Posts tagged student debt
How Today’s Young Workers Are Creating a New Opportunity for Unions
June 2, 2025 // A new survey from LaborStrong found that 77% of workers aged 18-28 believe union workplaces are better than non-union ones. More than half say unions should be tackling urgent issues like AI and automation this year — not sometime in the future. And 56% of Gen Z workers are actively seeking out unionized workplaces when considering where to work. This is not nostalgia for the labor battles of the past. It's a new generation's urgent search for collective strength in a world that feels increasingly unstable.
More Workers Are Filing For — and Winning – Union Elections Than in Any Year in the Past Decade
September 12, 2024 // A surge in union activity since the COVID-19 lockdown shows no signs of stopping, though it’s still not enough to reverse the two-decade downward trend in union membership in New York and across the nation.
How RAs at Emerson became the latest undergrads to unionize
January 29, 2024 // Since 2022, OPEIU Local 153 has worked with students at Wesleyan University, Barnard College, Fordham University, the University of Pennsylvania, Tufts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Swarthmore College to form unions. Since then, student unions at Wesleyan, Tufts, RPI and Barnard have all successfully ratified contracts with school officials, according to Heyne. “Last year was a particularly rough year to be an RA,” Drake Skelly, a senior at Emerson who is a member of the union’s organizing committee, told Boston.com in emailed comments. RAs are assigned certain nights where they are “on call” and must do rounds through dorm buildings at certain times to check for problems. Skelly pointed to recent changes that mandated the RAs walk another set of rounds at 2 a.m. on weekends as a sticking point. RAs asked Emerson officials to explain why the additional mandates were necessary, but college leaders denied the request for an explanation, he said.
Push to unionize at college dorms is growing
March 31, 2023 // Colleges have been a breeding ground for illness and social havoc since the pandemic began, and much of the onus has been placed on RAs, who are appointed to shepherd the well-being of an entire floor of younger students. In the past, that has typically meant hosting events, mediating roommate disputes, and perhaps guiding an overserved first-year safely to bed. For this, RAs are compensated with free or discounted housing and meal plans. But in recent semesters, and especially since schools reopened during the COVID-19 pandemic, those responsibilities have ballooned. RAs who spoke with the Globe describe being deputized as “COVID police” to enforce masking and social distance, and wrangling students whose university — or even high school — experience was stunted by lockdowns and remote learning. Several schools later assigned RAs to longer overnight “on call” shifts and additional check-ins with residents.
UC strike energizes unprecedented national surge of union organizing by academic workers
January 3, 2023 // In 2022 alone, graduate students representing 30,000 peers at nearly a dozen institutions filed documents with the National Labor Relations Board for a union election. They include USC, Northwestern, Yale, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Caltech plans to officially kick off its organizing campaign this month, and other academic researchers are working to form unions at the University of Alaska, Western Washington University, the National Institutes of Health and such influential think tanks as the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute. Princeton University, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Pasadena, Caltech, Pardee Rand Graduate School, University of Wisconsin–Madison
The resurgence of unions and the fight against Amazon
April 25, 2022 // "The pandemic also created a labor shortage, which gave people more leverage, and made them less fearful of organizing," she said. "Unions are cool again for this generation."
State of the unions: why US museum workers are mobilising against their employers
February 4, 2022 // TA report by the American Alliance of Museums, published in April 2021, found that museums closed to the public for an average of 28 weeks during 2020. More than 75% of those surveyed stated that their income fell by an average of 40% that year, while 56% went through rounds of layoffs and furloughs. Rehiring, in most cases, is off the table. Those who kept their positions have had to pick up the slack.