Nearly 20,000 student assistants in the Cal State university system are now part of the CSU Employee Union. They join the over 16,000 members of the CSUEU, making it the CSU system’s largest union and the largest undergraduate student worker union in the country.
“Our union stands ready to welcome 20,000 student assistants to our union family,” said CSUEU president Catherine Hutchinson at a press conference to announce the election results Friday.
Assistants are students working part-time jobs across the system’s 23 campuses, like CSU Monterey Bay, and do a range of work to support university functions, from serving as resident advisors to providing computer hardware support.
Leah Baker is a former CSU Monterey Bay student assistant who graduated in December. She was among the 7,248 student assistants who voted to unionize.
“When I worked at the IT department, I was out replacing computers, I was out responding to tickets, I was helping install fiber optic cable,” she said. “This is work that union staff are doing and that student assistants are doing for a fraction of the cost with no benefits.”
The election stretched for almost a month, from Jan. 25 to Feb. 22. More than 97% of the votes cast were in favor of unionization. Most CSU student workers make just above minimum wage and have a 20-hour cap each week. They also didn’t have paid sick leave before California’s paid sick leave law took effect on Jan. 1.
CSU vice chancellor for human resources Leora Freedman said in a statement that the university system “respects the decision of student assistants to form a union and looks forward to bargaining in good faith with the newly formed CSUEU student assistant unit.”
During Friday's press conference, student assistants like Colin Culver cited those reasons — and more — as among those driving their unionization.
“The low pay, the hours cap and the lack of sick time — they make it so, so difficult for us to justify working for the CSU,” said Culver, a desk assistant security monitor at San Diego State.
Cameron Macedonio from Cal State Fullerton, who manages the university’s campus-run radio station, added that “commuting to campus and expensive parking take[s] a huge bite from our wages.”
And Gem Gutierrez, who works with student residency documents at Sacramento State, said the movement wasn’t “just for us [who voted].”
“This is for every worker who comes after us, who deserves the same protections as our union colleagues [whom] we will now stand with as we negotiate our first contract.”
A campaign of firsts
The effort has been almost a year in the making. Student workers launched their unionization campaign last April, meeting people where they’re at. That's looked like conversations with workers on campus — and sharing information through Instagram memes and Reddit posts.
Digital platforms also played a role in the election itself. The student assistants’ union vote was the California Public Employee Relation Board’s first primarily digital election.
“When it comes to student assistants, we're talking about a lot of younger people,” Baker, the CSU Monterey Bay graduate, said. “Things like Instagram memes, they speak to them, even if older people might think that’s an odd way to go about organizing.”
Baker also got involved as part of the CSUEU student organizing committee through social media — when she found out about signing union authorization cards to incite a vote, she posted information about it to each CSU campus’s Reddit.
“I ended up getting, I think, 20 people to sign up,” she recalled. “They [the organizing committee] messaged me, and said, ‘Hey, would you want to help out more?’”
She was interested in spreading the word because “as younger people, we're just not making the same wages that our grandparents were.”
“We're not being given the same quality of life, even if we do make up a majority of the workforce,” Baker said. “I just feel like people don't know about unions and what they can do for you.”
Research from the Center of American Progress has shown those born after 1997, colloquially referred to as Gen Z, are the “most pro-union generation” in American history — both in supporting unions and leading unionization efforts of their own.
And while only 10% of Americans are part of a union, union membership and interest is generally growing, particularly with younger workers’ support.
“Change is coming, and it's not just happening on college campuses,” said SEIU International president Mary Kay Henry at the Friday press conference. “Working people across the country are fighting to win breakthrough organizing victories that raise standards across entire industries, and open the doors of unions to workers who've been written out and written off.”
The next step for CSU student assistants is to bargain for their first contract. Until an agreement is reached on that contract, job expectations for student assistants will remain the same.
No bargaining dates have been set.
CSU Monterey Bay holds the FCC license for 90.3 KAZU. The station is located on the university’s campus.
