By Ava Fahy

In 2021, the National Labor Relations Board publicly affirmed that undergraduate students employed at their university are protected under the National Labor Relations Act. Consequentially, undergraduate students across the country have since unleashed an unstoppable wave of union organizing. As an undergraduate dining worker at Smith College and a member of United Smith Student Workers (USSW) affiliated with OPEIU Local 153, I am a participant in this wave.

In just one semester, two different shops on my campus launched public organizing campaigns. As student dining workers organized, student workers in residence life formed the Smith College Residence Life Collective (SCRLC), affiliated with UFCW Local 1459.

When both campaigns went public, Smith College launched a union-busting campaign and repeatedly violated federal labor law in an attempt to suppress votes, spread misinformation about unions, and intimidate workers. USSW has filed Unfair Labor Practice charges against the employer for, posting a public FAQ with misinformation about unions while failing to post notice for union election.

Despite the bosses’ efforts, on Dec. 15, SCRLC became the first recognized undergraduate student labor union at Smith College when they won their election with 94% yes vote   (see https://www.nlrb.gov/case/01-RC-330196) when they won their election with a 94% “yes” vote. USSW’s election is scheduled for Feb. 1. Over winter break, I sat down over a video call with Amina Castronovo, a trade-union organizer and undergraduate student worker, to talk about USSW in advance of the upcoming election. Parts of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.

Could you introduce yourself?

My name is Amina Castronovo, I’m a sophomore and a women and gender studies major. I’ve been working in Smith dining as an undergraduate student worker since this year. I am glad that I’m working in dining now, even though I make way less than I did at my job back home in New York City, because I really like the people who work there and I actually enjoy going to work, even though a lot of times it can be dangerous or physically exhausting.

What are your working conditions like?

The full-time staff likes to give us treats and to watch out for us, so that’s really great. And the other student workers might take a little bit of time to get used to each other, but after you break the ice, it’s also fun to work with them as well.

But there’s a lot of stuff that’s frustrating. If you need to make a change or if you can’t make your shift, there’s nothing in place to support the other student workers there. So if you’re sick or you have an appointment, you feel bad because you don’t know if they’re gonna be OK on their shift or have to do all the work by themselves.

For training, they sent me a PDF, PowerPoint thing, but it didn’t open on my computer. And apparently, that’s where all the instructions for onboarding and training are. And that’s all they send me in terms of in terms of like what it means to work in dining or anything. So I’ve basically had to learn from the other student dining workers or full time dining workers who aren’t paid to train people. So that was kind of unfair as well.

That sounds pretty similar to my experience. Lack of training for me was always a big deal, especially because the training is different depending on which dining hall you’re working at. And a lot of students work at multiple dining halls, and if you pick up a shift in the middle of the semester instead of at the beginning, somebody has to drop everything that they’re doing and train you on the spot.

Yeah, that too. All the kitchens are very different and you have to know where everything goes, and that takes a while. They definitely don’t care about training. And also there are real safety concerns. Like, I have no idea about kitchen safety standards or guidelines. The Chase-Duckett floor often gets really wet—people slip. And you have to put towels down and hope for the best.

And more money would be nice as well. Especially because student workers’ hours are capped at 10 a week, which is, at our pay [$15], that’s $150 before taxes. Which is not that much money. It’s the state minimum wage, so they are paying us the minimum that they can. 

Yeah, I know. I work pretty much 10 hours a week. I try my best to do that, because it’s a lot to do—10 hours a week plus school and extracurriculars and stuff. My paycheck is not reflecting how much work I’m doing in a week.

It’s my understanding that most of the student workers leading the USSW drive have already participated in the campus labor struggle through solidarity work with Smith’s full-time dining and housekeeping workers in SEIU 211. Do you think that has impacted the way that USW has gone about organizing this union? 

I definitely think so. It gave us a good framework for organizing because we have strong relationships with the full-time dining staff, so we’re able to talk to them and let them know what’s going on, talk about how we can support each other.

It has also highlighted just how Smith tries to separate workers by trying to divide us into the full-time dining staff and the part-time student dining staff. They say that the student workers are just students who are working, while the full-time dining staff have a “real job.” But I think that we have such good relationships with them that we’re able to overcome that and become stronger together. The full-time workers have definitely been able to help us in the workplace in terms of sticking up for us.

That’s awesome. Could you give me a rough timeline of how long it took to build USSW up to present?

We started talking about it in the spring 2023 semester. But we didn’t have enough time that semester to fully build the union with the NLRB timelines and term breaks and all of that. Then we decided to start in the fall of 2023, and we pretty much hit the ground running, organizing right away. It was mid-November when we went public with our campaign. And then the election will happen when we get back, on Feb. 1.

That’s a pretty quick timeline for a unit of, what is it, over 400 student workers? But Smith is only recognizing less than 150 of those workers as part of the unit.  [Clarification: NLRB guidelines mandate that a union election recognizes votes from workers who work, on average, a minimum of 4 hours a week for 13 weeks prior to election. Because a majority of student workers in dining services work fewer than 4 hours a week, or have not been working for 13 weeks, USSW is fighting to include all student workers in the unit.]

