California State University, Los Angeles via Flickr
Earlier this month, on Wednesday, Oct. 4, student workers at California State University (CSU) announced that the California Public Employment Relations Board (CPERB) had greenlit their plans to hold a union election for undergraduate student workers. In April of this year, the CSU Student Workers Union filed a request with the CPERB for a union election, submitting more than 4,000 signed union authorization cards. On Sept. 27, the board notified the union that it met the threshold for a union election. According to calmatters.org, if student workers at CSU vote in favor of forming a union, it will be the largest undergraduate workers union in America, representing 20,000 student workers. It will also be the second-ever union for undergraduate workers at a public institution.
The nascent California State University Student Workers Union has been hoping to represent student assistants across CSU’s 23 campuses. The organization, which seeks to partner with the CSU Employees Union (CSUEU), has vowed to fight for higher pay, parking benefits, more hours, paid sick time and holiday pay, among other benefits. The union has also decried the university’s cap on hours that students can work, which is 20 hours a week.
“It’s crazy that students have to work multiple jobs when they could just increase the 20-hour/week cap so we could keep working on campus,” said student Wilbur W. on the CSU Student Workers Union’s website.
Wage issues are also a central concern for the union. Some students in the CSU system are paid below the local minimum wage. Featured in an article for Cal Matters, for example, student Delilah Mays-Triplett, who worked as a library assistant, was paid $15.50 an hour for her work. While $15.50 is the state minimum wage, it is less than the $16.30 local minimum wage of San Diego, where Mays-Triplett’s campus is located.
CSU Student Workers Union’s efforts echo a recent nationwide surge of student workers who have been organizing for better working conditions in their work-study programs. According to the Labor and Working-Class History Association, in the past three years, there has been a dramatic uptick in collective bargaining units representing both undergraduate and graduate student workers. In 2022 and 2023 alone, 30 new student-worker collective bargaining units were created, representing 35,655 students. During this period, 91% of eligible student-workers voted in favor of unionizing.
There are several possible explanations for this trend. Currently, according to a poll conducted for the AFL-CIO, an organization that supports union efforts, 88% of people under 30 support labor unions. The AFL-CIO says it has never seen support that high. One potential reason for this is the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw many workers across industries disillusioned with their employers’ lack of pandemic safety rules in the workplace according to time.com.
Another factor is the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which mediates labor disputes in private industries across the country. In 2016, the NLRB began to consider both graduate and undergraduate student workers as statutory employees, a stance which it has reaffirmed in years since. The NLRB only has jurisdiction over private universities, however, leaving public universities reliant on state-level entities to green-light union elections.
While unionization efforts among graduate students and faculty members are not exactly new, undergraduates have largely been excluded from this trend until recently. This is reflected in the fact that, of the 35,655 student workers who are newly unionized,according to chronicle.com. Yet, according to Inside Higher Ed, the number of recognized undergraduate unions went from one to over a dozen in the past three years. Fordham, Dartmouth, Wesleyan, Tufts, Mount Holyoke and Barnard are a few examples of colleges where undergraduate workers have successfully unionized.
This trend of undergraduate unionization raises the question of whether West Chester University could see a similar unionization effort in the future. For this article, Grace Zwierzyna, a fifth-year student at WCU who runs Students for Socialism, was asked about the chances of an undergraduate workers union forming at WCU.
“Students for Socialism always have been and always will be pushing for an undergraduate student union to be formed on campus,” Zwierzyna stated. “We’ve reached out to and spoken with other groups of student workers on this campus about helping to unionize them in the past, but most of their concerns were the administration punishing them for it. Unfortunately, that’s not something that’s too far out of the realm of possibility.”
While an effort to galvanize undergraduate student workers has not gained traction, there have been moments in recent memory where West Chester students and faculty have sought changes from administration. In 2017, according to The Daily Local, the group Pennsylvania Student Power rallied 40 students and faculty members outside of President Fiorentino’s office. The protesters demanded a freeze on tuition and a $15 hourly wage for all students and campus workers. President Fiorentino’s resignation could leave the possibility of an undergraduate union up in the air.
According to Inside Higher Ed, college administrators have historically seen student workers’ work as being primarily educational, and not worthy of unionization. With Fiorentino retiring at the end of this academic year, whether the next president of WCU will share this view remains to be seen.
“I think the likelihood of an undergraduate workers union being formed here is possible,” Zwierzyna went on, “but it will take a lot of work and perseverance to convince administration to even entertain the idea of having one. Maybe this will change with Fiorentino’s retirement this upcoming June.”
When asked about the potential benefits of allowing West Chester undergraduate workers to unionize, Grace Zwierzyna had this to say:
“With a possible second housing crisis looming over our heads for the 2024–2025 school year, $7.25/hr to $10.00/hr for a job that’s 5 hours per week is frankly shameful for a university of this size to offer to a federal work-study student. My friend started working one of the most important yet exhausting on-campus jobs this past spring, and they decided to continue with it this school year. What was their reward for that? A $0.50 raise. A $0.50 raise anywhere is problematic, but it is especially problematic coming from a university that has more than enough money to give him at least a $2.00/hr raise. An undergraduate union would fight for student workers to receive better raises than $0.50 an hour.”
For one, undergraduate unions are rare at public universities, and they have not yet been approved by the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board, according to the Department of Labor and Industry. When asked about the challenges to forming such a union at WCU, Grace Zwierzyna had this to say:
“There’s always challenges when it comes to forming a worker’s union–regardless of if the workers who are organizing the union are students or not. As most of us already know, colleges are businesses and operate as such. Workers unionize because they feel exploited by their workplaces–whether that’s in the form of little pay for physically and/or mentally taxing labor, poor working conditions or even something as vital as healthcare benefits.”
Zwierzyna also stated that an undergraduate union wouldn’t just advocate for higher pay. It could also push for better working conditions, good healthcare with low copays, decreased workload and stronger workplace guidelines. It could even push for earlier class registration, she said.
“With the exorbitant cost of living here in this town,” she said, “West Chester University should be paying both their undergraduate and graduate students close to, if not exactly, as much as Temple University is paying the members of TUGSA [Temple University Graduate Students Association].”
Josh Czaja is a first-year Political Science major on the International Relations track. JC1029473@wcupa.edu