Hello World!

Using this project

Immigrating to the land of the free introduced me to many things — lightning bugs, snow, hotdogs, subway rats, but also the concept of workers’ rights. Coming from Singapore, a country with strict laws against industrial action, I didn’t even know what a union was until about two years ago. But when part-time faculty at my university went on strike last semester, the live-action orientation I received into the world of collective action was enough to convince me that every worker deserves a union — particularly student workers.

Currently, I am a dual-degree student at The New School majoring in Communication Design and Journalism. But I am also a student worker on campus, employed as a Student Assistant in the Dean’s Office at the renowned Parsons School of Design. I am amongst a group of almost 1500 other students at The New School who work in front-facing roles across the university. From being technicians at our specialized equipment labs, giving tours to parents and prospective students, acting as academic and residential advisors, and more, student workers are the ones that keep the university functioning on a daily basis.

After a record-setting adjunct faculty strike at The New School during the Fall 2022 semester, where close to 1800 part-time faculty, unionized with the ACT-UAW Local 7902, went on a 25 day work stoppage to demand better working conditions, some of us student workers realized that we were facing a number of the same issues that our faculty were fighting to change. Watching the power of collective action manifest as the university finally gave in to a favorable contract, student workers came to the conclusion that we needed a union too. Thus was born the Organizing Committee of the New Student Workers Union (aka NewSWU, pronounced “noo-swoo”) — a wall-to-wall union of non-academic student workers at The New School — of which I am a proud representative.

Fuelled by inflation, working conditions that seem to perpetually deteriorate, and a political and labor consciousness that has developed amongst younger generations coming out of the pandemic, union organizing has become an endeavor that, like NewSWU, a number of other graduate and even undergraduate student worker cohorts are taking on. In the last few months alone, student workers from various departments at Fordham, Rensselaer Polytechnic, Harvard, Boston University, University of Pennsylvania, and Wesleyan have all ratified their unions or publicly announced drives towards achieving one, and the trend only seems to be going upward.

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But why should student workers unionize in the first place? As someone who has had to answer this question to university employers before, I would selfishly argue that the answer is simply because we can, since the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) guarantees that it is a worker’s democratic right in the United States to form a union and engage in collective bargaining, regardless of other conditions that may affect their employment. But in reality, there are a number of other compelling reasons as to why student workers should be unionized, with the following two being the most predominant answers in my conversations with co-organizers.

Firstly, universities often use the verbiage of “student-worker” to their advantage to get away with providing sub-optimal working conditions and inadequate compensation for the labor of student workers. By insisting that a student worker’s primary occupation at the university is as a student and not a worker, they imply that in the hierarchy of needs that must be met, catering to a student worker’s academic pursuits takes precedence over ensuring that their financial and physiological needs are met through their university-controlled employment. In reality, these statuses are not mutually exclusive, and a university should be held accountable for providing both quality education as well as safe and equitable working conditions and compensation. A union for student workers can help mitigate this through a contract that establishes minimum wage and hours-per-week requirements, ensuring that student workers are able to pursue their education without the worry of working enough hours to sustain themselves.

Secondly, student workers are often employed in front-facing roles across universities, such as student technicians, tour guides, receptionists and more, making them the first point-of-contact for most university services. This means that student workers are tasked with acting as good representatives for the ethos of a university, while also bearing the brunt of their community’s frustrations. I myself have had to deal with a fair share of rude emails from parents and students when working a desk job in the Orientation department at The New School. Unions can be beneficial in such situations as a union contract can stipulate adequate conflict resolution training for workers and ensure that they are afforded proper recourse in situations where they face harassment or feel unsafe in their workplaces. In fact, this is often a reason why a number of student worker union drives are centered around jobs that have a heavy front-facing component such as Resident Advisors or Dining Hall workers.

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Now if you’re a student worker and all of this has convinced you that you need a union, your university, like most employers, may attempt to push the narrative that unions are unnecessary and can be detrimental to the relationship between them and their students since they foreground the employer-employee association instead. But this argument is rooted in, dare I say, an outdated way of thinking that stems from a time in which tertiary education was a lot less necessary and a lot more affordable. Both legal and historical precedent, as well as public sentiment show that student worker unions are a good thing, with the data to back it up.

A key decision that set the stage for student workers to form unions came in 2016 when graduate student workers at Columbia University were unionizing. The university attempted to push back against their union drive using the argument that they were students first and thus not necessarily employees who were covered under the NLRA. But the National Labor Relations Board held that graduate assistants, and other student teaching and research assistants, were employees with a right to unionize, paving the way for a range of other graduate student worker unions to form including Student Employees at The New School (SENS-UAW Local 7902).

Even though the NLRB’s decision doesn’t explicitly identify that undergraduate student workers are also covered by the NLRA the NLRB’s General Counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, and Chairman, Lauran McFerran (both appointed to their positions by President Biden) have been unwavering in their support of labor organizing rights among student workers. Additionally, while Americans can’t seem to agree on a number of things, a study by Data for Progress shows that for the most part, voters are in support of student workers forming labor unions. Consequently, the Columbia decision, favor from the NLRB, and voter support make the current legal and social climate highly conducive to student unionization efforts.

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If you are a student worker at a university and you feel like you deserve more, I promise you, you are not alone. During the strike last fall, student workers at The New School realized that our university was purposely designed to silo us and discourage us from being able to come together on the basis of mutual grievances. But the more we pushed beyond these artificial barriers and talked to each other, the more we realized that the problems we were facing of no overtime pay, a lack of control over our working hours, unsafe working conditions and more, were ubiquitous issues that we could overcome by working together. Not only does forming and ratifying a union allow you to advocate for each other, but there is power and protection in a collective. Unions are a true example of all for one and one for all.

If you would like to begin unionizing your university workplace, know that your peers at other institutions will have your back. It is a type of resistance to exercise your legal rights to their fullest extent, and I encourage you to do so to advocate for yourself and your colleagues. At the end of the day, universities are businesses after all, and by using our agency we can refuse to let them take advantage of us under the guise that they are not.