Resident advisors, campus radio station managers and parking appeals adjudicators across over 20 California colleges could soon have one thing in common: A union.
Thousands of California State University student workers filed with the California Public Employee Relations Board on Monday, petitioning for a union election. If they’re successful, they would be represented by the California State University Employee Union.
CSUEU’s executive director, Jim Philiou, said at a press conference Monday that he estimates around 10,000 student workers would be voting members in the union bargaining unit, if successfully formed. California Faculty Association president Charles Toombs and Assembly member Liz Ortega, a Democrat who represents the east Bay Area, also attended the conference in solidarity with students.
While teaching assistants at CSU have union representation, the thousands of CSU students working jobs under the nebulous label of “student assistant” do not.
Utkarsh Mehta is a Sacramento State junior who discovered the union movement via social media. They said they’re supporting the union because it’s a way to “protect our students” with higher wages, holiday pay and sick pay.
“The reason why I’m very much in support of having a student [worker] union is because $15.50 an hour — minimum wage in California — given how rents are increasing, everything is not enough,” he said. “We’re capped at 20 hours and that makes it so much more difficult — just to put this in perspective, a high school [student] worker can get a permit to work and still be able to work more than we’re capped at per week.”
Discussion of a student worker union began last year, during the CSUEU contract negotiations, after students raised questions about how they might be able to gain union representation. Other student workers say they’re supporting a union because they don’t receive paid sick time and are underpaid despite doing the same work as professional CSU staff.
And, like Mehta, they highlight the 20-hour work cap — meant to help students focus on school — as a reason they’d like to unionize. Student workers at the press conference said they’ve taken jobs off-campus to make up for the hours they can’t get through university jobs, in order to make ends meet.
“I understand that the university said that that's for our benefit so that we can focus on school, but it's also really hard to focus on school when you have to decide if you're going to pay rent or eat,” said San Diego State graduate student Elisa Mendez-Pintado at the conference.
Benefits are also a flashpoint for student workers. Mendez-Pintado said she’s lucky to be able to stay on her parents’ health insurance until she turns 26. But after that, she’ll still be finishing her degree, and her job offers no benefits — “no safety net.”
“Students who are the first in their families to go to college, or students whose families just simply don't have the extra cash to spare,” she said. “Those are the students that are most harmed by these policies.”
CSU spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith told CapRadio via email that while the university system isn’t involved in the students’ organizing effort, it “acknowledges all workers’ rights to organize.”
Other organizing efforts are intertwined with the student worker union movement
With rising living costs, the ongoing pandemic and employment precarity, labor organizing in higher education — from academic workers to faculty — has been rising nationally.
In California, last year’s UC worker strike brought together over 46,000 workers across four different bargaining units in a six-week work stoppage, with a segment of workers specifically organizing around pandemic and public health protections both at the picket line and in their contract. This year, graduate workers at Stanford are fighting to organize a union of their own.
Student workers calling for a union say it’s a matter of demanding better, not just the bare minimum.
“Why do you expect students to perform well in school and perform well at work for little to no compensation?” said Cameron Macedonio, a junior at Cal State Fullerton who manages the campus-run radio station, during the press conference. “Not only are we elevating the CSU by going to school and getting good grades and publishing research papers … you also expect us to be in the office and elevate your profits.”
“You also expect us to be there when we’re sick, because otherwise we can’t get paid,” Macedonio added.
Aiden Rodriquez, a sophomore at Sacramento State who works for varied departments on campus, said student workers just want to be “given consideration for things as simple as sick leave.”
“Any other employee would be provided [it] if they weren’t a student assistant for the CSU,” he said.
Watching CSUEU bargain for a new contract with the university system brought up discussions about the 20 hour a week cap, parking fees and sick pay, said the union’s president, Catherine Hutchinson. From there, she began having conversations with students across the CSU about how a union works and how it could benefit student workers.
