In a move that could make them some of the first undergraduate student workers to unionize in Illinois, resident advisers at the University of Illinois at Chicago filed for union representation Thursday.
The undergraduates filed for representation with the Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 39, a Madison, Wisconsin-based labor union that represents workers in nonprofits and health care and at universities. Union organizers said more than 85% of the 170 undergraduate housing staff workers at UIC had signed union cards.
The undergraduate workers, organizing under the name Housing Staff United, also include students who work as front desk employees in campus residence halls and peer mentors who live in the dorms.
The move comes as part of a swell of undergraduate student organizing that has swept college campuses throughout the country over the last several years. In the public sector, undergraduates at the University of Michigan and California State have joined unions in the last year.
But much of the organizing has taken place in the private sector. Since 2022, the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees union elections and enforces federal labor law in the private sector, has certified close to two dozen undergraduate student unions across the country.
Undergraduate workers at UIC, who as public university employees filed for representation with the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board instead of the NLRB, say they are seeking higher pay, additional time off and the removal of a one-year cap on raises. In addition to free housing and a meal plan, RAs make a stipend of $75 to $120 every two weeks, organizers said. That can work out to less than $2 per hour if RAs work the 20 hours they are contracted for, organizers said.
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Ellison Radek, a UIC junior and RA, said the demands of the job — RAs are responsible for anywhere between 30 and 80 first-year students, she said — often mean that housing staffers find themselves working more hours than they are contracted for.
RAs are responsible for mediating disputes between first-year students who have never lived in dorms before, Radek said. They work overnight on-call shifts and respond to facilities issues in the residence halls. They monitor the dorms for alcohol and respond, in conjunction with campus police, to sometimes serious mental health incidents.
One of the changes RAs hope to win in a contract, Radek said, is an on-call counselor who will come to the dorms in the case of mental health emergencies.
“There’s also such a huge emotional and mental toll that this job takes on you that doesn’t seem to really be respected or understood by our supervisors,” Radek said in an interview with the Tribune.
On Thursday, dozens of the undergraduate housing student workers rallied outside a lecture hall on the university’s campus. There, they presented members of the administration with a request for voluntary recognition of their union, said Evan McKenzie, an organizer with OPEIU.
In a statement, university spokesperson Sherri McGinnis Gonzalez said UIC had not received the students’ union petition but would “carefully review any potential petition received.”
“The University of Illinois Chicago is committed to fostering a positive and collaborative environment where student employees feel valued, heard and supported,” she said.
“Regardless of the outcome, we remain dedicated to the well-being and success of our workforce while continuing to prioritize the needs of our students.”
OPEIU represents undergraduate student workers at a number of private colleges and universities, including Swarthmore, Georgetown and Smith. In the public sector, the union has sought to represent undergraduate workers at Temple University, a public university in Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board initially dismissed the students’ petition and the case is now awaiting a hearing, McKenzie said.
None of the private sector undergraduate unions formed since 2022 were in Illinois, according to the NLRB. But in 2017, student library workers at the University of Chicago voted to unionize with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. According to reporting by the Chicago Maroon, the student library union, which fought for recognition all the way up to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, included both graduate and undergraduate student workers.
“This would be exceptional,” Bob Bruno, director of the labor studies program at University of Illinois, said of the UIC students’ union campaign. At UIC, graduate students and faculty members are unionized with the Illinois Federation of Teachers.
It’s possible the university will attempt to challenge the undergraduates’ right to organize, Bruno said.
Under the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act, “student” is one of the groups excepted from the definition of an “educational employee.” (Graduate students performing research and teaching duties are considered educational employees, however.)
But Bruno said he thinks the undergraduate student workers should still be considered employees under the act, despite the fact that they are also students.
“They’re clearly employed,” he said. “The university pays them. They report hours, they perform work.”
The petition could also potentially set up a test of the state’s Workers Rights Amendment, which Illinois residents passed by referendum in 2022 and which enshrines the right to unionize and collectively bargain in the state’s constitution. Bruno said he thinks the still-untested amendment would protect the undergraduates’ right to unionize, even if the state’s Educational Labor Relations Board were to disagree.
“We are talking about workers,” McKenzie said. “They happen to also be students at the university, but 100%, full stop, these are workers and they deserve the right to unionize just like any other worker in Chicago.”
In the private sector, undergraduate student unions have garnered widespread support on campus in recent years, with most union elections passing by wide margins.
William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College in New York, said the surge in undergraduate student organizing, which follows a similar mass movement amongst graduate students, represents a “sea change” in the understanding of the role of labor both on campus and off, particularly among young people.
Herbert characterized undergraduates union campaigns as part and parcel with the surge in union organizing among young people off campus, including in high-profile campaigns such as at Starbucks.
“It’s a generational shift,” Herbert said.
The swell of private sector undergraduate unions was made possible in large part because of a 2016 labor board decision that found both graduate and undergraduate student workers were university employees and therefore eligible to organize, Herbert said.
During the first Trump administration, many student worker unions held off on filing new election petitions, with some — including University of Chicago graduate students — withdrawing active petitions because they feared providing a Republican-controlled labor board an opportunity to overturn the precedent established during the Obama years.
But during the Biden years, more than 53,000 graduate and undergraduate student workers in the private sector joined unions, according to the labor board.
Now, experts say a Republican labor board may attempt to curtail the right of private sector student workers to organize again.
During the first days of his presidency, Trump, as expected, fired the labor board’s progressive Biden-appointed general counsel. He also fired one of the Democratic members of the board, Gwynne Wilcox, in an unprecedented move Wilcox described as “illegal” and which she said she would challenge legally.
Since the November election, at least three undergraduate student union campaigns have withdrawn petitions with the NLRB. Those include undergraduate basketball players at Dartmouth, who voted to unionize last spring.
The petition withdrawals in the private sector represent a strategic decision unions are making, once again, to avoid providing a new NLRB majority an opportunity to overturn the 2016 case law, Herbert said.
But at UIC, the uncertain future of federal labor law won’t affect the undergraduates’ campaign.
“We’re very lucky to be in Illinois,” Radek said, “where we have such strong labor laws.”
