University of Oregon undergraduate workers form union

Undergraduate student workers at the University of Oregon have formed a union, which is the first such union at a public college or university, according to the Wall Street Journal. The union represents a number of positions, including resident assistants, dining hall workers and other undergraduate positions. Mae Bracelin is a second-year political science student at the University of Oregon. Noah Thompson is a fifth-year political science major. They are both organizers with the UO Student Workers Union and join us to discuss working conditions they are facing, changes they want in the workplace and what it means to be the first undergraduate workers union at a public institution.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. A new union is coming to the University of Oregon. It’s made up of student workers, like resident assistants, dining hall employees and other undergraduate positions. It follows successful unionizing efforts at a handful of private schools across the country, but it’s the first one at a public institution.

Mae Bracelin is studying political science in her second year at the U of O; Noah Thompson is a fifth-year political science major. They both work in dining halls and they are both organizers with the UO Student Workers Union. I talked to them a few days ago. I asked Noah what the first spark was for the unionizing effort.

Noah Thompson: About two years ago, a number of us who were student workers and were upset with the poor working conditions got together and talked about what improving campus working conditions would look like for us and for our fellow students. And through research coming out of that, we determined that unionizing is the best way to secure wins for us and for our fellow student workers. And we got trained up on how to do that, and the rest of the two years of history.

Miller: You’re encapsulating a lot of hard work, I imagine, in those two years. But what were the workplace issues that were top of mind for you when you started this?

Thompson: The first thing - and this is something that touches on almost any student that is working to get by - is wages. When I started, I think I was getting paid $13.50 an hour, which was a minimum wage at the time. That’s the case for a lot of people, but that minimum wage hits especially hard when your hours are capped, because as student workers we can only work up to 25 hours a week. And when you’re busy with school the other half of your time it’s not easy to pick up a second job. And obviously the pressures of the economy over the past two years have been really harsh. So wages were a big one.

Also widespread discrimination, harassment without much recourse for student workers was something we were seeing for queer students, for Students of Color, and the university wasn’t taking those issues very seriously. So we decided that we were going to do that and fight to improve things. Those are the big widespread issues. And of course, every student worker faces unique issues in the workplace, but our goal is to address as much as we can with that union.

Mae Bracelin: If I can add one more in…

Miller: Please do!

Bracelin: One issue that I think pretty much every student worker on campus feels is the pay period. Everybody at the University of Oregon is paid on a four-week schedule, which works fine if you have a nice tidy salary, but does not work as well if you’re making, like Noah said, $13.50. That obviously doesn’t line up with rent and with the utilities and all those expenses. So probably one of the things we hear the most is we need a two-week pay period.

Thompson: Yeah.

Miller: Can you explain? I mean, obviously that is separate from…although everything is connected in terms of the overall lumped together desires of students and needs of students. But what difference would it make in someone’s life if they got paid every two weeks - half of the current four week paycheck - as opposed to every four weeks? What might that mean?

Thompson: This is something that when you are making as little as student workers make, when you have such frequent expenses - we talked to many student workers who, right before their paycheck, were really scrounging by on eating [and] waiting to get groceries. And if they had access to their pay a little bit earlier, it really would change the conditions of their life on a week-to- week basis, which is the basis that we as student workers live off of.

I also want to add that one severity of the pay period is that while we’re paid once a month, that pays on a six-week delay. So, say I’m working mid-November. I don’t see that money until the end of December. That’s really harsh. We think that that potentially breaks labor law. We don’t have that kind of legal power to fight that. But we did want to fight it with union power and it’s especially harsh when people first start because you can be starting a student worker job and not be seeing any money for a month and a half, and a lot of people go through that and it’s conditions that we think are pretty unacceptable.

Miller: Mae, one of the issues that Noah mentioned was harassment. What have you heard from fellow employees, fellow students, other organizers about what they’ve experienced?

Bracelin: Yeah, harassment is one of the most talked about issues as a workplace grievance. We’ve seen examples of sexual harassment from managers to student workers. We’ve seen examples of transphobic harassment, constant misgendering, even when there is obviously effort to address that. We’ve seen examples of racist, xenophobic harassment, pretty much everything you can think of. Every type of harassment you can think of is happening in our workplaces. And we hope that by negotiating a contract that has stronger, hardier anti-harassment protections, better protections in general for student workers regardless of their status, that we can fight back against that.

Miller: If I could just dig into that. Obviously, what you’re talking about, there’s different levels of federal or state law that would fall under this. But a lot of what you’re talking about is already against the law. I’m curious what you think. I mean, the numbers are so overwhelming that it would be a real surprise if that weren’t going to happen. So assuming this all goes forward, what extra protections do you think being unionized will provide?

