In the wake of an election that expands an on-campus union to cover every student worker, Grinnell College President Anne Harris said she was impressed with the school’s labor leaders.
With votes tallied by the National Labor Relations Board on Tuesday, students overwhelmingly approved the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers’ proposal, marking a victory in an effort students had pursued for almost four years.
The union and the elite liberal arts school’s leaders have been at odds in the past, including a 2018 legal fight during which Grinnell attorneys tried to block an election. But the union leaders said they were “pleasantly surprised’ by their interactions with Harris, who joined the administration in fall 2019 and became president the following summer.
More:How Grinnell student workers won union expansion after years of battling administration
Harris, for her part, returned the compliment in an interview with the Des Moines Register on Friday.
“They moved from protest to process,” Harris said. “There is a place for protest. … I actually really value protest. But I know that institutional change comes through process. They brought a lot of valuable research as well.”
Union leaders, who represented about 120 workers at the dining hall and a campus cafe, told Harris in December they wanted a vote on expanding their bargaining unit to other student employees. Harris agreed to a series of meetings at the beginning of this year, during which she and the union negotiated a neutrality agreement to govern how an election could proceed.
She said the students brought examples of agreements and contracts between unions and campus administrators that they believed could work at Grinnell. Ultimately, students voted by mail in March.
Battle to expand union had been going on since 2018
Now that the students have won, union leaders and campus administrators will bring in a consultant to advise them how to bargain on a new contract.
Students first unionized at Grinnell in 2016. But when the union’s leaders tried to expand the bargaining unit to cover all student workers on campus a year later, they met resistance.
After students voted to expand the union in November 2018, school administrators retained Proskauer Rose, a management-side labor law firm that represents the National Basketball Association and many universities.
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School leaders asked the NLRB to rule on whether Grinnell’s student workers qualified as employees. Fearing the then-Republican-controlled board could rule against them and set a precedent that would cripple other student worker unions around the country, the Grinnell students vacated their election win.
Union leaders and then-Grinnell President Raynard Kington began negotiating whether the school would voluntarily recognize an expansion. The school’s Board of Trustees, however, ordered Kington to end the talks, then told the students in February 2020 they would not allow an expansion.
Asked why she thought the process was different this time, Harris pointed to her status as a relative newcomer to Grinnell. She had only been in her job a couple months before the board told the union it couldn’t expand, and the shutdown of the campus that followed during the COVID-19 pandemic stalled discussions. Talks didn’t resume until after the college resumed in person classes last year.
Some of the union’s leaders have said that, compared to 2018, they are in a better legal position. With President Joe Biden appointing the majority of the current NLRB since his 2021 inauguration, the union officials felt they were more likely to win an appeal than they had been when the Trump administration controlled the agency.
But Harris said she and the college’s board members were more open to the expansion now mostly because of how the students approached the potential election. She said their discussions in the run up to the vote were civil.
“I would chalk it up to the reset, the momentum of recent change,” she said. “New president. New board chair. New outreach.”
Grinnell union is different than most at other colleges and universities
The election expands the student workers’ union’s membership at least sixfold. About 720 students — half the school’s enrollment — were eligible to vote. Union officials say the number who could be union members is actually higher because some students hadn’t worked enough hours in the weeks before the election to qualify them to vote.
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Harris said the union is different than those on many other campuses around the country. Most are for graduate students, who often work full time as teaching assistants. The Grinnell students are all undergraduates, a group that has so far unionized at only a handful of colleges, including Dartmouth and Wesleyan, and it is not affiliated with a larger union like the United Auto Workers, which had helped organize student worker unions in states like California.
A high proportion of Grinnell students work on campus because of the college’s mission to bring in more students from non-elite backgrounds. With annual tuition of almost $61,000, about 65% of students receive financial aid, Harris said. Often, those students take part in a work-study program, which requires them to work at least 10 hours a week on campus to receive the aid.
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Grinnell has one of the most well-funded endowments among small U.S. liberal arts colleges, amounting to $2.9 billion as of last year. Administrators tapped the endowment to fund $87 million of the total $128 million in operating expenses in the school’s most recent year.
At the same time, less than 2% of the operating funds — about $2 million — go toward student worker wages. While that figure seems low, Harris said it does not take into account the $43 million the school spent on financial aid. The school also taps the endowment to help fund student internships and study-abroad programs.
Tyler Jett covers jobs and the economy for the Des Moines Register. Reach him at tjett@registermedia.com, 515-284-8215, or on Twitter at @LetsJett.