CSU student assistants say they can’t make ends meet. Now they’ll file for their own union

Yet another labor movement is afoot at the nation’s largest public university system.

Student assistants at California State University, backed by the California State University Employees Union, will file petitions Monday to form what they say would be the largest union of undergraduate student workers in the country.

Many of the students say they’re financially independent and need higher wages, more hours, and paid time off for sickness and holidays to afford basic living expenses like rent and groceries.

Their unionization effort marks the latest labor action to rock California institutions of higher education in the last few months, following a six-week strike that halted learning and final exams at the University of California and a coordinated push for raises at CSU among support workers, researchers and faculty.

The California State University Employees Union has helped the students organize and gather more than 4,000 worker signatures starting last November. They say they’ll submit those union cards Monday morning to the Public Employment Relations Board to hopefully trigger a union vote.

“There are so many student workers who just don’t have the resources and support from the institution,” said Grayce Honsa, 21, a third-year political science and women’s studies major at San Diego State. “Yet, we are the people making that institution run on the day-to-day.”

At the heart of the unionization push appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what role a student job should play.

The university says it caps student assistant hours at 20 per week when classes are in session to ensure they have enough time to study and pursue their degree. During break periods, student assistants can work up to 40 hours in a week.

“Work hours are intended to be flexible to accommodate the academic program of the student,” wrote CSU spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith in an email, “ensuring they can focus on their education, progress to (a) degree and participate in opportunities that support and enhance their education, such as internship and research opportunities.”

But students who are financially independent, and in many cases first-generation, say the CSU is misguided for believing that 20 hours of pay at minimum wage is enough to afford living expenses.

“I don’t think it gives a lot of consideration to students who are absolutely dependent on themselves,” said Aiden Rodriquez, 19, a second-year philosophy major at Sacramento State. “Twenty hours a week, it’s just not enough.”

Any CSU campus department can hire students to assist full-time staffers with their work. As a senior biology technician, CSUEU President Catherine Hutchinson sets up and tears down labs for classes in the biology department at CSU Channel Islands. Her student assistants help her prepare chemicals, arrange lab materials before class, and clean up the work stations once the lab concludes.

Although the students often complete the same types of work as staffers like her, Hutchinson said, they don’t receive any of the benefits or protections unionized workers have. If a student worker gets sick, they can’t get sick pay. Unless they can afford to forgo the hours, they have to arrange to make up the time later.

“We’re supporting the students coming together to form their union because it’s the right thing to do,” Hutchinson said. “If they’re doing any work, they should have a union.”

Struggling with few hours and low wages

Starting pay for student assistants is the state minimum wage of $15.50, even though some CSU campuses are located in municipalities like San Diego and Los Angeles whose minimums are more than a dollar higher.

“As a state entity, the CSU is subject to state, not local minimum wage laws,” Bentley-Smith wrote. She noted the salary range for student assistants ranged from $15.50 to $23.50 depending on a department’s budget and also a student’s experience.

Rodriquez, a first-generation student from Madera, works 10 hours a week as an administrative assistant in the office of Student Organizations and Leadership. The other 10 hours he spends as a research associate with the Population Research Center, making as many as 300 calls a day to collect survey responses. He makes the state minimum wage of $15.50 an hour, and with only 20 hours, he brings in just $310 a week.

Rodriquez’s monthly expenses total close to $2,100, he said. While his tuition and fees are covered by financial aid, he has to pay for rent, food, a car payment, auto insurance, phone service and his credit card bills. He also sends money home to his family in Madera to help cover their monthly internet bill. Next month, his rent will increase by $500 when the school year ends and he loses his state-funded housing assistance through the Rapid Rehousing program.

Handling finances isn’t a new concept for Rodriquez. At age 16 he became an emancipated minor. Thanks to a school work permit, he would sometimes work up to 48 hours a week at McDonald’s while still in high school. When he reviewed his W-2 forms from last year, he was shocked to see his income was only around $8,000 – not even half of what he was able to make in a year working in fast-food as a high schooler.

“It’s ridiculous that universities impose this 20-hour limit on their students,” he said. “I’m making significantly less compared to what I used to be able to make.”

Prior to this semester, Rodriquez had been commuting back to Madera on the weekends to continue working at McDonald’s. He would work Friday, Saturday and Sunday, then drive back and work his on-campus jobs in Sacramento during the week while also juggling classes.

“If I didn’t have that other job,” he said, “I probably wouldn’t have been able to afford rent.”

But his grades suffered. In spring semester 2022, he only passed two of his classes.

“It was ruining my ability to succeed. I knew I could succeed, but I just had to work so much to meet my obligations that I didn’t have the time I needed.”

Financially independent international students face additional challenges with the 20-hour limit. Due to immigration restrictions, Utkarsh Mehta, 21, says their only employment options are on-campus jobs. Even if Mehta wanted to, the Sacramento State student couldn’t work an extra off-campus job to supplement their income.