Bracelin: Well, first off, there is a pretty large gap between the law - what is meant to be happening - and what is actually happening in our workplaces.  We’ve seen our sister union on examples of what we could bargain for. We’ve seen our sister union, GTFF, recently bargain for workplace misgendering protections. The University of Oregon tried to say that it’s a religious freedom to be able to misgender your coworkers or your employees. And the GTFF was able to soundly defeat that idea. So it’s more about bringing up standards to where the law ensures that they have to be, by building up solidarity and power among workers. And then going a step further to make sure that our workers are safe from harassment in their workplaces, by that type of anti-harassment measures, by specific rules in the workplaces that make this type of stuff unacceptable, especially when it’s coming down from managers.

Miller: I should just give folks this information: The GTFF, that’s the Graduate Teaching Fellowship Federation, which is what it sounds like, for graduate students who are a part of teaching college right now.

Noah, I’ve seen reports of earlier unionizing efforts at smaller private schools. Students at Harvard actually were voting at the same time as you. But has there been a successful student union effort at another large public university like the U of O?

Thompson: To our knowledge there hasn’t been and I’m pretty sure that we would know. We knew from the start when we set the groundwork for unionizing two years ago that this was avant garde, that this was something that people haven’t done before except in those small private liberal arts colleges. But we knew that the task was something that we were ready to take on, that student workers were widely pro-union and fed up with their working conditions and ready to make a change.

And all it took was a group of people dedicated enough to organize workers, and we did that independently, without the help of a larger union, into this near 4,000-person union at a public college. And we hope to be the first domino to fall as we see student workers at the California State schools start to unionize, and we’re in talks with other private drives that aren’t yet public on unionizing their colleges.

Miller: Well, where did you turn for guidance?

Thompson: The big one is the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation, that is our graduate student worker union on campus. They’ve been around for 50 years at this point. They were the second or third graduate student worker union to be certified in the entire country. And they deal with similar issues with us. We both have student working populations, we both have high turnover in our workplaces, relative to other unionized industries. And they were definitely very happy to support, but we also turned to those small private liberal arts colleges and the organizers that made those drives happen for advice.

Obviously, the situations don’t map one to one, but it really is something where the people that are committed to make these changes know how long it takes. They know that many of us will graduate and not see the benefits of a union. And so they’re really willing to just do what they think is right and help unionize their campuses and help unionize other campuses through advice, teaching, skill sharing, those kinds of things.

Miller: You know, Mae, one of the issues that Noah just brought up is, is this question of turnover. You’re a sophomore, Noah is a fifth-year. My assumption here is that the union is likely to have new membership and new leadership every four, maybe five years.

Bracelin: Yeah.

Miller: What’s your strategy for handling that?

Bracelin: That is one of the biggest problems that undergraduate and graduate student worker unions have to deal with. And there are a couple ways of addressing it. A big one is just preserving that institutional knowledge. So, having a staff organizer or somebody who can just stick around the area and make sure that whoever the new leadership is, whoever is eventually going to replace us, knows about what we did, knows the organizing skills that we have, and make sure that the information, the resources that we created and that we learned, is passed on to a new generation of union activists [and] union organizers.

But I think there’s another way of looking at this question of turnover. And that is every four years, yes, we are losing people, but we are turning out skilled union organizers into the workforce. So we hope to have some sort of reciprocal relationship with the rest of higher education unionism, and especially just the rest of the labor movement, by training the skilled organizers and then sending them out into wherever they go next, whether it be education, logistics, research.

Miller: Well, sticking with that, I’m curious what advice both of you would have - but maybe Mae, first - for students at other schools who want to follow your lead?

Bracelin: I think the first thing I would say is that unionizing is fun and easy and you should do it.

Miller: Wait a minute…

Bracelin: That’s a bit of a joke…

Miller: OK. But actually, I’m curious. I don’t think it’s easy. I don’t imagine that. But has there been anything fun about this?

Bracelin: One hundred percent! Yeah. I mean, I started organizing as a freshman and it’s pretty undeniable that a lot of the people that I’ve got really close with, a lot of the social circles that I’ve built up, are people from the union, are my coworkers, are my fellow organizers. That’s really who I hang out with, most of the time. We do actually have quite a bit of fun. I know that we’re organizers but we are still college students.

Miller: So, worker solidarity has turned into social solidarity, as well?

Bracelin: I mean, that’s a big part of the union, is building that sort of sense of community.

Miller: Noah, what about you? I’ve been using the tense ‘would’, but I suppose it’s ‘are’ - what advice are you giving to other students around the country?

Thompson: There’s a lot of little minute advice for the tiny little situations that you might run into day-to-day. But my broad scope advice for people is, yeah, this is difficult and it takes a lot of commitment but we are not anomalous. We’re not uniquely skilled. This is something that young people are ready to do. Young workers are ready to unionize and people should be confident in their ability to make that happen with that degree of commitment.

