After Eight Years, Housing Advisors Have a Union Contract
On May 15, the Union of Reed College Housing Advisors (URCHA) and Reed College administration reached an agreement on the first-ever collective bargaining agreement for Reed HAs, marking a hard-fought victory eight years in the making. The contract was ratified by 95% of HAs on the day before graduation and took effect on June 1. “We think that what we have in place is one of the best contracts in the country, if not the best compensation-wise, ability-wise, protections and safety and re-hire wise. We believe that this is a really good, at least first start,” said URCHA representative Max Costigan ‘25, who graduated the day after the contract was ratified.
The terms of the contract include minimum wage compensation and free meals for the previously unpaid two-week training period, the option to opt out of the board plan while retaining the full stipend, enhanced job protections for returning HAs, the possibility of excuses from required training for HAs with summer internships or unanticipated emergencies, employment protection for absences during illnesses of up to three months, stronger protections against arbitrary disciplinary measures or termination, and a new grievance procedure. All HAs who attended the August 2024 HA training also received a $100 ratification bonus, marking a symbolic victory for HAs graduating with the Class of 2025 who would not benefit from the contract’s other specifications. Nevertheless, the college retains a number of key powers, including the right to make major changes to HA job responsibilities without the approval of the bargaining unit. This power played a major role in prompting the 2023 revival of the HA unionization effort, which was then in deep-freeze since its suppression in 2017-18.
Reed HAs formed URCHA in 2023 after Residence Life unilaterally implemented a series of major changes to HA job responsibilities and purged HAs who couldn’t or wouldn’t comply. These included the implementation of mandatory nightly rounds, a mandatory training over summer break, and a minimum GPA requirement, in addition to smaller governmental changes, like a campus-wide standardization of quiet hours, that shifted power from HAs to Res Life. The training requirement forced HAs conducting fixed-term summer internships and research projects to leave their positions early or be fired. A number of HAs were terminated for failure to attend the entirety of the mandatory training and replaced by new hires on short order. Many HAs who completed the training and kept their jobs found it largely useless compared to previous years. Then-HA Alister Orozco ‘25 told then-Quest editor Lindsey Babcock ‘26, “no new HAs were trained on how to fill out disbursement forms, like how to get reimbursed, how to do event planning, how to handle racial comments, or discriminatory actions that are happening in the residence halls, which is what our training last year was solely focused on… no one was prepped at all on how to do the job.”
Aggrieved by the college’s dismissal of their concerns, HAs announced the formation of URCHA at a rally on September 22, 2023. After the college declined to voluntarily recognize the union, URCHA won their union election as part of the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 11.
The Bargaining Process
On February 15, 2024, the newly-recognized union began contract negotiations with Reed administration. According to URCHA representative Eli Rall ‘26, the union and college were able to reach an agreement on all issues except for compensation relatively quickly.
During the 2024-25 academic year HAs received a stipend of $17,260, which is intended to cover the annual cost of room and Board Plan B at Reed. However, HAs actually take a net loss of roughly $900 per year on their stipend after taxes. Throughout the bargaining process, URCHA requested either an alternate payment model or an increased stipend so that HAs could take home a net positive salary, which is generally understood to be an important part of the employment relationship. Although the most modest of URCHA’s proposals would have only cost the college an extra $100,000 per year, equivalent to about 1.2 full-paying students in 2024-25, Reed’s representatives categorically opposed all proposals that would cost the college more money than it currently spends. The college’s counter-proposals would invariably have decreased HA compensation. A particularly egregious counter-proposal would have involved waiving room and board for HAs, no direct payment, and reducing financial aid eligibility by an amount equivalent to the cost of room and board. As Rall pointed out, this would have meant HAs losing $17,260 to the college per year. URCHA rejected a series of unfavorable compensation proposals from the college, while the college in turn rejected all proposals that would have cost them more money than they already spent paying HAs.
Negotiations finally came to a dramatic conclusion in the weeks leading up to Reed’s May 19 graduation ceremony after a yearlong impasse between the college and HAs, on compensation for the bargaining unit. URCHA had begun the semester planning potential escalatory actions in the event of continued deadlock on compensation. After mediation failed due to the federal government’s mediators being laid off by DOGE, URCHA confidentially informed admin that they would picket graduation if no contract was reached by that time. Costigan says URCHA told admin the picket would take place on the sidewalk next to the Great Lawn, technically off-campus, would consist solely of signs, and would cheer on graduating HA seniors. When graduation approached with no contract, URCHA publicized its picket plan, backed by Portland Jobs with Justice. In response, Vice President for Student Life Karnell McConnell-Black sent out a mass email on May 13 to the reed-community list innocuously titled “Clarifying HA Union Statements” declaring the college might cancel the graduation ceremony in the event of a disruptive picket. The email also made what URCHA says are false claims about the hours HAs work to justify the college’s reticence on compensation, and claimed that requiring HAs to pay union dues was unfair. McConnell-Black alleged that HAs worked 7-10 hours a week and made the equivalent of $40-50 an hour, while URCHA stated in a response that the average work week was approximately 13 hours. Costigan gave it as 12-15 in a later interview for this article. URCHA also noted in its response that the college had already agreed to the dues structure McConnell-Black claimed to reject.
