Our Full Response to Dec. 2020 Board Decision
Dear members of the Kenyon College community,
The Kenyon Student Worker Organizing Committee (K-SWOC/UE), representing a significant majority of current Kenyon student workers, has carefully reviewed the Dec. 11 letter regarding unionization sent by President Decatur on behalf of the Board of Trustees. We would like to share some of the important feedback our members have provided with the Kenyon community and the Board of Trustees.
We begin this letter by thanking President Decatur and the Board of Trustees for the time and attention they have shown student workers throughout our unionization process, and to express that we look forward to continuing an open and productive relationship with the Board as this campaign continues. This past semester has been one of the most challenging in recent memory, and it has been heartening to see how the student community, especially student workers, has come together to strive for better working conditions, workplace equity, and fair compensation.
K-SWOC is also grateful that the Board has presented their concerns about student worker unionization so thoroughly, as they have now provided student workers with a starting point for a dialogue on this very important issue—a dialogue student workers have repeatedly asked the Board to engage in since Aug. 31. In the spirit of Kenyon College’s mission to “engage in spirited, informed, and collaborative inquiry,” K-SWOC believes the best way to address these questions is to hear from student workers themselves. That is why we invited the workers we represent to collectively craft a point-by-point response to the Board’s concerns. The following statement has been written by the student workers that make up K-SWOC, and it draws directly from our experiences, concerns, and aspirations:
Kenyon student workers agree that all of our jobs have some kind of educational component to them in a broad sense, but we do not believe that student workers must choose between obtaining an educational experience or being compensated fairly and treated with respect on the job. Tens of thousands of graduate students across the country, as well as multiple workplaces employing undergraduate student workers, have unionized at colleges and universities where, as the Board says, “the education of students is paramount.” We are disappointed that the Board expects K-SWOC members to believe the educational value at institutions like the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Grinnell College, and Yale University—a unionized Ivy League graduate program that produced Kenyon’s very own Provost, Professor Jeffrey Bowman—is somehow compromised because their student workers have unionized.
Over the course of many meetings and organizing calls, K-SWOC has come to represent a growing majority of the student workers at Kenyon, including many who receive work study assistance. The overlap between the work study population and the larger student workforce and the fact that K-SWOC members, like all union members, live in a larger community that is shaped by forces outside their respective workplaces means that issues concerning work study are indeed important to our membership. That being said, K-SWOC understands that not all issues unions advocate for or that affect union membership can be bargained over. It is uncertain whether scholarships even qualify as remuneration, stemming from the Northwestern rulings in 2014 and 2015, and we believe that any financial aid award would be, at best, a permissive subject of bargaining. Practically speaking, it would be impossible to bargain over this issue because it would require us to bargain for future workers who would not be enrolled at the time of ratification (depending on the timing and length of the contract) on an issue that stands well outside the terms and conditions of employment for student workers. This is an issue we would have been happy to clarify if raised, and we would like to reiterate our support for a just system of work-study support for students who need it.
We also take issue with the portrayal of K-SWOC and the other unions as third party actors that are somehow not part of the Kenyon community. Any insinuation of the kind only serves as an attempt to drive a wedge between the hundreds of students in K-SWOC, our peers, and our professors. It also demonstrates a disregard for the hundreds of unionized staff at Kenyon who labor every day to make the college operate. Union members make sure our campus facilities are clean and fully operational, maintain the safety of the entire community, and keep us fed. Many members of both the recognized unions on campus and K-SWOC are continuing a multi-generational relationship that is central to Kenyon’s existence as a functioning community. If all of these groups, with their overlapping connections to Kenyon, are outsiders, then who is part of the Kenyon community? Given earlier attempts by Kenyon’s senior administration and Board of Trustees to bust Kenyon's unions, most recently in 2012-2013, we find this mischaracterization of unions, and those working on campus in particular, to be especially troubling.
When the Board asserted that diverse workplaces cannot be adequately represented by a common union, it seems to have conveniently forgotten about UE Local 712, the union that represents Kenyon’s skilled trades workers. Each member of that union has unique skills, motivations, and experiences that have led them to work at Kenyon and build a union with their fellow workers. Still, the Board is right to point to the diversity of Kenyon’s student workers. Student workers fill hundreds of jobs around campus, and each position saves money for the College and keeps it running smoothly. But for all our differences, student workers are united by our pride in our work, our willingness to fight for our fellow workers’ rights, and our abiding commitment to union democracy. The fact that K-SWOC has secured the support of a clear majority of student workers as a group and within all major classifications in very little time is proof that our diversity of experience is no obstacle to our commitment to one another’s wellbeing. The Board is welcome to highlight our diversity, but it cannot ignore what unites us.
