Opinion: There’s no good argument for preventing workers from seeking better conditions.
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If you often walk through the center of the UO campus, chances are you’ve been asked to sign a Student Workers Union card. You may not know much about what unionization entails, but it is an important step toward securing the rights and fair treatment of all student workers.
According to student activist and organizer Will Garrahan, the union card signing drive began last term following an unsuccessful attempt to pass an ASUO measure supporting student workers’ rights. “We’re on our way to getting a majority of student workers to sign and file for the official union, and after that, the university’s going to have to bargain with us,” Garrahan reports. The goals of the union would be to negotiate for better pay and a more timely pay period.
While organization efforts have been prolific, they’ve hit a major roadblock: union busting. If you’re like me before writing this article, you might not know exactly what union busting is. I had heard the term before and understood on a general level that it referred to breaking up unions, but I certainly didn’t know the specifics of what it could look like, especially on campus. Luckily, Garrahan was able to clear that up for me, explaining that within individual workplaces, managers have the power to enforce rules about what workers wear and discuss on shift.
For example, at the GSH Fresh Marketcafe where he works, Garrahan experienced pushback after wearing a pin in support of student worker unionization.
“The enforced policy was that we were allowed to wear pins on our hats. We had [workers] who had pins literally glued to their hats because they were wearing them all the time. And when we started to try to wear union pins on our hats, they began to crack down on us doing that, and they told us that we couldn’t wear pins on our hats,” Garrahan explained. “This policy change directly had to do with us wearing union pins.”
UO resident assistant Carolyn Roderique also experienced difficulty with campaigning for unionization in her workplace. This began in part because of how RAs are classified — “student leaders” instead of student workers, although they fit the legal definition of employees. However, this wasn’t the only complication Roderique had to contend with. RAs have one-on-one meetings with their supervisors, and some managers reportedly used that time to try to discourage the workers from unionizing.
“We had a manager tell people that [unionizing] would harm international and undocumented students, which is not true. I think that’s just really awful to use vulnerable people as your union busting tactic,” Roderique said.
International students are only able to work on campus during their first academic year, so they’re particularly vulnerable to the issues that have prompted organizers to push for a union.
“We’ve actually seen some RAs hesitant to sign for that specific reason, so the frustrating thing is that the lies are costing us cards,” Roderique said.
Campus union busting isn’t just confined to workers in the student dorms. Izzie Marshall, an Erb Memorial Union worker, described their brush with this discouragement.
“Recently we started to see managers talking to their employees about what we’re allowed to discuss about the union. We can talk about the union, but we can’t do work for it. We can’t campaign for it or even talk to people while they’re on the clock about the union,” Marshall explained. “Our ability to discuss the union, to organize, all of that is our power.”
Federal law seems to agree, with the National Labor Relations Board listing this behavior as an example of interfering with employees’ rights. “If you can sign a birthday card on the clock, you can sign a union card,” Garrahan said.
Even as someone relatively new to the concept of unionizing, I can’t help but see this hindrance as inherently wrong. Based on the workers’ statements, we desperately need a union to hold managers on campus accountable to end this egregious abuse of power and guarantee justice for workers. Not only is union busting against the law, but it’s a cowardly and morally bankrupt action. Why shouldn’t student workers be paid fairly? RAs, dining hall workers, janitors, tutors and more are essential to the function of the school.
“Student workers’ issues are student issues and our struggles around pay, harassment and other things in the workplace are all directly connected to what students experience around dining halls: being understaffed, long lines, services on campus that are generally poor,” Garrahan said.
Want campus to run more smoothly? The answer is clear: support unionization.
If you’re a student concerned about union busting in your workplace, the organizers I spoke to explained that a good rule of thumb is that if something feels wrong, it probably is. Currently, the group is collecting reports of union busting on campus through a link in their Instagram bio. If you work on campus, make sure to sign a union card and keep an eye out for union busting attempts. Every individual action makes a difference.
“This is not something we do alone; this is something we do together,” Roderique said. “It’s important to say thank you to everyone because everyone has had such an important role, even if it’s just signing a card or sharing an Instagram post or giving your friend or roommate a card. Those things are all what’s going to make this work.”