While admin was occupied responding to the upcoming picket, URCHA was playing its endgame. Rall observed that the college’s negotiating team felt that they needed extrinsic justification for any HA compensation increase, and the union’s bargaining team elected to give the college a “concrete reason to pay us more” by softening their compensation demands from an academic year stipend increase to fair pay for the previously unpaid two-week training period, corresponding to about $1,300. Rall acknowledged that the time it took to negotiate the contract was a “contributing factor” to URCHA’s willingness to draw back its compensation demands, as were the impending graduations of many original URCHA members. “People, who have spent a lot of time and a lot of effort to even start this union to begin with, need to be taken care of and need to graduate with a contract,” said Rall. For these reasons, URCHA considered it imperative to reach a contract by the end of the academic year.
The bargaining team believed that the new compensation request, combined with the threat of a picket, would represent an offer the college couldn’t refuse. They presented the offer to the college at the beginning of Finals Week and gave them until the official end of the semester on Thursday, May 15, to agree. Rall described it as a “limited time offer” that would “give the college an out” on the upcoming picket. On Thursday night, Barran Liebman attorney Nicole Elgin, who was representing the college, called the union and said that they would accept URCHA’s offer with some minor tweaks. As part of this tentative agreement, URCHA agreed not to take any disruptive action during graduation and canceled the picket. URCHA announced the tentative agreement in an email sent through the Senate Appointments Committee on May 16 and it was ratified by 95% of URCHA members on May 18.
Seth Douglas ‘18, the HA representative in the original 2017 student worker unionization attempt, viewed the terms of the new contract favorably but emphasized that it was important to understand the agreement as a beginning, rather than the conclusion of the student workers’ struggle. Douglas said the contract “offers a means to address and overturn prior managerial overreach, like an established, more democratic grievance process that ends capricious and arbitrary disciplinary practices of the past,” and provides HAs with a base of power, recognized under the law, that will make demanding further improvements easier in the future. Costigan shared a similar assessment, saying “our main issues were the mass firings and hiring of unqualified HAs… we needed way more job retention and we needed our employer to not treat us like disposable dirtbags.” Future HAs, they said, can work on winning compensation for rounds and other duties added in 2023, and on potentially removing the GPA requirement, which remains in effect in the initial contract.
The college’s exploitation of the mass email system to discredit the union marked a major escalation in simmering tensions over administrative repression of student speech. In October 2024, Karnell McConnell-Black and Dean for Student Affairs Chris Toutain banned the student body government from sending emails to the student body mailing list without their prior review and approval, citing alleged violations of the college’s mass email policy. Reed’s Computer User Services staff had been providing technical support to SB Info and believed that it complied with the policy, but the college administration overruled CUS’s stance and forced the mailing list under their control while arguing, in their own mass email, that granting themselves the power to withhold student emails did not violate the Reed Community Constitution’s ban on external “censorship or editorial control” of student expression.
Rall viewed McConnell-Black’s May 13 email as “a tactic to try and scramble the union internally” during final preparations for the picket, inducing “a big time commitment that all of a sudden all of us are scrambling to try and come up with a response on top of us trying to actually plan logistically a picket for graduation.” McConnell-Black approved the Student Body Government’s distribution of pro-union emails, but these only went out to the student body mailing list, letting admin reach staff, faculty, and families without the possibility of rebuttal. Conveniently for the union, though, McConnell-Black linked an URCHA press release on the picket in the first line of his own email, letting it reach many readers it would not have otherwise. Admin continues to use the mass email system to share its positions on negotiations with the Reed Custodians Union.