As Kenyon students, K-SWOC members share an appreciation for the community’s stated values of openness and accessibility. And as important stakeholders in the College’s mission, we are committed to upholding democratic principles throughout our lives on campus, including in our workplaces. To this end, we hold open organizing meetings, share our intentions and ideas through public forums, and make concerted efforts to engage with all members of the community, including faculty, staff, students, and the Board. In fact, 57 members of the faculty have signed a letter stating that “[they] do not believe that such a union threatens the integrity of the College, its mission, or the important relations we enjoy with our students.” We agree with them, and have greatly appreciated their attention and feedback throughout our organizing process. The Board’s letter does not provide evidence for its claim that the existence of our union would dramatically change relationships between students and faculty. However, we fear that by stating that it would, the Board itself intends to intervene in this central aspect of the Kenyon experience by insisting that a student union must necessarily be somehow an obstacle to the formation of bonds between students and their professors.
Student Council, Campus Senate, and other existing governance structures play a critical role in Kenyon’s community. Members of K-SWOC have the utmost respect for the work done by elected representatives of the student body in these institutions. However, neither Student Council nor Campus Senate are designed to represent student workers in their relationship with the College as employees. If access to democratic institutions should bar workers from a union, then public sector unions representing teachers, social workers, nurses, and more would have no reason to exist. Further, it is our understanding that the College, if it is arguing that Student Council and Campus Senate adequately represent student workers as employees, would be in violation of Section 8(a)(2) of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which prohibits an employer from establishing a “company union” that it dominates or controls. Rather than undermining the democratic processes that already exist at Kenyon, we believe a union would complement these institutions—just as student worker unions at Grinnell College, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and Yale University each complement separate student government structures that exist at their respective institutions.
The Board presented a grossly misleading assertion that recognizing a union today would disenfranchise student workers in the future. Every workforce in any unionized workplace has the federally-guaranteed right to vote to decertify their union, just as they have the right to form a union in the first place. The Board’s argument also implies that no decisions should ever be made at the College that would apply to future students; by this logic, the Board’s rejection of recognition now disenfranchises future student workers who would want to join a union. Additionally, this assertion further ignores the student workers in K-SWOC’s ranks who have been laid off with no explanation, significantly underpaid, put in harm’s way by their managers, and subjected to unjust workplace conditions. These experiences have led a majority of student workers to agree that the protection a union provides is a necessity for student workers now and in the future. By rejecting this demand, it is the Board, not the union, that is subverting democracy and treating student workers unfairly. Finally, the Board’s arguments on this issue are unsettlingly close to the arguments used in Kenyon’s past regarding the question of becoming a coeducational institution, introducing interdisciplinary programs, and increasing the emphasis on student-faculty collaboration in research. All of these changes did indeed alter the college for succeeding generations of students and staff, but all of those changes improved Kenyon and helped create the strong institution that we study and work within today.
Beyond the Board’s specific concerns with unionization, we would like to highlight a disturbing component of the Board’s direct response to K-SWOC, which was delivered via email 4 minutes before the Dec. 11 campus-wide communication. In that response, the Board claimed it “obtained a broad range of perspectives, from students in support of and opposed to a union, as well as faculty and staff” (emphasis added). Based on our understanding of Section 7 & 8(a)(1) of the NLRA, asking any worker for their opinion on the union and/or asking follow up questions is a violation of the rights workers have. Considering the gravity of the decision made by the committee, we ask the committee to elaborate on how pro- and anti-union students were identified and how follow-up questions were asked. To be clear, this is not a request for the committee to identify any of the students questioned—K-SWOC firmly believes that every student worker deserves a voice and, while K-SWOC represents an overwhelming majority of student workers, that includes workers who are not supportive of unionizing.
In addition to concerns about potential violations of federal labor law, another disappointing aspect of the Board’s Dec. 11 letter is that they never brought any of their concerns regarding student worker unionization to student workers as part of a good-faith effort to engage in a productive dialogue on these issues. Had the Board engaged in such a dialogue at any point after forming their Ad-hoc committee in September, K-SWOC members could have provided the responses given in our letter today, which might have changed the way that Board members viewed student worker unionization and its effects on our community. At the very least, student workers and the Board could have talked through these issues, worked out solutions to the concerns raised in the letter, and arrived at reasonable ways of creating together a union that is uniquely suited to Kenyon’s values and workers’ needs.
Shutting out K-SWOC and the rest of the community from their decision-making process raises the troubling possibility that the Board had decided to oppose student worker unionization far earlier and was simply waiting for an opportune time to inform the community of their position. We sincerely hope that this is not the case and that the Board will now embrace Kenyon’s mission to “engage in spirited, informed, and collaborative inquiry” as much as K-SWOC has by engaging in an open process to negotiate the terms for recognizing a union through which student workers can support each other in creating fair and safe workplaces.
Ultimately, K-SWOC will continue its fight to secure a union for all student workers regardless of whether the Board commits to re-engaging in this process in accordance with Kenyon’s mission statement and federal law. The Board of Trustees does not get the final word on whether a union will be formed at Kenyon—student workers do.
Sincerely,
The Kenyon Student Worker Organizing Committee (K-SWOC/UE)