I’d also keep in mind that, unlike traditional union organizing efforts, we’ve got a unique element to the kind of people that we’re looking to organize, which is that they’re students, many of them see themselves as students first. And unions could potentially be a path to address issues in higher education broadly, whether it’s tuition, book costs, weak labor market coming out of school, so keep those issues in mind as something that you can organize around.

Miller: I want to make sure I understand what you’re saying. Is the basic idea that if student worker unions become more common around the country and more powerful around the country, that you would have a stronger voice to actually leverage - say, with the threat of a strike - things like tuition increases? The things that are not technically a part of union negotiations.

Thompson: Yeah, absolutely. This is called bargaining for the common good. It’s difficult because employers aren’t mandated to bargain over these issues that address broader people. But it is something that you can look at these smaller unions across the country and see them laying the seeds for.

Dartmouth Student Workers won raises tied to tuition increases. I believe every percent that tuition increases, workers get a half a percent raise. And of course that only affects workers in the short term but in the long term - and this is what a lot of us who got together to organize in the first place were considering - the issues of higher education aren’t going to be fixed by people asking for it. It takes real power, and power comes from the hands of workers in the workplace.

So if we really want to improve higher education, which many of us do, many of us feel the effects of declining quality of higher education, a strike threat is a big part of that. And it’s something that we’re considering, even though it might take many, many years to build up unions strong enough to make those sorts of demands.

Miller: Mae, what’s the short or medium-term time frame right now? Assuming the state’s employment relations board certifies the election results, what are the next steps and what is it going to take before you can actually be doing collective bargaining for all of the student workers?

Bracelin:  Well, really the next step is that collective bargaining. We got our certification receipt pretty much back on the seventh. We are now an official real certified union. So what that means is in the short term, we need to start building up our structures and our organizing committees into a system that can get workers more easily engaged, more easily protected in their workplaces.

We need to start reaping the benefits of certification, which looks like being able to have a union representative at  worker orientations and access to a lot of payroll information and inside worker information. But first step is get workers engaged, figure out what their grievances are, come up with a plan for bargaining, and then we just sit down with the University of Oregon and we tell them what we want.

Thompson: And we’re looking to start that January at the soonest to set ground rules for bargaining and we can’t say how long it will take. But that’s our initial timeline.

Miller: I just want to turn, in the time we have left, to the biggest picture here. The Center for American Progress has reported that Gen Z, meaning people born after 1997, is the most pro-union generation alive today. They’ve also shown that Gen Z’rs and millennials - so one generation up - are more pro-union now than older generations were when they were the same age, when it was 20 or 30 or 50 years ago. How do you both explain that? Noah, first. I mean, what do you think is happening?

Thompson: I think that there’s a very clear thought pattern in our generation, which is that many people do not especially believe in the American dream anymore. We don’t believe that, out of college we’ll be getting solid, upper middle-class jobs which will allow us to afford a home, to support a family. And the data reflects that - the economic circumstances for people our age are quite poor, higher education costs are incredibly high in tandem with higher education degrees being worth less than they used to be. And there’s also the looming threat of climate change and general economic decline. I think that young people see that, they see that a change is necessary. And they also look back and they see the decline in the strength of labor over the past 50, 60, 70 years, and see that when things were really good for people, were when the American labor movement was strong. And we want to rebuild that and get our just desserts and fight against the increase in privatization, corporatization to try to make the changes that are necessary.

And I think that the history and the facts of history support that as an option. And I think that’s especially poignant post-COVID as people saw the necessity of workers and also the severeness of the economy. And you see that resurgence in the labor movement, not just among young people, but with the teamsters, with the UAW, with the UC strikes in California. We are returning to a more militant labor movement that we’re happy to be a part of and happy to support.

Miller: Mae Bracelin, any last words?

Bracelin: Yeah, our generation came to age in the 2008 recession. We know what not having money feels like. We know what poverty feels like. There is a big social dynamic too - since we’ve seen the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve just seen a growing amount of unrest in the United States, and the world. And I think people are identifying unions and workers as a vehicle for change. And I think that our generation is kind of clinging on to that idea, that hope for change, because the way that things have been for our entire lives, for the lives of our generation, it’s not sustainable. It’s not working out for us. It’s only working out for a couple of rich CEO’s. So I think people are looking for change in a way that they previously were not.

Miller: Mae Bracelin and Noah Thompson, thanks very much for joining us.

Bracelin: Yes, thank you.

Thompson: I appreciate it. Have a good one.

Miller:  Mae Bracelin is in her second year studying political science at the University of Oregon. Noah Thompson is a fifth-year political science major. We spoke to them a couple of days ago.

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