A History of the 2019 CSO Unionization Attempt
Six months ago, Reed HAs secured a union contract after years of hard-fought bargaining with the administration. Two months ago, Reed’s custodial workers settled a contract with the college after extended protests alongside students, staff, and faculty. Two days from now, all the bargaining units on Reed’s campus will meet with non-unionized workers to ratify the Reed Workers’ Council, a body that will coordinate all workers employed by Reed.
This upswing in action by labor organizations has been vital to secure basic working conditions for the people that make the college’s operations possible. The janitors were able to secure protections against unfair discipline, receive modest raises, and retain their legal rights in the face of Reed’s attempt to waive them. HAs were finally able to secure a contract that wouldn’t be a net-loss in money for them. Additionally, labor organizations help secure more democratic workplaces, ensuring that workers are treated as full members of the Reed community.
While labor organizations have seen recent successes at Reed, they face an uphill battle against a variety of systemic challenges. One of the most significant of these is the issue of institutional memory, which is the knowledge of the institution’s past held by its members. Reed’s lack of institutional memory has been identified as a challenge to labor organization before by writers for the Quest as well as (ironically) by Reed’s lawyers in one of their legal challenges to the 2018 HA unionization attempt.
Reed’s union-busting lawyers are, unfortunately, correct for once. Without institutional memory, it is more difficult for workers to find common ground over struggles that they can organize to solve. Institutional memory is also important for being able to anticipate and prepare for challenges to labor organization. It is invaluable for us to be able to understand the context that we have placed ourselves into. Although students, faculty, and administrators may come and go as the years go on, we invariably act within the constraints of institutional trends that long outlast our presence here.
In an effort to ameliorate the issue of institutional memory in relation to labor organizing, I will give an account of the 2019 attempt by CSOs to unionize in partnership with SEIU. One of my focuses is identifying what grievances with Reed motivated this unionization attempt. I think this is important for students in particular to understand, as our experience as students is a product that often comes at the cost of these grievances. Furthermore, examining what transgressions Reed is willing to carry out against its employees can serve as a stepping stone to finding what interests motivate these transgressions.
My second focus is on identifying what barriers these attempts at unionization faced. This is important because it might help those involved in future attempts at labor organization at Reed to understand what they’re up against.
The 2019 CSO Unionization Attempt
In early January 2019, Reed’s Community Safety officers delivered a letter to their management declaring their intention to form a union. The support for this letter was unanimous among the CSOs and was also supported by other Reed staff members. Drawing on a commitment to key values of safety, respect, community, and accountability, the CSOs requested that the Reed administration commit to a fair process for union formation. The letter ended by saying that they expected a response from the Reed administration by the 25th of that month.
This letter was the culmination of a year of concerted effort by the CSOs to begin a unionization process. This was partially due to issues scheduling meetings between all coworkers, due to the irregular schedules of CSOs. One of the biggest challenges, however— according to Dashiell Harrison, a CSO at the time of the events—was the historically high turnover among CSOs. Bucking the historical trend however, 2018 had few changes to the CSO staff, allowing the efforts at unionization to crystallize.
The trend of high turnover among CSOs makes sense after reviewing complaints that CSOs listed. One of the primary concerns raised by a CSO in a Quest article from February 2019 is poor staffing and resources making their job unsafe. Whereas CSOs in the past had done patrols in pairs, they were increasingly being asked to do so alone, hindering their ability to safely respond to emergency situations.
The article attributes this issue to an increased focus on managerial staff rather than actual safety officers. Whereas the number of CSOs remained at a stable fifteen positions, the managerial staff had ballooned to seven full-time positions. Exacerbating this problem was a decrease in willingness among managerial staff to fulfill patrol duties as they had done in the past.
The focus on managerial hiring was accompanied by a feeling among many CSOs that there was a general attitude of disrespect and belittlement from managers towards officers. When asked what the CSOs’ largest reasons for unionization were, Harrison said that, despite pay and staffing being major factors, the largest issue was that “Gary Granger was a dick” who was difficult to work with due to his “sanctimonious” and “dishonest” conduct. Harrison elaborated that managerial impunity created a “toxic work environment” that ultimately motivated his decision to leave Reed. Gary Granger is no longer the director of Community Safety due to his unwarranted disclosure of an alumnus’ information to law enforcement in violation of college policies.
