Resident Advisers at George Washington U. Attempt to Open a New Union Front

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Resident advisers at George Washington University are seeking the National Labor Relations Board’s permission to unionize, a development that would open a new front in the campaign to organize private colleges’ academic workers.

The effort’s leaders are asking the NLRB to let the private university’s nearly 110 resident advisers vote on forming a collective-bargaining unit affiliated with the Service Employees International Union, which already represents adjuncts at George Washington and other colleges in this city.

The federal labor board first must determine, however, whether George Washington’s resident advisers are eligible for union representation, a question that boils down to whether they should be thought of primarily as students or, instead, as workers.

The board declared two other categories of students employed by private universities — graduate assistants and research assistants — to be union-eligible workers in an August decision involving Columbia University. At an NLRB hearing held here Wednesday, however, George Washington argued that its resident advisers are a distinct population whose jobs are inseparable from their roles as undergraduate students.

In a letter sent to George Washington’s resident advisers last week, Peter A. Konwerski, vice provost and dean of student affairs, said, “the university does not believe that it makes sense to apply a federally regulated system of collective bargaining to students who are participating for a period of time in a program as part of their educational experience.”

On the other side of the debate, several of George Washington’s current and former resident advisers have declared in a statement published in the campus’s student newspaper that they need to form a bargaining unit in response to administrators’ failure to sufficiently value the “real work” they do “to promote the physical, mental, and emotional health of students.”

Resident advisers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a public institution, were allowed to unionize under state law in 2002, but the NLRB has never ruled on whether those at private colleges are eligible to do so under the National Labor Relations Act. The George Washington organizers triggered this week’s NLRB hearing by getting more than a third of the advisers now employed there to sign cards saying that they favor an election and would vote to form an SEIU-affiliated collective-bargaining unit.

William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, predicted this week that an NLRB decision to let George Washington’s resident advisers organize under the SEIU “is likely to lead to similar unionization efforts on other campuses.”

Jonathan C. Fritts, a partner in the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius who was representing the university, devoted much of his opening statement Wednesday to arguing that the Columbia ruling should not set the standard of judging the George Washington case. Unlike the graduate assistants covered in that previous ruling, he said, George Washington’s resident advisers are undergraduates, their relationship with their institution “fundamentally depends on their status as students,” and they “perform a function that is not performed by any university employee.”

The university then experienced a setback in learning that Charles L. Posner, director of the NLRB’s regional office in Baltimore, had concluded that the NLRB’s recent ruling on Columbia University’s graduate assistants provided the correct standard for evaluating the George Washington case. Mr. Fritts objected to that decision.

Coping With Uncertainty

The Association of College & University Housing Officers—International roughly estimates that about 42,000 resident advisers work at public or private colleges in the United States.

Most are compensated primarily with free or discounted housing. When the association surveyed housing officers, mainly in the United States and Canada, in 2015, 35 percent of respondents reported that their institutions did not offer resident advisers any stipend. An additional 28 percent reported stipends of less than $1,500, while 18 percent reported stipends in excess of $3,000.

George Washington provides resident advisers hired since 2015 with free housing, valued at nearly $12,700 annually, and a $2,500 stipend for the academic year. Those hired before 2015 are grandfathered into contracts providing them with housing and stipends that rose annually, to $4,740. Despite the recent drop in maximum compensation, as well as their awareness that they earn less than their counterparts at nearby American and Georgetown Universities, those leading George Washington’s unionization drive say that concerns about pay are hardly their only motivation.

As big a concern, the union organizers argue, are ambiguities about their duties and performance expectations in their current contracts. In their statement published in the student newspaper, The GW Hatchet, they argued that “the nature of our contract allows our employer to demand flexibility far beyond the scope of a typical student position,” and “there is no semblance of equal pay for equal work.” They are considered on call whenever they are on campus, they are contractually barred from committing a total of more than 10 hours a week to outside employers or student leadership positions, and their performance-review process is subjective enough to leave them at the whim of their immediate supervisors and insecure about their jobs.

“You are being given these extra responsibilities. You can’t say no,” said Calla Gilson, a third-year student and former resident adviser who is a leader of the unionization effort. Some advisers end up with far more responsibilities than others, she said, and those who are fired have no right to appeal their terminations.

“This is not about limiting what we do,” Ms. Gilson said. “This is about putting what we do in a contract, so it can all be a accounted for.”

Points of Comparison

In the letter he sent last week, Mr. Konwerski, George Washington’s dean of student affairs, warned that entering into a collective-bargaining arrangement would insert a third party into the advisers’ relationships with dormitory residents, resident directors, and other staff members in the university’s student-affairs division.

“Rules of the road could become governed by collective bargaining rather than individual judgment and could restrict your autonomy and choices about how you interact with your residents,” Mr. Konwerski said. The resulting contracts could limit how they can support students, or force them to share with their union confidential or sensitive information about the students they help, he said.

Allan Blattner, president of the housing officers’ association, took a similarly dim view of the unionization of resident advisers in an interview this week.

“First and foremost, we have always considered resident advisers to be student leaders on campus,” and such positions to be “part of the student experience,” said Mr. Blattner, who is director of the department of housing and residential education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their unionization, he said, would force colleges to treat resident advisers primarily as employees and take away “some of our ability to manage a position that is fairly unique.”

In addition, Mr. Blattner said, his association worries that the unionization of resident advisers “could have a significant impact on costs,” potentially forcing colleges to charge more for room and board.

In testifying at the hearing staged Wednesday by the NLRB’s regional office, Austin Hansen, a resident adviser and third-year student who was called up as one of George Washington’s witnesses, said, “I am viewed as a peer. A peer with a title, who role-models behavior.”

“It doesn’t feel like a job,” Mr. Hansen said. “You tailor your schedule to the needs of your community. We’re, honestly, just a support system.”

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.