Yeah, about 140, and they still haven’t been clear in their communications to us. Our research says that their voter list is missing at least 40 people. We told Smith, but they haven’t responded yet. I don’t really think that they know how many people, or even which people actually work throughout the week.

How has Smith been responding to USSW’s organizing efforts? When USSW filed our petition for voluntary recognition and then union certification in November, how did our employer respond? 

What they did was very typical of Smith College. They were very passive-aggressive about it, very quiet, not responding to us at all, not talking to us directly. For example, speaking through the NLRB representative and waiting until the last second possible to respond to stuff they’re federally required to respond to by a set time. They’d even miss the deadline. It felt very disrespectful, treating us as if we’re just young students who don’t know what they’re doing. That part has been very frustrating and infuriating. Even when we have rallies and public social media campaigns, they still won’t respond to us.

The only public thing that they’ve done now is send an email with a link to a FAQ website that they made. It’s supposed to have this information about things like “what is a union?” but it was very obviously a union-busting effort. A lot of the questions were like, “What if I don’t want a union?” In my opinion, it was a move to encourage student workers to not support the union.

Yes, and our local has filed ULP charges with the NLRB about all of this. You get the feeling that either they don’t take us seriously or they take us very seriously, which is why they’re using these pretty well known union-busting tactics and language. Do you think that Smith’s anti-union efforts have impacted the union drive in any way? 

I think what Smith is trying to do is impact how the broader Smith community sees us. They’re trying to delegitimize our campaign and our unionizing efforts, and also trying to quiet the movement that we’ve built around people being upset—like having rallies, petitions, people wearing like union stickers and T-shirts.

I think Smith, in not responding publicly and trying to be very quiet about this has definitely stopped some people from thinking about the campaign in general because now we’re stuck just waiting for them to respond. It’s hard for us to do anything. And at the same time, they’re maybe causing people to wonder what is really happening. Maybe people are kind of taking Smith’s words for granted with the FAQs because they’re not really aware of what’s going on. Sometimes I think the Smith population is still divided on who supports the administration and who doesn’t.

I feel like I have to mention that USSW is not the only student labor union on campus, and that the Residence Life workers in the SCRLC actually won their union election. They got a 94% “yes” vote, which was fantastic, especially considering they had to deal with the same union-busting tactics used against them as we did. Why do you think so many Smith student workers are motivated to be labor organizers?  

I think we’ve definitely been inspired by the other undergrad organizing that’s been going on, either locally or nationally. You realize that labor organizing is something that relates to anyone who is getting paid for any labor that they do. And it definitely applies to undergraduate work. I feel very exploited because we’re not really told of our rights and we’re told to be more focused on our studies and not really build that class and collective consciousness of “why does our school need our labor for so cheap, and what is that really all about?” I think that kind of thinking has really spurred more undergrad organizing.

Seeing how other people our age and in similar environments are unionizing and then actually winning their union, and then going into negotiations and winning good contracts—they’re really showing how to fight for universities to pay us more, and also give us more training and just more respect in general. The solidarity between the different undergrad unions has really been one reason for this uptick in unionization. I think also other social movements are driving this too.

In December, USSW co-organized, alongside the Smith branch of Students for Justice in Palestine, a walkout protest against, among other things, Smith’s investments in U.S. corporations that build weapons and technology used by Israel in the ongoing occupation of Palestine. Could you tell me a little bit about how USSW became involved with Palestine solidarity organizing? How can we serve the Palestine Solidarity movement? 

There were a few members of our union in this SJP meeting, because I remember getting a bunch of messages in our group chat saying, “Guys, we should do this rally together.” That was the second to last week of this [past] semester. It was very quick planning, so I hope that next semester we can do something a little larger and more organized together once we have more time to plan.

Basically, we saw the similarities between how Smith is publicly responding to the genocide in Gaza and how they’re treating their workers in general, especially student dining workers. This has to do with where Smith is putting its money, which was a big part of that rally. We feel very strongly that Smith should support their students rather than supporting genocide and weapon manufacturers.

And then we saw similarities in the general sentiment of how the new college president is responding to all of this. Again, it’s very passive-aggressive, but very Smith College. They’re very quiet, not really saying anything that could be controversial, not really taking a stand—acting like a politician about it, I guess. Students could definitely see through that.

That’s why organizing that rally was a really good idea. We had some speeches from both union organizers and from SJP organizers, talking about the connections between what SJP is trying to achieve and what USSW is trying to achieve. Understanding that connection is really important. They’re technically two different issues, but they’re grounded and rooted in the same systematic issues that arise from the way Smith uses its institutional power. We think that if we work together, we can achieve something, hopefully.

Honestly, at this point, I don’t even know what the achievement would be like under an institution. This is definitely a learning curve for all of us, and we’re learning that universities and institutions like Smith College are the kinds of things that need to be left in the past. We need to create our own communities and imagine different things and different systems together. I think this solidarity between USSW and SJP is the start of something like that at Smith.