In January of 2022, in the midst of a cold New Hampshire winter and an ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, student dining services workers unanimously formed their first ever undergraduate student worker union at Dartmouth College. The Student Worker Collective of Dartmouth (SWCD) won sick pay for all workers and 50 percent hazard pay for those working during the pandemic.
Just a year later the independent union, which now represents an additional 100 undergraduate advisors (UGAs), were able to force significant concessions from the college in their first contract, including a $21 an hour base wage ($3 more than what the college was offering and $8 more than the minimum that workers were earning before), with increases linked to the cost of tuition.
Since then, the union has remained active even outside contract negotiations. In May of last year the union teamed up with other Dartmouth campus unions to demand the resignation of President Sian Beilock after she called the New Hampshire State Police and allowed them to arrest more than 90 students, faculty, and reporters during a peaceful pro-Palestine demonstration on campus. In their statement about the incident, the union declared:
We will not sit idly by as our members, colleagues, and friends are beaten up at the orders of an unaccountable, uncontrolled administration. We will not allow striking workers to be hounded by bosses. We will not let President Beilock take away the right of our members to participate in protected, concerted activity, discriminate against union members or political viewpoints, or threaten members’ health and safety.
While the union did not go on strike then, as UAW members at the University of California did that same month over the repression of student protests, Beilock was eventually censured by both the undergraduate student body and the faculty. Despite this near-universal expression of no confidence, she remains president.
On Monday, however, after seven months of fruitless negotiation with the administration over a second contract, SWCD went out on strike for the first time since they were formed, citing a failure of the college’s bargaining team to negotiate in good faith.
As the union explained in the email announcing the strike:
We are negotiating a second contract for dining workers and our first contract for UGAs, or residential advisors. We are up against hostile lawyers on six-figure salaries, formerly employed at union-busting firm Jackson Lewis, as we independently crafted contract language and self-taught labor law between classes, lunch breaks, and on our weekends. Some of Dartmouth’s tactics have included: refusing to provide contract clauses prior to bargaining sessions, joining negotiating sessions late and leaving early, using aggressive and volatile language, and of course, denying contract extensions, which has culminated in our current reality—without a contract, and with our backs pushed against the wall.
At stake are agreements on wages and yearly increases pegged to tuition, as well as policies around protecting international students from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The union is asking for a $23 an hour base salary and yearly wage increases of 4.75 percent. They are also demanding that the college agree to a program of non-cooperation with ICE.
Many of the members of SWCD are international students, and amid ongoing state kidnappings of international students and visa holders, the union is rightly concerned for the safety of their members. As one undergraduate advisor, Harper Richardson, told the news site In Depth New Hampshire: “What we are pushing for is that Dartmouth will not willfully and voluntarily provide immigration or personal information about the residence or location of any student worker, so that we can ensure that our UGAs have the utmost security from interactions with ICE.”
The fact that the union has prioritized this demand and is willing to go on strike to fight the Trump administration’s attacks on international students and the movement for Palestine reflects a remarkable shift in the labor movement that has been ongoing since the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, which galvanized a whole generation of young workers and students. Fed up with being treated as disposable cogs, and increasingly conscious of the relationship between state repression and capitalist exploitation, young workers have embraced unions with an enthusiasm that has won them the moniker of “Generation Union.” Not only are more and more young people forming unions on campuses and workplaces across the country, they are doing so with the clear understanding of the need for independent class solidarity and collective struggle.
This strike is an important part of the larger process of struggle unfolding against the Trump regime and U.S. imperialism. Every worker and labor union across the country should help these workers win these demands and join them in building the firepower of the working class to topple this rotten regime and the entire system of exploitation it rests upon.
