too, so that’s something that is springing up in other contracts too, that we’re not seeing. I’m not seeing any questions, so I think, feel free to reach out over email if you do wind up with any questions, but thank you all for joining and yes, happy to share the presentation. Just shoot me an email and I will send that your way. This is also being recorded, so it’ll be accessible on the ACPA website as well.

DeAndre Taylor:
Yes, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Tyler. Great content. Again, I want to thank ACPA and Roompact as our sponsors, and this concludes our fall webinar series. Thank you all so much. Have a great day.