Kenyon College student workers have been organizing since April 2020. Can you give an overview of the campaign?

When Kenyon’s campus closed at the pandemic’s onset, the administration announced that full-time staff would still be paid but didn’t say anything about student workers. Most students worked on campus and were no longer paid because they did not have services set up to work remotely.

Student workers within the Kenyon Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) wrote a petition to demand that student workers be paid for the average hours per week they would have worked for the semester. The administration accepted the proposal, saving student workers hundreds of thousands of dollars. This sparked conversations among student workers, who realized that they would have missed out on income they needed if they hadn’t done something.

At the next school year’s beginning, workplaces formed committees to discuss issues that existed before the pandemic, like low pay, unfair treatment, and untransparent policies. We decided we needed a wall-to-wall union to address issues that affected all student workers. When we went public with the union, the school said they would think about voluntary recognition, but it was a farce. I think that they planned to deny it from the beginning.

This and a lack of payment during COVID shutdowns led to our first one-day strike on March 16, 2021 over an unfair labor practice (ULP). That escalated into a two-week strike in April 2021, prompted by the administration’s intransigence over union recognition and attacks on several workplaces — specifically, the implementation of unpaid training for teaching assistants (TAs) and the removal of apartment positions for community advisors (CAs). Now, in line with the theme of last spring, the administration has made many unilateral changes to working conditions that have negatively affected students.

On March 3, 205 Kenyon student workers participated in a strike. This was the largest strike by undergraduate student workers in US history. Then, on March 11, the Kenyon Student Worker Organizing Committee (KSWOC) announced an indefinite strike. What was the impetus for these actions?

The college’s announcement that the student-run farm program would be discontinued motivated the one-day ULP strike on March 3. Student farmers and others reached out to the administration saying, “You didn’t ask us before making this decision. Can we have an open forum and discuss?” The administration declined and said that they planned to hire a “farm manager” to answer those questions. We knew that we would have to undertake a longer, indefinite strike, because the one-day strike was not going to do enough for us. We created a strike GoFundMe to support strikers and have a letter that will be sent to our college decision-makers that people can sign.

Then, Kenyon announced changes in payment for CAs. Historically, Kenyon CAs have been paid with an hourly wage, but next year that will change to a stipend. Again, they did not ask current CAs for their input or do an impact analysis before making the decision. CAs met with the president and vice president of Student Affairs to discuss these changes, but they later said that they did not consider CAs to be employees that have rights under labor law. That’s a big problem motivating our strike right now, too.

The administration has given us no other choice but to strike. We have gone through every formal process they have asked us to. They have pushed us to prove that we are stronger when we come together. The administration doesn’t know the details of how all of these workplaces run, and their top-down decision-making negatively affects student workers.

How did you mobilize your coworkers for the one-day strike and the indefinite strike, and what is your strategy to ensure that the indefinite strike has the impact you want it to?

We had tons of conversations with coworkers. You can ask someone to go on strike, but they won’t stay on strike if they are doing it only because you asked them to. They have to genuinely believe in improving their working conditions through a union. Getting to know the workers is the first step.

We planned to roll out the strike in stages by shop. The big focus was CAs since they are one of the largest workplaces on campus. They started striking as soon as a majority of them agreed, and we adopted that strategy for other workplaces too. The workers who went on strike first were those who were most visible, essential, everyday workers for the college.

The one-day strike was organized right before our spring break, so we couldn’t do anything long. But, it became the largest strike we’ve done in the campaign so far. The farm showed that it was not going anywhere.

The indefinite strike is a marathon, not a sprint. The idea behind it is to maintain momentum internally and steadily build pressure on the college. One workplace on strike definitely disrupts some services, but then another workplace joins. Each time we escalate, we present a very reasonable alternative: do what Dartmouth, Grinnell, and Wesleyan have done. Sit down and talk to us. How easy would that be?

The timing was also important. The real decision-makers at the college are the board of trustees. They decide whether a union can go forward. They came to campus on April 21. We ramped up the pressure and took the fight to them. There are several anti-union trustees who we are asking, “Are you willing to drag Kenyon’s name through the mud and make the College the face of anti-unionism around the country to keep out a student workers’ union? Or are you willing to let us vote?”

What was the administration’s initial response to the strike?

They released a statement claiming that the college will operate under normal conditions. We know this is not true from our one-day strike, during which the vice president of Library and Information Services (LBIS) had to work Nick’s shift.

They’ve pretended like the strike is not happening. CAs lawfully withdrawing their labor has affected Kenyon, but of course the college is going to say that it does not. A strong majority of language course TAs have shut down their classes. As other workplaces join the strike, the college’s operations are further affected. It’s standard for employers to say that strikes don’t affect them to convince people that the strike is futile.

They’re also using recycled legal arguments that were struck down by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in the Columbia decision to argue that we are not student workers and to delay us. Other undergraduate and graduate student labor allies have reached out to say, “Don’t listen to them. This is a facade.” But it’s working as a legal tactic. Ultimately, their goal is to demoralize us and make our actions feel futile. Student workers and our allies are not buying that.