“If we work off campus, that puts us a lot at risk,” said Mehta, a close friend of Rodriquez.

The third-year from Hyderabad, India, works 20 hours a week overseeing parking citation appeals with the university’s parking and transportation department. In a given week, they’ll adjudicate anywhere from 70 to 100 appeals.

Mehta, who identifies as gay and transgender, says their family in India doesn’t fully accept their gender expression and sexuality. That makes it difficult for Mehta to ask for their financial support. Aside from tuition, which the family helps cover, Mehta has to find ways to pay for their own housing, utilities, food and phone bill.

Since Mehta can’t work off-campus due to immigration, they’re limited to the same 20 hours at $15.50 per week to cover rent and groceries. They mostly rely on freezer foods like pizza rolls, which are cheap and filling, but not healthy.

“I’m trying to stay healthy, trying to get back into the healthy lifestyle,” Mehta said. “But I’ve seen that for a healthy diet, it’s just more expensive.”

Any cut in hours translates to a cut in pay, which means Mehta has to cut back on groceries for the week – or take on credit card debt. They say sick pay and paid holidays would guard against some of the uncertainty.

Last month, Mehta had to miss work twice due to illness. Then, on Cesar Chavez Day, their shift was canceled because the parking and transportation office was closed. The hit to their paycheck – which only comes once a month – was shocking.

“I was really taken aback,” Mehta said. “It was very ironic for me to lose five hours of work because of the Cesar Chavez holiday, given everything he’s done.”

The $77.50 that Mehta lost from the canceled holiday shift could’ve covered more than a week’s worth of groceries, they said, and helped make a dent in their utility bill.

Honsa, the San Diego State student, is the first in her family to attend college and works three campus jobs to make ends meet. The Sacramento native originally had financial support from her family, but a familial dispute during the pandemic meant that she had to find a way to support herself if she wanted to stay enrolled and complete her degree. She scrambled to file a financial aid application and figure out how to pay for her living expenses.

“I’ve been in, like, almost like a survival mode,” Honsa said. “I’m just wanting to prioritize getting my education and getting that four-year degree, and that comes with making sure I have enough money to live.”

Thankfully, she found a job as a resident advisor in a first-year dorm, which provides stipends to cover housing and food. Her other expenses, such as health insurance, toiletries, phone bill, public transit and school supplies, she covers through jobs as a student assistant. She spends 10 hours a week working the front desk at the campus’s Women’s Center, and then another three to six hours at the front desk of her dorm.

“A lot of first generation students feel an immense pressure to overwork themselves, and really just be the pioneer for the family or for generations of people,” Honsa said.

On-campus student assistant jobs are highly accessible, Honsa said, because students don’t have to drive or walk a long distance from their classes or dorms to get to work. The ease of access makes it possible for students to balance their school work with their jobs. At the same time though, she said student workers haven’t been encouraged in the past to use their voices and stand up for themselves in the workplace.

“It’s somewhere you can do work and do school,” she said. “But it’s also a place where there’s not a lot of knowledge of, ‘Oh, you can really stand up for yourself and your voice should be heard and your work really should be valued.’

“There are so many students who might not even realize that their voices are important,” Honsa continued, “which is why we need this union so much.”

What comes next?

Student workers started asking about union representation back in early 2021 when CSUEU was bargaining over its own contract, said union president Hutchinson.

Before organizing students to form their own union, CSUEU first tried to fold student assistants into their existing bargaining units. They filed petitions with PERB back in March 2021. But the CSU pushed back, saying that student workers’ roles differed too dramatically from those of traditional employees for them to be included in the same units.

“The Student Assistants’ primary role is that of a student and not a traditional employee,” wrote Timothy Yeung, legal counsel for the CSU, in a letter to the administrative judge overseeing the case.

With Monday’s filing, the students are calling on CSU to negotiate with them while also asking PERB to schedule a timely vote.

There’s still some question over whether the students have enough signatures to trigger a vote.

Per state law, organizers need to file signatures of support from at least 30% of workers who would be represented by the new bargaining unit. However, CSUEU and the university have vastly different counts for the total number of student assistants. The union estimates there are approximately 10,000 workers across the 23 campuses, which means they’d only need 3,000 signatures.

When asked for an estimate of the number of student assistants employed across the 23 campuses, CSU spokesperson Bentley-Smith directed The Bee to a data dashboard that showed about 17,878 “non-represented” students were employed in fall last year. That figure includes graduate students, Bentley-Smith said.

“CSU excels in creating hidden categories of employees and depriving them of basic rights,” wrote union spokesperson Khanh Weinberg and an email to The Bee. “This is a great example.”

If PERB approves a union vote and schedules an election, more than 50% of election participants must cast “yes” votes to approve the union.