Non-academic student workers are the only non-unionized group on The New School’s campus besides full-time faculty. With support from ACT-UAW Local 7902 and union members at the university, the NewSWU (New Student Workers Union) Organizing Committee is working to change that.
NewSWU organizers publicly announced plans to unionize non-academic student workers in a post on their official Instagram account on March 30, 2023. They described their work as “a student-led effort to build a wall-to-wall student worker union at The New School open to ALL student workers on-campus,” in their posted statement.
“The work done by non-academic student workers is valuable. It contributes to how the university runs. We’re staffing all of the residential buildings, we’re running libraries. We’re keeping facilities open,” Emily Li, a member of the NewSWU Organizing Committee said.
“The university makes students do a lot of front-facing jobs… If we’re expected to be representatives of the university and keep this place running, the least we deserve is some say in our working conditions, some opportunity to be paid properly for the work that we’re doing, and some flexibility with our hours,” Aarya Kini, another member of NewSWU’s Organizing Committee said. “The university doesn’t run if student workers don’t work. The reciprocity of the effort that we’re putting in to keep the place running is just really what we want to see happen.”
Currently, only academic student workers (Teaching Assistants, Teaching Fellows, Research Associates, Research Assistants, Course Assistants, and Tutors) are unionized in the SENS unit (Student Employees of the New School) of the ACT-UAW Local 7902 union. Non-academic student workers are those who hold any other job on campus, including positions in the Making Center, Administrative Offices, Resident Advisors, Lab Technicians, Student Advisors, Student Assistants, and Orientation Leaders, among others. They were not included in the SENS unit when it was formed in 2017 due to a lack of legal precedent for non-academic student worker unionization, said Molly Ragan, an ACT-UAW Local 7902 employee and part-time faculty member at Parsons School of Design.
Despite this, Ragan said that unionization for non-academic student workers has been discussed since the formation of SENS. According to those on the NewSWU organizing committee, it is likely conversations about and attempts to unionize non-academic student workers at The New School had occurred previously and made varying degrees of progress. The current effort by NewSWU has made it further than any other New School non-academic student worker unionization initiative before, which the collective attributes to the way the part-time faculty strike in fall 2022 brought organizers together.
Kini said that the NewSWU unionization effort “started off with separate conversations happening in tandem,” across many departments. She said she has now realized that, “at the same time [I was organizing], in parallel, some of my current co-organizers were thinking along the same lines and doing their thing. [The NewSWU collective] just naturally came together.”
NewSWU organizer Jovanna Liuzzo said the part-time faculty strike was the “key point of getting [now-NewSWU organizers] to meet and realize that we were doing very similar work across different departments in the university. There was a really cohesive effort in different departments [happening separately at] that stage. That rallying cry of the picket line allowed us to meet and say, ‘Oh, you’re doing this? I’m doing this, too. Let’s join forces.”
Jonathan Bloom, a SENS representative for Parsons supporting the NewSWU unionization effort said there were multiple conversations and organizing efforts regarding non-academic student worker unionization happening in tandem that got linked. “They were linked, in large part thanks to people like Jovanna. We were able to sort of consolidate these efforts into a wall to wall effort” during the strike, he said.
The initial conversations about working conditions between non-academic student workers that led to this push to unionize highlight what they believe are issues in their workplaces. Ragan, who prior to teaching at The New School was both an academic and non-academic student worker while completing her graduate degree at Parsons, said, “I had benefits for my unionized job that I didn’t have for my nonunion job.” She cited that SENS workers receive a “hefty sum of their health insurance payment back” and that international student workers in SENS have their international student admittance fee “waived.”
“I think some of the biggest issues with the way that student workers exist now is that they’re not really treated like workers,” Li said. “We don’t get sick leave, we don’t get at least a little higher form of pay for the kind of work that we’re doing. A lot of these jobs, especially at the Making Center, require really highly specialized skills. Even more so when you look at places like the Laser Lab, or the Woodshop, or the Metal Shop. You’re dealing with dangerous machines and materials, and you want to have proper training. People I know are telling me they never had, or they didn’t have in some capacity, training,” Li continued.
They stated that on their first shift, “I didn’t know what to do, where to go, what the structure of the workplace was. I just kind of walked into a space and like, figured it out.” Li described not receiving training as, “obviously fucking terrifying and not a standard job thing.”
Li said that after meetings in fall 2022, when student organizers began finding each other and talking together about “how we can channel our frustrations [with our jobs] into actionable items, deadlines, and union goals,” the NewSWU Organizing Committee officially formed and held their first meeting in early January of 2023. Organizers have been canvassing, holding 1:1 conversations with non-academic student workers around campus, and collecting union cards since publicly announcing their unionization campaign.
“By having 1:1 conversations, we have a better idea of what people are going through in different areas of the school. Through our outreach and our conversations with people, we’ve been able to learn so much about them as individuals and as workers. It’s helped our talking points. It’s helped our organizing. It’s helped us connect with people and create community with them,” Hannah Landesberg, a NewSWU organizer said.
“When we talk with each other, we realize there’s a lot more in common about our experiences than not, which provides us with a collective cause,” Kini said. “This [union] can make life better for almost 2,000 people at this university.”