In the context of these long-standing grievances and the effort put into the unionization process, the administration’s response to the letter felt disrespectful to many CSOs. The body of the email responding to the letter praised the administration for already having taken steps to address the CSOs’ concerns and invited CSOs to come into Gary Granger’s office hours to “ask questions.”
The email then went on to say that under Reed policy, CSOs could not discuss unionization while on the clock and could not meet with union organizers on campus. The email then requested that CSOs “respect the right of your CSO colleagues to agree or disagree with the union representation model.” This was despite the fact that the letter had been supported unanimously by all CSOs and dispatchers. The email ends by expressing interest in being “hooked up” with CSO trading cards.
CSOs and their union organizer felt that the policy iterated in the email was illegal, violating the National Labor Relations Act which states in Section 7, “Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.”
In response to the email, the CSOs filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge against Reed with the National Labor Relations Board in early May 2019. According to Harrison, who is now a field representative for Laborers International Union of North America, most ULP charges never go to adjudication because most employers are willing to walk back the practices that provoke them. Harrison further said that Reed is the only employer he has seen maintain the practice and wait for adjudication.
The ULP charge brought the already unfruitful unionization process to a standstill. Harrison explained that when the union had reached out to Audrey Bilger, she responded by saying that she had been advised not to communicate with the union until the adjudication process for the ULP charge had finished. After the union offered to drop the ULP charge in exchange for a meeting with the administration, the offer was not accepted and they continued to receive a lack of communication with the administration.
The standstill in the recognition process dragged on for months and eventually spelled out the death of the union. As of December 6, 2019, which was the latest mention of the union found online, not much had changed. The ULP had not been resolved and would not be resolved anytime soon. Scott Cheesewright, an SEIU organizer that was working with the CSOs, attributed this deadlock in a Quest article to “The college...taking advantage of the Trump Administration’s rewriting of the long-established precedent of existing labor laws”.
Harrison said that the end of 2019 was when many CSOs either gave up on the unionization process or left for greener pastures, like he did. He attributed this to a pervasive “burnout” after months of arduous organizing, as well as there being little hope that the college would ever allow the union to form.
One of the biggest reasons for this “burnout” and lack of hope lies in the process for recognition which the CSOs pursued. Section 9(b)(3) of the NLRA prohibits security guards from joining mixed unions with non-security guards unless their employer voluntarily grants permission for them to do so. In contrast, most workplaces simply need workers to vote in an NLRB election to form a union, regardless of whether the employer likes it or not. Because the CSOs chose to unionize with SEIU (a union that represents non security guard workers) they needed to follow this voluntary recognition process. In effect, this meant that the union’s recognition depended almost exclusively on the goodwill of the Reed administration.
While this obstacle was apparent to some CSOs at the start of the unionization process, they ultimately chose to unionize with SEIU because their primary alternative would have been to join a police union. An anonymous CSO interviewed by the Quest on December 6, 2019, said that they didn’t want to join a police union because, “We don’t do what they do.... I think most CSO think of themselves as first responders.” Harrison said that another one of their concerns was that joining a police union might reduce student support for the unionization effort. He concluded that, considering how much power the voluntary recognition model gave the college, trying to join a mixed union “may have been an error.”
Another potential reason for the lack of progress was linked to the ULP and how the college was willing to use the Trump administration’s labor policies to their advantage. Because the NLRB in 2019 had multiple Trump appointees on it, the college may have had reason to believe that holding out for adjudication would yield a positive result for them. This strategy is similar to when the college used a potential NLRB ruling to pressure the HA’s union to back down just one year prior.
The struggles faced by the CSOs’ attempt to unionize in 2019 are similar in many ways to those that a budding union might face at Reed today. Not only does the NLRB currently have Trump appointees on its board, but it does not even have the quorum of the three members necessary to make decisions on ULP charges. This pitiful state of affairs has been going on for seven full months, by far the longest time the NLRB has been without quorum over its 90-year history. This is further exacerbated by the government shutdown (which, among other things, makes FOIA requests very difficult, much to my chagrin).
Any new labor movement would also do well to learn that the Reed administration will probably not be very willing to cooperate with them unless they are put under serious pressure. This pressure, however, is something that might be more easily accessible to obtain than assistance from the NLRB. For example, large numbers of the freshman class turned out to protest alongside janitors earlier this year. URCHA was finally able to secure a contract after they and other students threatened to picket at graduation.
In short, when the administration can wield all its resources against just a small section of workers trying to organize, it can wait them out or crush them like they’re nothing. But when the Reed community unites behind workers, they have a real chance of success.