Before 2022, only two colleges had a union representing undergraduate workers.
Now undergraduate students at two large universities and at least seven other colleges have unionized since October — accelerating a trend that began 18 months ago.
Last week, 20,000 student workers across the California State University system voted to form a union, following the lead of about 4,000 undergraduates at the University of Oregon.
And Dartmouth College’s basketball team voted on Tuesday to form a union, becoming the first unionized college athletic team. Dartmouth has appealed a regional labor official’s decision to allow the vote to proceed.
Nonacademic undergraduate workers now represent more than one-third of all the student employees who have unionized since the start of 2022. That’s a shift in just the past eight months: Between January 2022 and June 2023, the vast majority of newly unionized student workers were graduate students, according to a study released in September by the City University of New York’s National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions.
The burgeoning movement among undergraduate workers is significant because they work in jobs across the college, not just in classrooms and labs, said John Logan, chair of the department of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University. These campaigns have the potential to spur on the wave of unionization in the United States across industries outside of academe, Logan said.
Including both undergraduate and graduate workers, around 50 unions representing more than 78,000 student employees have formed since the start of 2022. Between 2013 and 2021, growth was much slower: Just 21 new unions came to be, according to the CUNY report.
Where It’s Gaining Steam
In October, nonacademic student workers — a category that includes resident advisers, dining staff, lab technicians, and others in roles outside the classroom, but not teaching or research assistants — announced plans to form unions at Oregon and four other colleges: Swarthmore College, Brown University, Harvard University, and Reed College.
That brought the total to 18 nonacademic student-employee-bargaining units, including Oregon, which may also contain some graduate students, said William A. Herbert, executive director of the CUNY center.
Being a union member might just become another characteristic of being a student worker.
Four more institutions have held successful votes so far this year: Emerson College, Smith College, the Cal State system, and Dartmouth.
While most of the new undergraduate unions have formed at small private institutions in the Northeast, continuing the trend that emerged in 2022 and 2023, the Cal State and Oregon unions demonstrate that these campaigns are gaining steam elsewhere.
They also represent a shift in the type of union forming. At colleges like Swarthmore, Brown, Reed, Emerson, and Smith, the unions represent small numbers of resident assistants and dining workers.
The new unions at Cal State and Oregon, on the other hand, are “wall to wall” — meaning the groups represent all nonacademic student workers across several departments on campus. Previously, the only other wall-to-wall student-worker union was at Grinnell College. It formed in 2022 after a vote expanded the college’s existing union of undergraduate dining workers. Student workers at The New School are also trying to organize a wall-to-wall union; Harvard’s undergraduate union has ambitions to do the same.
The Cal State undergraduates’ vote more than doubled the size of the system’s existing employee union, which represents 16,000 full-time health-care, administrative, custodial, and technical staff. Student workers will negotiate a separate collective-bargaining agreement from the union’s other units.
The vote came six weeks after the first-ever systemwide strike by Cal State faculty members, who walked off the job on the first day of the spring semester. The strike ended quickly after union leaders and Cal State officials reached a tentative agreement to raise faculty pay, among other things. The faculty union’s membership approved the deal in February.
Student workers’ bargaining priorities at Cal State are higher wages, lower parking fees, and paid sick leave, said Leah Baker, an IT student worker at Cal State-Monterey Bay. Many Cal State campuses pay their student workers the state minimum wage of $16 an hour, regardless of higher local minimums.
Leora D. Freedman, Cal State’s vice chancellor for human resources, said the system “respects the decision of student assistants to form a union and looks forward to bargaining in good faith with the newly formed CSUEU student-assistant unit.”
Higher pay is also a priority for student workers at Grinnell and Oregon, as well as adding more protections against discrimination and harassment on the job.
What’s Driving the Trend
Labor experts, union leaders, and student workers told The Chronicle that psychology is one obvious propellant for the recent surge in undergraduate unions. Student workers have been inspired by the successful organizing efforts at companies like Starbucks and Amazon, as well as across higher ed.
Changes in the legal landscape have also paved the way: The National Labor Relations Board ruled in 2016 that graduate and undergraduate workers at private colleges had the right to unionize. The first wave of new undergraduate unions in 2022 and 2023 came at private colleges like Columbia University, Barnard College, and Wesleyan University.
Public colleges are governed by state law, and states in the Northeast, Midwest, and West are typically friendlier to unions, Logan said. In California, a 2017 law reclassified student employees as workers, which paved the way for the recent unionization of undergraduates at Cal State.
Colleges have argued for decades that both undergraduate and graduate students shouldn’t be considered employees because their primary role on campus is as a student. Student workers have increasingly pushed back against that characterization. “Student jobs aren’t just paid study halls,” said Baker, of Cal State-Monterey Bay.
Cal State has not publicly opposed its undergraduate union, in contrast to Harvard, Barnard, and other private colleges that declined to voluntarily recognize such groups. Logan believes that stance stems from the fact that Cal State would attract political resistance otherwise.
The University of Oregon has also not publicly opposed its undergraduate union, though Carolyn Roderique, a resident assistant at Oregon and union leader, said the union has lodged an unfair labor practice after a union organizer was fired.
An Oregon spokesperson said in an email that the university “remained committed to providing our students with valuable work experience and financial assistance through part-time employment while they pursue higher education.”
Better pay and benefits for student workers could force many colleges to reassess their hiring practices, labor experts said, and to stop relying on student labor as a way to cut costs.
Catherine Hutchinson, Cal State’s staff-union president, said she hopes the new student-worker union would force the university to consider “when it’s appropriate to have a student in the position versus an actual staff person.”
New Territory
Cal State’s staff union will be eligible to begin negotiating a contract for student workers this week, said Jim Philliou, the union’s executive director.
The process will have to go faster than usual, he said. “We don’t want to take two years of bargaining the first contract and everybody that’s a junior now won’t reap the benefits, " he said.
The two other wall-to-wall student-worker-bargaining units — which are both unaffiliated with national unions, in contrast to Cal State — have yet to reach an agreement. Student workers at Grinnell have been bargaining for nearly two years; negotiations with the college resumed last week. Student workers at Oregon said they were ready to negotiate, but they have not yet set a timeline.
Conrad Dahm, co-president of the Grinnell union, said the bargaining process was new for both the union and the college. “We’re setting a little bit of precedent here of how a wall-to-wall undergraduate contract would work,” he said.
All of the labor experts and union leaders that The Chronicle spoke to agreed on one thing: If there is a peak in undergraduate organizing, it’s still ahead of us.
“Being a union member might just become another characteristic of being a student worker,” said Logan.
