NORTHAMPTON — Toward the end of last year, with winter break approaching, student residence-hall workers at Smith College were buzzing around campus with a sense of urgency. The undergraduates were seeking out coworkers they had never met before. And they were hoping to talk to them about something very few U.S. workers — and even fewer student employees — have ever done: forming a union.
“It was an absolutely wild experience but it was so cool,” said JoJo Azzara, a senior at Smith who works as a house community advisor. “I got to see so many of the people I was working with really push themselves to become braver to talk to people and build up communication skills.”
Little did they know that they would hardly be alone in those efforts.
In the past four months, there has been a surge in union organizing at Smith College, where workers have formed three unions. It began with house community advisors, house coordinators, and apartment managers — all student workers — who announced their union in November just one day before student workers in the dining halls went public with their own organizing efforts. After the college declined to recognize those unions, they both won recognition in federal elections in December and February, respectively. Then, this month, Smith College’s full-time and part-time library workers announced their own union, which the college has not voluntarily recognized. Their election will take place April 9.
Smith College did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
In 2023, union density continued a 40-year decline in the United States. Just 10% of all workers, and only 6% of private-sector workers, belong to a union. However, support for unions has swelled as striking workers and organized labor have stepped into the spotlight in recent years in coffee shops, car factories, Amazon facilities, and other industries across the country.
That new union organizing includes a wave of student workers seeking better conditions on the job, including in western Massachusetts and the broader region. In September 2022, for example, residential advisors at Mount Holyoke College unionized with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. (Previously, the country’s only undergraduate RA union was at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.) At Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, library workers and basketball players have recently won recognition of their newly formed unions, and student dining workers secured a first contract with the college after threatening to strike.
At Smith College, dining workers have now joined the Office & Professional Employees International Union Local 153 with library workers hoping to join them. The housing workers, meanwhile, decided to join UFCW Local 1459 like their Mount Holyoke College counterparts. Those interviewed for this article said they drew inspiration from those other efforts and from each other.
“There’s just big momentum and a hope — and knowing — that we can organize ourselves,” Amina Rosa Castronovo, a sophomore dining worker at Smith, told The Shoestring. “There’s a lot more confidence.”
Castronovo said that dining workers’ union efforts actually began as student solidarity actions in support of the full-time dining and housekeeping workers on campus, who have long been unionized with the Service Employees International Union. As that union bargained for a new contract in 2022, students formed an organization, United Student Labor Action Coalition, to support them. And once that union had won a new contract, the students turned their efforts inward to begin organizing themselves.
“A lot of our conversations were about shifting that consciousness to start thinking about ourselves as students and workers and not just students,” Castronovo said.
When Azzara began organizing with student workers in the Office of Residence Life, they said they didn’t know that student dining workers and library employees were going through that same process. Learning about those efforts, as well as those of Mount Holyoke College’s RA union, fueled the dining workers’ own organizing, they said.
“It was just really exciting to know that we weren’t doing this alone,” Azzara said. “We had other examples to look to, we had other peers here at Smith who were trying to organize and work for better conditions.”
When librarians, archivists, and professional staff in the college’s libraries announced their union earlier this month, they felt the same, according to scholarly communications librarian Jessica Ryan.
“I absolutely see it in the larger context of trying to use the tools that are already in existence to create partnerships and to lift all voices up,” Ryan said. “That’s what I see unions doing. It’s a really good tool for that.”
Micah Walter, a web-services librarian, said that when the library workers delivered their letter asking for recognition of their union from the college’s president and board of trustees, two of the student union organizers joined in solidarity. Walter and others said turnover is a big issue the union is hoping to address in the libraries in order to improve not just workplace conditions but also the support that the libraries can provide faculty and students on campus.
“If we play such an important role in whatever community we’re in, it makes sense that we should have our voice in how we’re treated in the workplace,” said Xochitl Quiroz, who began working at Smith last year as the first years’ engagement and humanities librarian.
In an email copying a labor lawyer from the firm Mirick O’Connell, Smith College declined to recognize the Smith College Libraries Workers Union, despite the workers saying that more than two thirds of them have signed union cards. That means the library workers will now vote in an April 9 election with the National Labor Relations Board. On its website, Mirick O’Connell said it advises non-unionized clients being “targeted” by union-organizing drives.
“I have no doubt they’re going to strategize as carefully as possible to do the most they can to weaken our strength as much as possible,” Walter said.
Some of the workers who spoke to The Shoestring expressed disappointment at Smith’s insistence on pushing their unions to NLRB elections rather than recognizing their clear majority support. For those like Azzara, the union organizing was about making a place they love, Smith College, even better.
“I can be part of that community that cares so much about this place and these people,” Azzara said. “I can be part of making this little section of it better for all the people who are going to come after me.”
As a Smith alumna herself, Ryan said rejecting its workers’ desire to unionize is contrary to the values that the college espouses
“Working together on a shared project to make a better library for a better college is very important for us and it’s unfortunate that it’s not recognized by the college,” Ryan said.
Walter pointed out that Smith’s 2035 vision document says that “all community members’ voices matter in determining its future.” For the library workers, that’s exactly what they’re hoping to accomplish with their union. Ryan said that unions don’t just improve work conditions for their members, but also have secondary impacts improving pay and conditions for the broader region.
“Every union that forms strengthens all unions and I think that’s a good thing,” Ryan said. “And I hope that people recognize that all of these small steps lead to something greater and better. That’s what we’re working toward.”
Dusty Christensen is an independent investigative reporter based in western Massachusetts. He can be reached at dusty.christensen@protonmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @dustyc123 or on Instagram @dustycreports.
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Dusty Christensen is The Shoestring's investigations editor. Based in western Massachusetts, his award-winning investigative reporting has appeared in newspapers and on radio stations across the region. He has reported for outlets including The Nation magazine, NPR, Haaretz, New England Public Media, The Boston Globe, The Appeal, In These Times, and PBS. He teaches journalism to future muckrakers at both the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Smith College. Send story tips to: dchristensen@theshoestring.org.
