Kenyon College Students Are on Strike Today. They Want a Student-Worker Union.
Kenyon College student workers are on an unfair labor practice strike today. The strike comes during a campaign to organize the first US union representing all undergraduate workers on a campus. Jacobin spoke to several strikers and two campus maintenance workers supporting them about why they’re organizing — and how other students can follow their example.
Members of the Kenyon Student Organizing Committee. (Courtesy of KSWOC)
For nearly a year now, Kenyon undergraduate student workers have been organizing a public union drive as the Kenyon Student Worker Organizing Committee (KSWOC) with United Electrical Workers (UE). If recognized, KSWOC would be the first “wall-to-wall” university union in US history representing all undergraduate student workers.
This past Thursday, they announced an unfair labor practice (ULP) strike in five of their shops in response to what the student workers say are illegal labor practices by the Kenyon administration. It is the first undergraduate student worker labor strike in US history. Oren Schweitzer spoke with student workers Nick Becker, Djibril Branche, Sigal Felber, Rebecca Kornman, and Dani Martinez, and with UE Local 712 workers Glen Goodwin and Bob Smith.
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