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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. 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. A 2016 National Labor Relations Board ruling 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.”
The uncertainty caused by the virus has led to a resurgence in labor organizing on campuses, often in broad coalitions. 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 members joined forces in a lawsuit 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.
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.”
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, an unusual rule-making process, 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.
“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.”
