Student workers at Minnesota’s Macalester College fight for a union

@macalesterunion via X

ST. PAUL, Minn.—Six months after the Macalester Undergraduate Workers Union (MUWU) went public, People’s World spoke with some of its members about what sparked their organizing drive and their ongoing fight for union recognition. If the union wins its election or is voluntarily recognized, it would be the third private sector wall-to-wall undergraduate workers union in the United States, and the first undergraduate union in Minnesota.

Undergraduate labor organizing is a very recent endeavor in U.S. labor history, with the first student workers union being formed of RAs (Residence Assistants) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2002.

Organizing student workers only picked up steam more recently after the 2016 victory of the first independent student workers union at Grinnell College, with its dining hall workers winning their union election with 91% support. In 2022, the Grinnell College dining hall union expanded to all undergraduate workers at the college, the first wall-to-wall student workers union in the country.

In the past two years, 30 new student worker (undergraduate and graduate) bargaining units have won unions, with the University of Oregon’s wall-to-wall undergraduate union being the largest in recent years, representing over 4,000 student workers.

Macalester College, the home of MUWU’s organizing efforts, is a small, highly ranked liberal arts college located in Saint Paul. Nearly 60% of students receive need-based student aid, demonstrating the real income disparities between those whose semester tuition is in the hundreds of dollars to those paying over $80,000 in tuition fees.

Macalester has built up a reputation as a very liberal, progressive institution. However, this image stands in stark contrast to the poor working conditions students face in their work-study jobs.

Roxy, who wished to only go by their first name, described one of the main reasons for getting involved in union organizing was because they are “a low-income trans college student” who “dropped out of college because I could not afford it.”

She gravitated towards the union after both these personal experiences and “seeing people that have to work two or three jobs, [and] a number of low-income queer dining hall workers dropping out of college,” she told People’s World.

Roxy spoke on the strategy of the union’s goal of becoming a wall-to-wall union representing all 1400 student workers at Macalester (65% of the student body) and described how many of the student workers they sought to organize were “low-income, queer, and trans, low-middle income,” students who would most benefit from a union victory. These students were not just workers in the dining hall; they represented a cross-section of the entire student worker population at Macalester.

“The union did not want to ‘silo off’ these students to multiple bargaining units and multiple unions, and instead opted to fight for all student workers in one organizing push,” she said. “It was everything everywhere all at once, not something most union organizers advise.”

She also told People’s World about the working conditions at the dining hall, describing a “lack of respect for student workers, especially women, trans, and queer people, by management, full-time non-student employees, and people using the dining hall.”

She described a long-standing issue of management not using student workers’ correct pronouns, putting work on trans students without recognition, and, in one case, re-hiring a full-time employee previously fired for sexual harassment.

“There’s a pipeline of trans people,” said Roxy, “who drop out because they can’t afford Macalester and they work at the dining hall as a result, because it’s the one place that is marginally better than being poor back home.”

In addition to the organizing efforts of MUWU in the Macalester dining hall, full and part-time employees hired directly by Bon Appetit—the company contracted by Macalester to run the cafeteria—have unionized with Unite Here Local 17. After a five-year organizing push, workers at Bon Appetit won their union earlier this year.

The two unions, Unite Here and MUWU have had an interconnected history since MUWU started, with both focusing on the dining hall workers initially. While MUWU first wanted to form a cross-employer union, after linking up with Unite Here, they switched focus to a union encompassing all of Macalester’s 1,400 student workers.

The workplace issues at the university aren’t specific to the dining hall, either. Former Macalester student Mercurie discussed her experiences working in the Psychology Department caring for rats undergoing various experiments.

In her year working there, she experienced a lack of care for mental health issues, unhealthy conditions for the rats undergoing experiments, and meager pay—all while working with minimal supervision and support from management. In one case, a rat with cancer was not treated or examined for months before it passed, despite Mercurie’s repeated requests for management to step in.

MUWU hopes to address these issues by raising wages, increasing worker control over workplaces, increasing the allowed number of hours for student workers, requiring better communication and transparency from managers, and providing “a safety net for other student workers.”

People’s World also talked with Macalester student worker and MUWU organizer Gabe, who works as a researcher at Macalester’s Center for Religious and Spiritual Life. While becoming a student worker just this past year, they described “being organized into the union” and having been involved in it ever since.

One of the main reasons he lists for his involvement in union organizing is the potential for the union to act as an expression of student power over college administration. Gabe currently sits on Macalester’s Board of Trustees as a student liaison—a non-voting position with no legal status that only exists so long as the board “graciously allows it.”

Currently, this position is “the only interface between the students and the real decision makers at the college,” said Gabe, and the students have “no real power” over college governance.

“All the things students care about—Palestine, work-study, [and] curriculum, [would] benefit from having an institution that allows them to create consequences for the college if those demands are not met,” they said.

A major issue the union has faced in its organizing efforts is that many student workers at Macalester have relatively easy and uninvolved jobs. Gabe described how there “is this narrative that we don’t need a union, our jobs are easy. But this isn’t true…. The workplace isn’t just a desk and doing nothing.” The whole college and the experience around it, from tuition to course requirements, affects all students.

“Every issue is a worker issue; this is how we change them, how we have power. No one is going on a tuition strike…a labor strike is very different, it puts pressure on a college in a serious way that is not possible in other ways.”

The union organizers’ immediate demands are for the Macalester administration to voluntarily recognize their union, remain neutral during union organizing, and bargain in good faith for a contract which will protect all student workers.

Want to support the union?

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MUWU Website

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CONTRIBUTOR

Emily Thorpe

Emily Thorpe writes from the Twin Cities area.