Above photo: Student worker-organizer Noah Weitzner leads a chant with rallying student workers on Occidental College campus, 28 March 2024. Joey Scott.
Rising Occidental Student Employees fights for fair wages amidst the city’s cost of living crisis.
Los Angeles – Occidental College, one of the first liberal arts colleges established in California, presents a portrait of the idyllic all-American collegiate experience that many folks dream about. The small, well-planned campus features a distinctive Beaux-Arts design to its buildings and a tree-lined quad that have been featured in dozens of TV shows and movies over the decades, including Beverly Hills 90210, Clueless, and Jurassic Park III. Just under 2,000 full-time students were officially enrolled at the college in Fall 2022, and it remains one of the few colleges nationwide that focus exclusively on undergraduate education. Their recruitment flyers boast of the “distinctive interdisciplinary and multicultural focus of the College’s academic program,” which “seeks to foster both the fulfillment of individual aspirations and a deeply rooted commitment to the public good.”
Within the school’s buildings, where students flit through the halls and pass through the doors on their way to class, an army of student workers is busy keeping the institution running: they lead tours, work as teaching assistants, maintain the IT systems, assist in labs, file paperwork for various departments, and fill many more auxiliary roles in every corner of the campus.
In the last few years, like so many other workers across the country, student workers at Occidental have found it increasingly hard to make ends meet. The price tag for the premier liberal arts degree that Occidental College offers is $60,000 per year—not including the additional $17,000 required to live on campus—a steep hill to climb for working-class students who are eager to set themselves up for success in their careers. The majority of students, nearly 76% in Fall 2022, receive financial aid in order to attend the college. But for most who receive aid, loans and Pell Grants can’t close the gap, forcing them to seek out additional employment on or off campus.
For student worker-organizers like Noah Weitzner, a junior at the college and media services technician in the IT department, the compensation that he and other student workers receive from Occidental still isn’t enough—and that’s why they made the decision earlier this year to try to form a union of undergraduate workers across campus. “This effort was born out of an acknowledgment that every worker, or many of the workers on this campus, are not treated with dignity and respect, and are not compensated fairly for the work they do that keeps this multi-$100 million institution running,” he told The Real News.
Most student workers at Occidental make the state minimum wage, which is $16.78/hour. “The college, in their first response to our public launch, said that they offer competitive wages, competitive pay, and that is a blatant factual inaccuracy,” Weitzner continued. “We are not paid competitively. There are some students making just over minimum wage [and] no one more than 18 bucks an hour.” In Los Angeles, a city where the cost of living is unaffordable for all but the very top tax bracket, this presents a massive problem—one that worker-organizers like Weitzner believe the union will be able to help fix. “If you look at other schools in the area, you will get UCLA—some of the academic workers were undergraduates who just joined UAW 2865—they’re making over 20 bucks now, right? If you look at Claremont [College],… they’re making more money than we are.”
On March 23, 30 or so student workers manned tables set up under a tree in the quad of Occidental College’s picturesque campus. “This week is about ‘hearts and minds,’” said Olivia Plumb, teaching assistant in the Biology and Arts departments. After holding intense rallies focused on signing cards the week before, worker-organizers felt the need to set up shop and allow student workers to get to know them and get to know the new union. As students walked past the tables on their way to class, smiling organizers called a few out by name. “Grab a pin!” shouted one sophomore, Chris Cassel, who stood out prominently with his Occidental College sweatshirt and brightly colored hair. The mood was relaxed and joyful as worker-organizers passed out flyers and discussed their demands with curious passersby.
When the new student worker union (called Rising Occidental Student Employees, or ROSE) went public, it only took a matter of days for organizers to secure a supermajority of signed union cards. They filed for an election with the National Labor Relations Board on March 22—the election date has been set for April 30, with ballots to be counted on June 12. After years of complaints about the nature of their work, students were ready for a change on campus. In addition to the demand for higher compensation and increased wage caps for work performed at Occidental College, ROSE workers are demanding better work schedules and the flexibility to work more than the 10 hours per week allotted to them by the college.
Union Organizing Is Part Of Occidental’s Campus Culture
ROSE has been particularly welcome at Occidental College, where three other bargaining units already represent non-tenure track faculty and non-student staff (both with SEIU), and dining services workers (with the Teamsters). Should undergraduate student workers win their union, there would effectively be wall-to-wall union representation on campus, excluding tenure track faculty. In other words, virtually every non-supervisor role on campus would be covered by a union.
On Thursday, March 28, student employees engaged in a walkout from class and held a rally outside the college’s administration building to draw attention to ROSE’s efforts to get the administration to voluntarily recognize the union. Attended by nearly 200 student workers and their allies, the rally featured speeches from faculty members expressing solidarity and support for the student union drive. After opening his speech with rounds of “Si Se Puede!” E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics Peter Dreier commended student workers for their “impressive” organizing and spoke at length about the support from tenured faculty and California political officials for the new student worker union, including a statement of support from longtime labor activist and California state Senator Maria Elena Durazo.
In her speech, student worker-organizer Jennifer spoke about the broad benefits of a student worker union on Occidental College’s campus, particularly for noncitizen and international student workers. “[The union] offers a collective voice shielding [student workers] from exploitation and discrimination in the workplace, [and] it also provides a sense of belonging and protection, assuring them that they are valued members of our community deserving of [the] same rights and opportunities as their peers,” she said. “As a noncitizen student myself, I recognize that students of irregular statuses, whether undocumented or international, face their own unique vulnerabilities being on this campus, and our work deserves to be acknowledged. We are not invisible and we should not feel invisible.”
