Smith College Student Dining Workers Announce the Formation of their Union

[NORTHAMPTON, MA] - Student dining workers at Smith College announced this week the formation of the United Smith Student Workers (USSW) with Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 153. They delivered their petition for voluntary recognition on the morning of Friday, November 17th.

USSW formed in response to the mistreatment of student dining workers specifically relating to pay, training, safety concerns, and management. Smith pays student workers minimum wage and students can only work ten hours a week, or eight hours for freshmen. Additionally, there is no standardized training program for student workers in the kitchens, cafés, or catering. Training is conducted on an informal, ad-hoc basis, usually by other student workers. This has resulted in accidents such as burns from hot water and slips and falls on wet floors, as well as inconsistent implementation of health and safety standards. On top of that, student workers face harsh mistreatment by managers like unexpected hour cuts and the addition of job duties outside the scope of their roles as dining workers.

A dining worker who wishes to remain anonymous shared, “I was working at the Campus Cafe over J term and it was pretty slow. [A manager] came up to me and had me organize his office and items into bins. [...] I think it was interesting because I was one of the only POC working that day and I don't really know why he asked me to do that especially since that's not part of the job description for the Cafe. Aside from that, there have been times where the managers at the cafe have been really rude and mean to me when I was first starting out and didn't understand the ropes of the job due to poor training.”

Another worker explained, “No explicit instruction was given on hygiene standards such as sanitizing solution use or how many times to wash silverware or glasses—knowledge of that was passed by word of mouth and there was no written policy. These things shouldn’t fall upon the backs of the already overworked dining staff either—there should be a college standardization that student managers can be given and provided on paper to student workers.”

Grace Ellis, a student manager in one of the cafes expresses concerns with boundaries between upper management and student staff: “My manager is able to contact me at any point of the day, any day of the week, and I am expected to be available to come into work as needed. I’ve worked many food service jobs in the past, and I’ve never had a job where I was expected to drop everything and come in to work. Management can take advantage of us living and studying on campus to get us to come in to work on the fly.”

Zu Sikes, a student worker in the dining halls, spoke on the importance of unionizing to student workers’ agency: “It's not about what happens to me at work, it's about having the collective power to make the decisions about it ourselves.” 

Another student dining worker, Olive McFarland, said, “I'm hoping a union for student workers will give us the leverage to better support the full-time dining workers in their goals as well as advocate for ourselves.”

You can follow the USSW campaign and ways to support via their instagram: @unitedsmithstudentworkers.