Legacies and Institutional Memory
Although URCHA was formed in 2023, it was preceded by a campus-wide student unionization attempt in 2017. The independent Student Worker Coalition (SWC) sought to unite all student workers at Reed, but HAs were the most aggressive in their unionization push because of changes to the tax code that meant they would begin taking a net loss on their jobs, with no raise from Reed to counteract the change. Rather than pay HAs a net positive salary, the administration of then-President John Kroger retained law firm Barran Liebman. They argued to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that the SWC’s unionization attempt was illegal under the National Labor Relations Act, claiming that no undergraduate or graduate student workers anywhere in the United States could legally be considered employees with the right to collectively bargain. The Obama-era NLRB’s 2016 Columbia decision affirmed that student workers at private colleges and universities are allowed to organize under the National Labor Relations Act, overruling a 2004 decision to the contrary. Fearing that the Trump-appointed NLRB would side with Reed, overturn Columbia, and strip all student workers in the country of their union protections, the SWC dissolved itself to terminate the case. Had the NLRB heard the case and sided with Reed, roughly 80,000 graduate students across the country would have lost their collective bargaining rights.
Most current Reedies heard about the SWC and Barran Liebman for the first time at the 2023 rally where URCHA announced its formation. Current Reed administrators have previously denied knowledge of the Kroger administration’s union-busting, but the college continues to retain Barran Liebman, and Barran Liebman attorney Nicole Elgin was on Reed’s negotiation team throughout the bargaining process.
Douglas attributed the college’s somewhat less hostile stance towards URCHA to the more labor-friendly stance of the NLRB board appointed by former President Joe Biden, rather than a change of heart. “I wish I could say that moment had passed, but all that changed between our fight and [URCHA’s] is that the composition of the NLRB became less favorable to Trump and the College's priorities,” Douglas said. They pointed to Community Safety Director Gary Granger’s unauthorized and voluntary disclosure of alumni information to federal law enforcement as proof that the college’s willingness to collaborate with the Trump regime at the highest levels has not changed. (The college placed Granger on leave immediately upon learning of his actions, which it says went outside of policy).
Rall and Costigan said that URCHA learned key strategic lessons from the SWC. While the SWC was part of a surge of independent labor organizing in Portland that has also included the Burgerville Workers Union, Doughnut Workers United, Buffalo Exchange Union, Restaurant Workers of Portland, and New Seasons Labor Union, URCHA is instead affiliated with OPEIU Local 11, itself a part of the 12.4 million-member AFL-CIO. This gives HAs access to the legal, financial, and media resources of the largest federation of labor unions in the country, letting them draw on a well-established base of labor power to deal with admin. While this sacrifices some of the autonomy of independent organizing, it has also succeeded in putting HAs on a more level playing field with admin. URCHA had support from OPEIU negotiators and lawyers at the bargaining table, and drew Oregon AFL-CIO President Graham Trainor to an on-campus rally in October 2024, where he promised the solidarity of 300,000 Oregon union workers in URCHA’s struggle.
The new URCHA contract will be in effect until May 31, 2027, with the possibility of a one-year extension if negotiations for an updated contract aren’t finished in time. In the meantime, URCHA is shifting its focus to preserving institutional memory, which has historically been a major killer of Reed student movements as organizers graduate and administrators outwait their demands. Douglas says that “because [admin] are there longer than any cohort of students, structural power is stacked in their favor.” For example, under then-President Paul Bragdon, Reed admin successfully captured student demands for divestment from Apartheid South Africa into a series of working groups, which retreated into the deliberative process until the college’s anti-apartheid advocates had all graduated. The college ultimately never divested from apartheid. URCHA, however, appears primed to remain strong in the coming years. Costigan said, “URCHA shows that students organizing at Reed College who are dedicated, who are continuing the work for two years… that that type of organization eventually does work.”
The union has worked on organizing introductions for new HAs to explain the historical context surrounding the contract, including bringing organizers like Costigan back to orient new members, to “continually inform people it’s not that we just did this for fun, we did this to protect you and help you and we’d like you to join us in continuing this work.” The contract, in fact, mandates that Reed “provide an opportunity for each new HA to meet with the Union Representative and Steward(s) for a new Union member orientation,” ensuring the institutional longevity of the union.
Costigan, Douglas, and Rall all see the new URCHA contract as a major victory for student autonomy and proof that Reedies can support each other to build the community they were promised in the face of an increasingly authoritarian administration. “When the students organize together, the college is scared,” Costigan said. They hoped that URCHA’s long-fought victory would inspire other Reed community members to get together and reclaim their collective power. “If you are a resident and you see your HA being a good HA bringing together the community and you also know that they have a union that has been bargained well and that they are taken care of because of this labor movement, it can inspire you to maybe do that work, [to] see where you are in the college and try to make the college a better place, whether or not admin want you to necessarily do that.”
At press time, Reed spokesperson Sheena McFarland had not responded to a request for comment on this story.