After an hour of speeches, rally-goers made their way into the main atrium of the college’s administration building. There, student worker-organizers lead the crowd in a rousing rendition of “Solidarity Forever” and again implored the administration to voluntarily recognize their union. As of publication, the college administration remains unwilling to recognize ROSE and is letting the election process play out.
Students Can Be Employees Too, Says NLRB
The uptick in undergraduate student worker organizing at Occidental has been a welcome addition to the robust student worker organizing campaigns already underway at many of the nation’s colleges and universities. Since 2016, the NLRB has held that student workers are statutory employees when they provide services or work under the university’s direction in exchange for compensation. Since that landmark ruling, Columbia University, the vast majority of student worker union campaigns at private universities have focused on organizing graduate students and PhD candidates, to great success: in the last two years, dozens of new bargaining units have cropped up at universities and colleges across the country. Now, as grad unions continue to expand their reach on campuses, the focus has increasingly shifted toward organizing undergraduate student workers.
Previous reporting credits positive attention on the US labor movement, as well as the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on student workers, as the main reasons for increased undergraduate student worker organizing. According to reporting from last year at Inside Higher Ed,
William Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and Professions at Hunter College, said the rise of undergraduate unions is tied to the resurgence of a larger nationwide interest in organized labor among young workers.
“This is all stemming from an explosion of post-pandemic labor activism, particularly by a new generation who understands that representation has strong advantages,” he said. “There’s a relationship between these filings on campuses and what’s transpiring off campus at places like Starbucks and REI, in which a new generation of employees is leading the charge.”
Undergraduate student workers have won unions at just over a dozen colleges and universities in the last year, illustrating the breadth of new worker organizing in sectors that were previously under-represented.
Since ROSE’s NLRB filing on March 22, the college has responded by setting up an “Information for Student Workers” webpage, in which they make clear their unwillingness to voluntarily recognize the union ahead of an NLRB election. Their statement reads, in part,
The College is pro-student, and not opposed to the formation of unions generally. There are aspects of the typical employee-union format that we see as potentially incompatible with the student work experience. Student jobs at Oxy often have an educational or training component, or exist to strengthen connections between students and faculty, or help students fulfill work-study requirements. These goals and connections may be strained by the presence of third-party representatives. We see the value in direct and interactive dialogue with our student workers and hope that there will be opportunities for such dialogue in the future.
Reading between the lines here, Occidental College’s administration has employed the usual playbook that other private institutions have used to discourage the formation of undergraduate student unions: namely, that student workers are students, first, and collective bargaining agreements would somehow be incompatible with their “unique” relationship with the university, and the negotiation of wages and other compensation would affect federal work study allocations and requirements.
There is precedent, however, in addressing these concerns. In The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, Case No. 04-RC-313979 (Aug. 21, 2023), Region 4 Acting Regional Director Emily DeSa rejected both of the university’s arguments, stating that the employer offered no legal basis for either of them, and upheld the Columbia ruling. As DeSa notes,
However, as the Columbia Board held, “[s]tatutory coverage is permitted by virtue of an employment relationship; it is not foreclosed by the existence of some other, additional relationship that the Act does not reach.” 364 NLRB at 1080. That logic applies equally here: while the RAs unquestionably have a student relationship with the Employer, they also have a coextensive employee relationship with the Employer for the reasons set forth above. Therefore, the Employer’s argument that the RA’s are merely students and not employees lacks merit.
What’s clear in this ruling is that, despite the student relationship between student workers and the college, there is also an employee relationship that can and should be addressed via a collective bargaining agreement—and the former relationship, per the Columbia ruling, does not negate the latter. For graduates and undergraduates alike, one can be a student and an employee. As Weitzner asserted, “The college needs to acknowledge that the institution wouldn’t run without us.”
In response to the argument that acknowledging this employee relationship opens potential conflicts with federal work study allocations and that “the University cannot collectively bargain over financial aid issues and is bound by the Federal regulations governing Title IV programs,” DeSa noted in her ruling against the University of Pennsylvania that “The Employer provides no legal support for this assertion. Nor does the Employer adequately explain how its potential negotiations with the Union could somehow conflict with the Federal government’s aid determinations.”
A Union Election On The Horizon
What does this mean for the student workers organizing at Occidental College? The precedent established in these rulings gives student workers the space they need to push back against these assertions once negotiations commence.
The administration’s decision not to voluntarily recognize the union is a disappointing one, but not a surprise to many Occidental student worker-organizers. “We’re telling them that they have a choice here,” Weitzner said. “They can respect their students and their staff’s decision to form a union. They can live up to their commitments within their mission statement to develop leadership and to foster community engagement and ‘cultivate a community of care.’ They can meet those ends by recognizing this union, or they can remain hostile…[to] put up this wall, within their community… To me, that doesn’t feel like the path of least resistance for any of us.” While they hoped for more willingness from the administration, worker-organizers like Weitzner are confident that the NLRB election will go in their favor. “Either way, we have a union, and it will be recognized by the NLRB and by the college,” Weitzner said. In recent days, members of ROSE have responded to the Student Worker FAQ put up by the College in their campus newspaper.
In response to the organizing effort, SEIU Local 721 President and Executive Director David Green released a statement lauding the student workers for their efforts and welcoming more organizing in the future. “Over the past decade, we’ve seen many employees on college campuses join SEIU Local 721 to demand better working conditions—including at USC, Otis, Laguna College of Art and Design, and more. As a unionized adjunct instructor in the CSU system for more than 10 years, I know that the wave of unionization hitting college campuses will only continue to swell as instructors, staff, and students recognize the benefits of unionizing,” he said. “We will continue to support their ongoing organizing efforts.”