By Arnie Alpert, Active with the Activists

Arnie Alpert spent decades as a community organizer/educator in NH movements for social justice and peace.  Officially retired since 2020, he keeps his hands (and feet) in the activist world while writing about past and present social movements.

HANOVER—More than 100 Dartmouth College students, joined by faculty, staff, and community members, rallied Monday evening at an on-campus church in support of the college’s growing labor movement.  It was the third annual Labor Solidarity Town Hall, organized by an informal coalition known as the “Mighty Labor Coalition.”

“We are taking on the college to continue to better our conditions each and every day,” said Harper Richardson of the Student Worker Collective at Dartmouth (SWCD), which represents undergraduate workers.  It was a sentiment echoed by representatives of other campus unions.  The SWCD, which started with dining hall workers three years ago and won a big wage increase in 2023 after threatening to strike, has recently expanded to include Undergraduate Advisors. 

Negotiations between the Undergraduate Advisors, known as Resident Advisors on other campuses, will begin Thursday. 

Richardson said the SWCD is pursuing affiliation with the United Auto Workers Union, whose members include student workers on other campuses, including UNH Durham.

Another recent addition to organized labor on the Ivy League campus is a union of librarians, affiliated with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.  A year ago, librarian Daniel Abosso told me their successful organizing drive was prompted largely by the college taking away promotion rights during the pandemic, as well as by the high cost of living in the Upper Valley. 

After the forum, Abosso said the librarians have been negotiating with the college since February. After 16 sessions, they still haven’t made progress on what he called “the big stuff,” like compensation.  “We continue to negotiate in good faith. We hope that the college will come to meet us in the middle, but that’s probably all I can say,” he said.

The oldest campus union by decades is Local 560 of the Service Employees International Union, which has contracts for non-academic workers, including the Hanover Inn, which is owned by the college but managed by an outside firm.  Its newest members are the Dartmouth basketball team, the first college players in the country to unionize.

However, the college has refused to bargain with them, with officials saying they will fight all the way to the US Supreme Court to deny the players their rights to collective bargaining.  Chris Peck, Local 560’s president, said the players’ story has attracted interest at the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation, as well as on Capitol Hill.  “We’re talking to anybody we can talk to,” he said.

Peck noted the recent retirement of Tony Bennett, the famed coach at the University of Virginia, who said at a retirement news conference that the future of college basketball “is going to be closer to a professional model. There’s got to be collective bargaining.”  While the National Labor Relations Board is still considering ordering Dartmouth to negotiate, Peck is looking forward to Dartmouth being the first college with a players’ union.

Other participants came from GOLD-UE, the union of graduate student workers, which won its first contract at the end of June after a two-month strike.  They’re still working on getting the college to implement provisions they agreed to in the contract, a member of the negotiating team told me after the forum.   

Links between pro-labor and pro-Palestinian concerns were evident. Sean Dumont, a member of SEIU, said organizations of Palestinian workers pleaded last fall for the international labor movement to put its weight behind efforts to stop the flow of weapons to Israel.   “It is our obligation as workers to fight for the workers of Palestine,” she said.

No one needed to mention that the graduate workers strike last May 1 began on the same day that police busted up a peaceful encampment on the Dartmouth Green.  Neither did it need to be mentioned that Roan Wade, an SWCD leader, was one of the first two students arrested protesting the Gaza war last year.

Wade asked a panel of representatives of campus labor groups to explain what motivates workers to unionize and stay engaged.  “Bad bosses,” Peck said, is the number one condition.  Alora Greiner of GOLD-UE agreed.  “One of the biggest motivators for engagement is the boss misbehaving,” she said.

One of their hopes is that more union efforts will emerge in the coming months.  If they do, Rev.  Gail Kinney of the NH Faith and Labor Alliance said, “We want to stand in solidarity with you whenever and wherever and as long as needed, until you get what you’re asking for to be treated decently with respect.”

The forum ended, of course, with everyone singing the labor anthem, “Solidarity Forever.”