Residential Life started compelling non-striking CAs to cover striking CAs’ duty shifts. CAs usually do two duty shifts per week. You pick up a cell phone from campus safety, oversee a prescribed area of campus, and are liable to answer the duty phone in the case of an emergency from 10 PM to 8 AM the next morning. They are making CAs who are not on strike do that three to four times a week and exploiting these workers to an even greater extent. They originally asked campus safety officers to cover those shifts, but campus safety declined unless they were paid overtime. Residential Life is avoiding acknowledging that CAs are doing extra work.

How many student workers in total do you expect to participate if it extends into next week and you expand workplaces?

We aren’t sure. We’re continuing to do outreach. Some workers may be easier to talk to once they see others striking and realize that this is protected and empowering. It would be crazy if we hit 205 strikers again, but I hope it doesn’t come to that. It would be best for the college to come to its senses right now and talk this out with us.

It takes a lot of courage to strike. Those are difficult conversations. But the fact that over two hundred workers went on strike in March shows that there is a lot of strength behind our campaign. We’ve demonstrated supermajority support on signed cards, and they are still willing to ignore us.

We’re trying to bring in as many nonworking students as we can too. For example, the administration is also trying to take away students’ ability to live at the farm house. The decision affects people who aren’t student workers because the farm house is a center of community for many people on campus. The farm workers’ fight has brought in so many people who enjoy farm services. We tell people, “If you want to protect what makes our community so unique, we need a union.”

How do you see Kenyon’s administration’s union busting affecting unionization efforts elsewhere?

The Columbia NLRB decision in 2016 opened the door to undergraduate worker unionism. Kenyon’s strategy has been particularly innovative, because they’re paying top dollar for it. Their union-busting lawyers at Jones Day are coming up with novel reasons why they can’t even proceed to the first step of an election, which is to have a hearing. This is hanging up the NLRB.

If we allow these arguments to delay the election and make our organizing seem futile, it would send a signal to every single college and university employer. They might conclude that if they just pay these lawyers top dollar and file these motions, they don’t have to worry about student organizing and can delay it inevitably.

We are fighting to stop the precedent that colleges and universities can delay unions inevitably. If we don’t defeat the legal issues that they’re bringing up, they could become a precedent when the NLRB turns over to Republican nominees at some point in the future and seriously inhibit the explosion of undergraduate student worker unions that we’re seeing right now. It’s not just about us at Kenyon. We are fighting for the rights of undergraduate student workers across the country.

This has given us motivation to fight for a Kenyon College that is not dictated by these right-wing trustees. We don’t want Kenyon to be associated with that. We want Kenyon to be associated with the things we love about it.

How does your organizing relate to the broader trend of workplace organizing spreading across the country?

Workers at the Whitney Museum of American Art recently won a union, and we brought Karissa Francis, a prior museum worker who now works for their local, to come speak at the Gund Gallery on campus. The similarities between the Whitney Museum’s tactics and Kenyon’s are clear. They are delaying negotiations for higher wages at the moment even though they are currently unionized.

A lot of the same themes are coming up across Kenyon, Dartmouth, Hamilton, Wesleyan, and Grinnell, too. There is a theme of administrations denying that student work is essential and delaying unionization. Administrations and boards of trustees at different schools around the country are underestimating their students. These are highly regarded institutions. These students are smart and understand the value of their labor. Yet administrations expect that they won’t act for some reason.

Our unionization campaign is reinforced by these other movements. They make us feel like we are not alone in the challenges that we face and in our goals. We hope it’s cyclical and that we are also providing support and inspiration for other students at schools around the country who are starting to see how their labor is being exploited with fresh eyes.

Have you been in contact with other undergraduate student worker unions? If so, what has your communication with them looked like?

Yes. Dartmouth is a good example: their student workers contacted our committee members and our union representative to learn from our tactics. It was heartening. We’ve been pushing our campaign for two years now and haven’t gotten to the final victory. We have been able to contribute our hindsight and experience to committees at other universities so that they can apply those lessons. Dartmouth has applied them almost perfectly. Their campaign has been amazing to watch, learn from, and grow from.

Similarly, the University of Massachusetts–Amherst resident assistants’ union has been an inspiration to us from the beginning. Their members have pointed out flaws in Kenyon’s administration’s arguments against better conditions because they’ve been around for twenty years. It feels like we’re joining a movement, even if it’s a small one that is growing.

What has the role of the YDSA chapter been in your campaign?

Who was in the chapter and who is active in organizing in KSWOC overlaps. There is not currently an active Kenyon YDSA chapter. People who were active in it saw the campaign for student workers as a time to take action and focus on organizing rather than educating within the YDSA chapter. That’s what this campaign has evolved from.

The YDSA national organization and many chapters nationwide have helped through solidarity. Kenyon College is a small school, so when people in the YDSA chapter — most of whom were student workers — got involved in KSWOC, it was hard to maintain both the chapter and KSWOC at the same time. But we are still connected to YDSA networks.

