On Thursday, Nov. 21, United Smith Student Workers (USSW) union bargaining committee members met with representatives of Smith College to discuss their new contract proposal. This meeting is the latest part of ongoing bargaining efforts between the USSW, represented by OPEIU Local 153, and the college as the newly established union works towards reaching an agreement on a labor contract with the administration. The students are working towards improving conditions for a range of issues, but are prioritizing one urgent matter in particular: solidifying protections for immigrant and undocumented student dining workers.
With Donald Trump’s impending inauguration in January, student dining workers have emphasized the issue of how their contract can provide safety to student workers who may be more vulnerable under the new administration. One such protection includes establishing procedures in preparation for any Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigations that may be rolled out following Trump’s inauguration. While they have received no confirmation from the college on this demand, the students say this is one of their most important, non-negotiable requests.
“Northampton is a safe-haven city; local law enforcement has said they will not work with any immigration services, and we’re just asking Smith to affirm that for themselves — that the administration, reslife [Residence Life staff], Campo [Campus Police] will not work with immigration services,” committee member and café worker Persephone Sinnis-Bourozikas ’25 said. “It’s just insane to think that a student is safer walking off of Smith campus than on the campus that is claiming to protect and educate them.”
USSW’s consulting lawyer Seth Goldstein, partner at Goldstein & Singla PLLC, echoed this sentiment and said that the administration is concerned about how the union’s push for protections for dining workers would affect Smith’s revenue.
“During contract negotiations, the college expressed concerns about funding if they declared themselves a sanctuary college,” Goldstein said. “Essentially, they implied they would not agree to the proposal due to financial worries.”
Goldstein said he was deeply disappointed by the college representatives’ choice to place more value on money than student safety.
“I pointed out to the attorney that some members of the bargaining unit could face mass deportation to detention centers, including Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, undocumented individuals and even naturalized Americans,” Goldstein said. “I also emphasized that it was crucial for the college, which claims to uphold liberal values and prides itself on being a progressive campus, to stand by those principles in action.”
In addition to the struggle over protections for vulnerable workers, the committee is working to gain support for their other demands, including training, safety/accessibility and an increase in wages. Bargaining has been going on for eight months, with contract proposal negotiations being discussed over these three major goals. Committee member and student dining worker Fern Poling ’25 said that these are the biggest issues the union heard complaints about from dining workers.
“Across dining halls, training is very inconsistent,” Poling said. “The training that you get in one dining hall is totally not the training you get in another, which is really difficult, especially when students go to transfer dining halls.”
The union hopes to agree on a contract that guarantees thorough and consistent training across dining halls for student dining workers to address such discrepancies. Additionally, Wesley said the safety and accessibility of working conditions for dining workers could be greatly improved.
“They complain about the high turnover and how nobody stays in dining, but they don’t want to invest in making it a better work environment,” Wesley said. “They could save a lot of effort by just training us all really well for the jobs and encouraging and incentivizing us to stay in those jobs throughout our time at Smith.”
One of the union’s biggest demands is increasing the wages for dining hall work. Poling argued that this is important because, for many students, their dining job is a large part of the money they use to pay for their tuition. This is in addition to the cost of living in Northampton, they said, making higher wages necessary.
“The cost of living in Northampton is quite intense, and the cost of tuition here is ridiculous. A lot of people rely on work-study to pay for college and to save for grad school,” Poling said. “Even if you’re not relying on it to pay for tuition, it’s still important that our work is valued.”
Another part of their argument for higher wages rests on the vast need for dining work versus the lack of demand for open dining shifts, creating a surplus of work. Sinnis-Bourozikas says that college representatives have yet to respond to their discussion of this issue.
“People don’t stay in the dining jobs,” Sinnis-Bourozikas said. “They’ll have a job dishwashing for $15 an hour, and then once they have a job at the library for $15 an hour doing much less work, that’s more desirable for students. Regularly there are hundreds of open shifts that are just never getting filled. That labor isn’t just disappearing, it’s just falling on other people.”
The first offer made by the college in response to the union’s request for increased wages was a 25¢ pay increase. Poling and Amelia Wesley ’25 explained why the committee rejected this offer, citing examples of similarly expensive schools like Dartmouth College paying their dining workers $20 to $21 an hour, as well as the gap between rising tuition costs and static wages.
