Sam Betsko quickly realized that being an aide in a college dorm would require more than helping locked-out students and begging sophomores to turn down the music, for the love of God.
In her role at Boston University, there were days of compulsory, unpaid training and the specter of arbitrary discipline from bosses. He had to prepare to respond to emergencies such as a student’s anxiety attack or sexual assault. Then she learned that some resident assistants had been assigned to work much longer than others—for no extra compensation—at a gig that offered nothing more than housing, a meal plan, tickets to school events, and a weekly stipend that could barely buy a drink. .
Permanent assistants, he thought in 2021, needed a union. Last March, they voted overwhelmingly to have one. Contract negotiations began Friday, capping a week in which workers at Swarthmore College and Smith College voted to unionize.
Resident assistants, known as RAs, are on the way, part of a wave of unionization by undergraduates 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 undergraduate students, many of them at California State University, the largest four-year public university system in the country, voted in union elections or secured the opportunity to vote.
“It’s not really hard to see that, up until this point, the universities have had all the leverage,” said Ms. Betsko, now a senior majoring in English. “We see that students have been exploited by this.”
Students who have joined the labor movement represent a fraction of the nation’s roughly 15 million undergraduates. However, the movement is a glimpse into how campus culture is changing. As families increasingly question whether a college education is worth it, undergraduate workers like RAs often ask the same question about their campus jobs. And AEs, often compensated with benefits like free housing, now seek wages and workplace protections that were rare a decade ago.
“We’ve spent most of our lives in navigation systems that weren’t built for us and weren’t built for us,” said Nathan Duong, a junior at Boston University. “Well, you take that, and then you put it in the context of a broader upsurge in labor organizing across the country, and I think it makes a lot of sense.”
Many university leaders believe they already provide generous enough benefits to student workers, such as housing that can be worth $15,000 or more a year. And some have made sometimes aggressive legal efforts to try to derail unionism.
But they face a generation of students far more receptive to organized labor than young people even in the recent past. A Gallup poll found that 60 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds approved of unions in 2013. This year, that figure was 78 percent, the highest in more than two decades of polling.
And students, having watched organizing campaigns unfold at cultural cornerstones like Amazon and Starbucks, wondered if they, too, could benefit from the workforce.
“For most people, it wasn’t a hard sell,” said David Whittingham, a senior who helped create a new union for RAs at Tufts University, just outside Boston. “The fight, I think, was less about convincing and more about turning people away.”
With the help of groups like the Service Employees International Union and the International Union of Clerical and Professional Employees, students have mobilized support for elections, contract talks and headline protests. Their muscle mass 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: Instagram direct messages with organizers in other campuses.)
“These students have clearly studied it and used 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 students was reframing decades of institutional preaching about the purpose of student work. “It was a fundamental divide,” said Tufts junior Anisha Uppal-Sullivan. “We saw ourselves as workers where the university saw us more as student leaders.”
A Tufts spokesman said administrators were not available for interviews, but other universities questioned whether unions were necessary for tenured adjuncts.
The University of Pennsylvania, where RAs voted in September to unionize, 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 environment.”
At Tufts, RAs said some school negotiators didn’t seem to understand their jobs and downplayed their contributions.
RAs there and at other schools recounted how they had helped crime victims go to the police, implemented coronavirus protocols and dealt with mental health crises. Their work, they said, did not lend itself well to a shift.
“Kids are losing sleep, kids are losing study,” Ms Uppal-Sullivan said of the resident aides. “This is something that needs to be compensated for.”
At Tufts, RAs hit one of the busiest days on campus: student move-in day. The university, which had granted them housing, soon reached an agreement promising a stipend of $2,850 per academic year, from scratch.
That money can be crucial, RAs said, because universities sometimes limit, explicitly or implicitly, their ability to hold second jobs. And many RAs said they are struggling to make ends meet.
“I have a kitchen and I like it, but it’s not what I need,” said Jasmine A. Richardson, a student at Boston University. “I need food.”
Ms. Richardson understands why people are often surprised to hear about the unionization effort, in part because she didn’t initially understand the scope of the role and wasn’t fully prepared for it. A restaurant prepared its workers better, he 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 ever do, there’s a problem — nothing against Red Lobster,” he said.
Colin Riley, a spokesman for Boston University, declined to comment on the union beyond writing in an email this fall that the university expected “to begin negotiating in good faith for a fair contract with them soon.” He did not respond to a question about the accounts of some of the university’s R.As.
Students won the national right to organize only in 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 rules. RAs at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, for example, unionized in 2002, but their effort did not spark much of a movement.)
According to Mr. Herbert’s figures, at least 41 new bargaining units involving students, graduates or undergraduates, have been created since the beginning of 2022. In the previous nine years, Mr. Herbert’s center said, 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 decision, particularly if a Republican wins the presidency next year. But Mark Gaston Pearce, the executive director of the Workers’ Rights Institute at Georgetown University Law Center, predicted that even then, few schools would rush to get rid of new unions.
“Regardless of one’s philosophy on the issue, universities are interested in achieving stability,” said Mr Pearce, who was the chairman of the works council and a majority voter in the 2016 decision.
One of the biggest challenges for 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 every day, knowing that the next bargaining battle will come after many current students leave.
And at Boston University, students like Ms. Betsko know they will have only so much time to enjoy the benefits of any deal. She was philosophical about the crunch time.
“It’s not just about us,” he said of their potential contract. “It would be for every life worker that comes after us. There’s no point in being selfish.”