We’re trying to nationalize this fight, because it has national implications. We didn’t want it to have national implications; we wanted to form a union to address the concrete issues that affect student workers here. Kenyon has unfortunately made it an issue of national importance that will set a precedent that could threaten the rights of student workers everywhere.

How has your involvement in KSWOC affected your personal political theories of change and your paths after graduation?

I signed a card when I first got to campus, but I didn’t get involved in KSWOC until the administration’s farm decision in January. I couldn’t stand by anymore. I want to go into curatorial studies, and I have heard from labor organizers at museums in New York City that it is important for me to get involved now, because my labor rights and labor won’t be respected in the field later. But that reality hasn’t changed what I want to do.

I study sociology, so I had a pessimistic view of the world and social change. But that was theoretical: I read [Karl] Marx, [Antonio] Gramsci, and [Émile] Durkheim, and I knew that industrial work was hard. I realized that the same mechanisms of domination are ongoing and perpetuated now at Kenyon.

For a long time, I considered going into academia. Through KSWOC and other things, I realized that if you don’t act and disrupt people’s normal life routines, they will not listen to you or change the behavior that is oppressing you and those you care about. I don’t think that academia is the best realm for sparking ground-level change. That’s part of my inspiration for applying to law school.

I had already supported labor rights. I just hadn’t been put into a position where I had been able to advocate for myself and others through a union. I had heard small talks about unionization at other jobs I worked but had never thought of the possibility. I’ve been inspired by seeing unionization as a very real possibility.

It has been disheartening to see how hard Kenyon College has fought our basic right to vote for the union. But it has been inspiring to see the wins of student workers at other colleges and to know how much power labor has that we can collectively use.

The strike has shown the difference between self-selecting activism and structural organizing. Our organizing is based on the structure of the workplace. Bringing the interests of different workplaces together into one whole has been a great skill to learn: it involves time, especially because many of these people would never come to a YDSA meeting or self-identify as labor people. While they might have originally said, “This is just my job,” our organizing has shown that their jobs affect them and their lives.

Our jobs are a huge part of our lives in school, and they will be a much larger part of our lives when we actually leave school and enter the workforce. The issues faced in the workplace on campus are a microcosm of what could be faced out in the “real world.” Learning the skills of effective collective action now can only help create better conditions going forward.

Political education can never really compare to the lived experience of trying to change conditions. It’s something altogether different.

Through this outreach and talking to people who are not a part of KSWOC, I’ve also learned the valuable skill of articulating to people that wanting to be respected in your workplace and to assert your rights as a worker is not a radical position to take.

How is the leverage that a union holds different from that of a regular student organization?

Student organizations do effective and productive work around a lot of issues. There has been a strong tradition of activism and effective organizing at colleges and universities across the country that did not originate from unions. But student organizations and institutions are not built for representing students as student workers and their economic relationship to the college through that employment. That’s where unionism comes in.

At the same time, unions have the power of collective bargaining, which allows us to sit at the table as equals with the college as an employer and compel them to listen to us. This power gives unions the potential to address community-wide issues. That prospect of these emerging student worker unions at colleges and universities is exciting. The question is, “How can we link with other struggles at Kenyon College and beyond to both improve our working conditions and use that leverage to democratize the broader institution?”

Have you gained solidarity from nonstudent workers on campus? If so, what has that solidarity looked like?

We’ve shown up for the maintenance workers union on campus when they have asked us to, and we really appreciate them. We’ve formed a great relationship.

Before we went public with our union, UE local 712, which represents the skilled trades maintenance workers, were at the bargaining table with Kenyon fighting the administration’s attempts to gut retirement benefits for all workers. Changes to their contract would have affected everyone; they were bargaining for the common good of all faculty and staff on campus.

In the midst of that tough fight, they found time at the bargaining table to say to the administration, “You should respect the rights of new workers trying to unionize,” to make the path as easy as possible for us. In many ways, they fired the opening shot for us to get union recognition.

They also came to our picket line during our one-day strike. Later in the day, we took the picket line down to the maintenance building because they were having a contentious meeting with management about potential irregularities since their last contract bargaining. We showed support for them to make sure their issue was visible and people were paying attention to it.

What advice would you give to student workers at other institutions whose administrations might go to extra lengths to union bust or are crushing their rights as workers?

I would say, “Your work matters.” A lot of students have told me, “I’m not actually a worker. I just do this through the college and get paid for it.” A friend of mine teaches a yoga class twice a week, and she said she could not strike because she wasn’t a worker; she just helped others’ mental health. I responded, “You’re just telling me that your work matters.” People need to know that they do matter and that’s why they need to fight for themselves.

We’ve also learned to not get trapped in debates about wanting union recognition or the fact that they’re committing unfair labor practice. The college wants us to get into abstract conversations about rights in response to the legal arguments that they’re bringing up. It’s important to make sure we’re grounded in the issues of why we want a union. We formed a union in the first place because we have no power over conditions.

Every positive improvement has only come from student workers, and every negative change has occurred when we don’t have rights and when they make decisions unilaterally. A world without a union is a world wherein these things happen constantly. We could fight back, but it would be a constant battle. By contrast, a world with a union is one where we have a say in the workplace.