“I think they don’t value our labor. They think we deserve $15 an hour. We just find it ridiculous,” Wesley said. “If other unions in places with a similarly high cost of living can make $20 to $21 an hour, why can’t we?”
“We have value to this college; they know how important we are. The kitchens can’t run without us, they need us to wash the dishes and we deserve to be paid for our important labor,” Poling said. “If our wages had risen with the cost of tuition since the minimum wage went up in January of 2023 to $15, we should be making $16.65.”
While bargaining for union contracts is often a lengthy and complicated process, students have reflected on that they face difficulties during negotiations that make bargaining sessions frustrating.
“The hardest thing has been dealing with them weaponizing the fact that we’re student workers,” Sinnis-Bourozikas said. “They’re like, ‘You’re students first and foremost, and then you’re student workers,’ and while that’s true, we’re telling them what that merits for us, and what we need from that, and they feel differently. They’re really kind of tying our hands.”
Committee members who participated in the bargaining meetings recalled tense moments where members of both sides exchanged heated language. Poling described one session in particular where college representatives referred to the union members as “middle-schoolers.”
“Part of the problem is Smith claims to have these morals of ‘Audacity, Agency and Authenticity,’ and then when we try to be audacious, they’re like, ‘Oh no no, not at us, at somewhere else,’” Poling said. “You know, [the college representatives are] the ones calling us middle-schoolers, but I’m sorry, I’m not the one throwing a tantrum and walking out.”
Students speculate that college representatives are purposely delaying decisions until committee members who are seniors graduate in the spring. This is a popular tactic used by employers faced with employee organizing — resisting making decisive agreements until union leaders are cycled out and the momentum dies down.
“Another thing that’s annoying about bargaining with [the college representatives] is that they stall. They ramble, and they kind of beat dead horses with their words to eat up the clock, but they’re trying to get us to graduate,” Poling said. “They’re trying to wait so that we don’t get enough done and then we graduate, because a lot of our bargaining committee [members] are seniors.”
In a statement from the Office of College Relations, representative Carolyn McDaniel wrote: “Smith College is committed to fostering positive work environments for all employees. We are abiding by the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] protocol and out of respect for the formal process associated with collective bargaining, we do not have further comment at this time and will negotiate in good faith with union representatives.”
Wesley said another recent issue involves a change to the number of café shift hours available to student workers — a change they say should not have been made during this time.
“At the Compass Café, there has been a reduction in the number of [available] shifts: 13 and ¼ hours are being eliminated from the schedule for next semester. This is a big problem and it’s a change to our working conditions that they are not allowed to make right now,” Wesley said. “We are in a period of status quo since we’ve won our union and don’t have a contract yet, they can’t be making changes like that, and reducing hours just hurts everyone.”
According to the National Labor Relations Board website, in August 2023, the Board overturned the Raytheon Network Centric Systems (2017) decision, a previous policy allowing employers to make “unilateral changes affecting a unionized workforce during a contractual hiatus or during negotiations for a first contract.” Now, with the Wendt Corporation decision, employers are no longer legally allowed to make such changes during a period of continued contract negotiations.
McDaniel issued a statement in response, stating: “We are actively looking into the situation and will take any necessary actions to address it appropriately.”
Jeremy Bonios, Retail Manager of the Cafés, declined to comment on ongoing negotiations between the union and the administration.
Despite the struggle to reach agreements before they graduate, seniors on the bargaining committee maintain a positive outlook. Poling encourages all dining workers to get involved with union activities and reminds students that just by being a dining worker, they are already a part of the union.
“With the union, you can be as involved or uninvolved as you’d like,” Poling said. “Being in conversation with your fellow coworkers and other union organizers I think is the biggest thing — building community, building conversation, keeping everyone updated on the same page.”
Union members hope that the work they are doing now will inspire other students and workers on campus to advocate for their own working conditions in the future.
“I’m hoping that if we’re able to see some success, even if it’s tedious, that other workers on campus can see the good that can come from unionizing, and how much stronger we are together,” Poling said. “We deserve to be compensated fairly for our labor, we deserve safe and positive working conditions, and if they see that we can get those, then I hope that can spread to other workplaces on campus as well.”
Editor’s Note: This article was updated Dec. 18, 2024. to include clarifications about Goldstein’s firm and the USSW’s union branch.
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