“It was not just one campus, but we found, statewide, that it was students from all over campuses who started talking to each other — students from Channel Islands talking to students at Sonoma,” she said.
Seeing the UC academic worker strike last fall further emboldened students.
“It was definitely top of conversations amongst … my classmates in the graduate student program, because so many of us work on campus or work … as graduate student assistants for a program or teaching assistants,” said Mendez-Pintado, the San Diego State graduate student. “It definitely inspired many of us to realize that we had a voice as well and we can empower ourselves to advocate for ourselves.”
While Grayce Honza, a resident advisor at San Francisco State, said she hasn’t personally contacted striking UC graduate students about their tactics, she did have friends at UC schools who shared day-to-day updates about the strike.
“Moving forward, we should definitely get in contact with other student assistants within the UC system that are organizing,” Honza said. “I think that the more voices that we have heard, the better that we can be equipped as we go into having this union election and talking with the CSU and this bargaining situation.”
Student assistants have used multiple methods in hopes of becoming recognized as a union, including signing union cards which represent their support. If a majority of eligible student assistants sign the cards, the union must be recognized by the PERB. A unit modification petition — which would allow student assistants to be incorporated into the existing CSUEU units — is also pending and has a hearing in June.
Philiou said the workers chose to file a petition for an election because it is “a quicker process” that would build “much more enthusiasm.”
“What we’re announcing … is that we filed a petition for a separate bargaining unit of student assistants,” he said.
Hopeful union members look to social media as an organizing tool
To put pressure on the CSU and the state of California to expedite the union vote, student workers are launching a social media campaign, using the hashtags #LetUsVote and #LUVStudentWorkers.
“In the event student employees are formally recognized by the California Public Employment Relations Board, we look forward to engaging with them as we do with all of our other union partners,” Bentley-Smith, the CSU spokesperson, said.
While the social media campaign continues, CSUEU president Hutchinson said in an ideal world, the union would be recognized by May — when CSU schools end the academic year.
“I know these things will take a little time, so we’re looking at using summer to keep it going and build that momentum,” she said. “Hopefully by fall, we have something for the students to be proud of.”
In the meantime, hopeful union members said they still plan to spread the word to student assistants throughout the CSU campuses, and a main tool they’ve been using is Instagram.
Social media was also a main tool for UC organizers during their strike, with the academic workers’ union Instagram accounts being dedicated to infographics about pay disparities in the university and the union’s platform, and other striking workers used their own Twitter accounts to share information like COVID-19 safety practices for the picket line.
On the CSU Student Worker Union Instagram, testimonials from supportive student workers are surrounded by memes with pay and benefits-focused messages, like a photo of Tangled’s Flynn Rider surrounded by swords accompanied by text that reads “$500 a semester for a parking pass is just paying to go to work.”
Both Sacramento State students, Mehta and Rodriquez, found out about the union movement through social media.
“There was a meme about how much the CSU is profiting and how much they're paying student workers,” Mehta said. “I was really surprised.”
Most of Mehta’s friends and coworkers had already signed their own union cards, so they were later to learning of the union.
“I would have never thought that something — such a movement — will exist for a student worker like me,” he said. “This was completely a new concept for me.”
Seeing the outpouring of support for the union on the Instagram account was “in itself a huge shock,” Mehta said. They’re hopeful it will materialize into the promised union, which they see as an extension of the CSU’s promise to its students.
“The CSU system was created for students to bridge the gap in education and bridge the gap in economic inequities, racial inequalities, all of these inequities,” he said. “Unionization of student workers is a very great step forward in that aspect. We want the CSU to allow us to hold elections and let us vote in these elections because I think if you, the CSU, are here for your students, you need to prove it by doing that.”
Aside from participating in the social media campaign, attendees at the press conference urged supporters — whether they’re student assistants themselves or just want to stand in solidarity — to call their legislators and the CSU chancellor’s office to put additional pressure on the university to have PERB schedule a vote.
