College Students Have Begun to Unionize, Very Carefully

In November 2023, in the basement of a campus building at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), student workers gathered to share their grievances about their on-campus jobs—low pay, inadequate training, unpaid overtime. Among them was Madison Peon, a junior and resident assistant. Peon had become an RA because she needed housing, which she couldn’t afford without the job.

When she started, she was excited to work with fellow students and grateful to have a place to sleep. But her feelings soon soured: During training, which lasted three weeks, Peon and her peers worked 40 hours a week despite being paid for only 20.