Students stand up: Logan Labor Union

 As of this academic school year, there will now be a student-raised Labor Union at the Logan campus of Utah State University called the United Campus Workers of Utah, or the UCW. This will be the first time a union has been formed on a Utah State campus. 

 “A labor union is a collective of workers who work together to bargain or come to agreements with their employer to better worker welfare,” said Emily Burgess, a graduate teaching assistant in the biology department and a member of the organizing committee for the union.  

 “We’re a wall-to-wall union composed of workers all over Utah State’s campus,” said Keegan Waller, adjunct in the English department and member of both the organizing committee and steering committee for the union. “That’s faculty, staff, undergraduate students, workers and graduate students. And it’s a collective aimed at bettering conditions and wages for all workers here on campus.” 

 The labor union at USU is organized under the Communications Workers of America, or CWA, and is in the same local chapter as the communication workers and hospital workers unions at the University of Utah. 

 The CWA has helped organize other collegiate unions in other states such as Virginia and Arizona.  

 “To start this union, our first step was to reach out to them [CWA] and say ‘Hey, we’re interested in starting this higher ed union. Can you supply us with resources to do that?’ And they eagerly responded ‘Yes.’” Waller said. “Ever since then, we’ve been working with staff organizers employed by CWA to help us organize within the university ourselves.” 

While the USU’s campus union is a chapter of the broader organization of the CWA, it still maintains a fair amount of autonomy. 

“We do contribute financially. Like our dues — some of them goes back to the local level, and some of them go back to the national level,” Burgess said. 

At present, the union has both a website where workers can join and an Instagram. 

“You fill out a little form that has some of your information, your name, your department, your job and then a way for you to pay dues,” Burgess said.  

Dues are an amount of money paid to help keep labor unions running. Burgess stated that the dues structure for the USU union was kept intentionally low at $10 a month to reflect different income levels at USU, as well as the cost of living within Logan. 

Dues stay low until the union member makes $80,000, as that is considered the living wage for a single parent in Logan. After that point, dues are scaled by percentage. 

Decisions about what the union does are made via the collective decision of members.  

“We are a democratic organization,” Waller said. “The members of our union will decide what our campaigns are.” 

For example, at the moment, the union is focusing on one particular issue: wages. More specifically, a livable wage for the Cache Valley area. 

“There are a lot of other issues that workers care about at Utah State University,” said Paul Harrison, computer science coach at the Computer Science Coaching Center at USU and member of the union’s organizing committee, the steering committee, and the interim local central committee. “This is just one big unifying one that we can start our first petition for and we look forward to addressing other issues in the future as well.”  

 On the UCW’s website, there is a petition that asks for higher wages to match the cost of living in Logan.  

 The main form of how unions try to improve working conditions according to Harrison is through collective bargaining, which may take many forms such as negotiations. In this case, this is being done via petition.  

 “There’s a difference between atomized asking, where each individual contributor is asking for a change to their work, the workplace and their working environment,” Harrison said. “And the collective asking for workers coming together and saying, ‘This is something that we all think is a good idea, and we’re willing to ask together.’” 

 The union has also made it clear that they aren’t enemies of school administration.  

 “Ideally, we want to work with university administration to make this a better place,” Waller said.  

 “We are unionizing because we care,” Burgess said.  “We want USU to feel like a really wonderful, exciting place to work, and we think that the institution needs a little bit of a push to do those things and make this place a really, truly great place to be.”