On for Young and Old: How Boston University’s Resident Assistants Pulled Off a Double Strike

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By: Stacey Yuen and Alana Edwards, with contributions from Thomas Baker

This article was originally published in Long-Haul Magazine in its Winter 2025 Issue.

In Fall 2024, Boston University’s Resident Assistants (RAs) pulled off a rare, week-long strike in this new corner of the labor movement. Over seven days, Residence Life (ResLife) workers held their weight amid frazzled union staffers, hostile supervisors, and internal fracturing to strike during Fall move-in – a high-leverage period during which tens of thousands of students rely on RAs to move and settle into campus housing, with parents in tow. This was our second strike to win higher stipends, better protections against harassment, and paid health insurance for those not on family plans, in the context of negotiations for our first contract. On September 5, BU threatened to withhold RAs’ compensation, which comes in the form of housing and meals. Workers voted to end the strike shortly after this threat. To the surprise of some of us, BU increased their semesterly stipend offer from $1,000 to $1,700 a few days after the strike ended.

We are two rank-and-file members who helped organize BU RAs’ “Marathon Monday” strike in the Spring and the Fall 2024 move-in strike. As RAs, our job involves looking after the safety and well-being of more than 12,000 campus residents at BU. We work on-call shifts to respond to student emergencies, assist with housing needs, connect residents with resources, and plan community programs. Undergraduate students make up around 85% of our 300-member unit and graduate students account for the rest. Workers are compensated with housing and meal plans, although only half the unit received the latter before our strikes. The unit tends to be staffed by some of the most working-class, housing and food-insecure, and racially diverse students at the university. We are, therefore, relatively young and unversed in our dealings with both management and union. Our status as workers is also complicated by our other relations to the employer, as students and tenants. 

In recent time, the “upsurge” of labor organizing in higher education has drawn much attention, along with the university’s exploitation of student debt through tuition and rent.¹ Yet the organizing potential for many thousands of residential assistants around the country, who stand uniquely at the nexus of these trends, has been comparatively overlooked. We hope our experience can be instructive for RAs elsewhere.

A YEAR ON THE JOB (STACEY)

In August 2023, I began my two-week RA training program at Boston University. The sessions ran daily from 9am and ended in the evenings, occasionally as late as 10pm. I was 30, but was immediately made to feel 12 again. Our supervisor yelled at us to keep quiet, called us out if we looked at our phones, stared at us if we talked with each other, pulled us aside if we were five minutes late, and policed us into performing a charade of attentiveness during presentations, even as they droned on for hours with few breaks. Graduate RAs (GRAs) like myself, who have some responsibility to supervise and provide additional support to undergraduate RAs, were also roped into acting like their parents. If “our” RAs were not on time for a meeting, we were told, we had to retrieve keys from the office to enter their rooms and bring them down.

On the last day of training, all 300 fatigued and pissed-off RAs were made to participate in a treasure hunt and put on dance and chant performances as part of our “team building.” The audience and judges were our supervisors (primarily university staff) along with other administrators involved in student affairs. There was a fancy buffet, staff promotion announcements, and other such things. It was clear that part of our training involved being habitually infantilized and, for the GRAs, becoming some mix of parents and managers. This dynamic was weaponized against us when we attempted to fight for ourselves as workers.

“The worst is over,” I was told. “The job isn’t actually that difficult.” But, in my first week of duties, I found myself frantically setting up meetings to try and save a coworker’s job. They had not met academic grade requirements in the spring for continuing their RA role and were only informed about their predicament after they were rehired for the fall semester, already in full swing. “If they had told me at the end of spring,” my coworker said, “I could have just taken a summer course to boost my grade and everything would have been fine.” Instead, they were removed from the role and evicted from their on-campus residence with one week’s notice.

These experiences illustrate some of the unique realities of undergraduate labor. Undergraduate workers are “young,” not only in the literal sense, but in terms of how they ought to be treated by management. Managerial truisms like “they do not know what is good for them” infiltrate supervisor-employee relations. At BU, RAs must seek their supervisors’ permission to leave their residences for more than 24 hours even when they are not on call. My coworkers have been denied permission, without explanation, for something as innocent as attending a cousin’s wedding. And so, the pressure to perform obeisance to our supervisors becomes part and parcel of life as an RA. 

But many RAs have been working multiple jobs since high school. One told me about a time they had a gun pulled on them while working as a fast-food restaurant manager in their teens; another complained about working under the hot Texas sun for $12 an hour, 12 hours a day, at an amusement park while a full-time high school student. Moreover, the nature of RA work, at its most intense, requires that workers attend to residents in crisis, to violent altercations, and even deaths. In the wake of one tragic student death on campus, my coworkers and I set up emergency discussions about how to respond to our residents and support one another in the face of confusing instructions and administrative oversight that had put workers in unacceptably difficult positions. It was apparent from those discussions that undergraduates’ maturity, wisdom, and workplace savvy are in abundance, whether administrators recognize it or not. But, of course, it’s in management’s interest not to.

“WE NEED TO PROVIDE THAT EDUCATIONAL MOMENT”

For management, ResLife workers’ youth and inexperience were reason enough to dismiss our organizing. We learned that BU was characterizing us as “ungrateful” and “aggressive” at the bargaining table. These complaints about our supposed childishness spilled over into daily interactions with our supervisors.² RAs made several efforts to meet with supervisors about how RAs themselves understood the negotiations – as a path toward ending food insecurity and the necessity of juggling multiple jobs. We were unable, however, to have this middle layer exert any pressure upward; more often, it came down on us in the form of mounting tension at work. During the strike, some supervisors grew openly disdainful of workers with whom they formerly had friendly and warm relationships. 

Ignorance and inexperience were also key tropes in the university’s public messaging. In an interview with the university paper about the administration’s plans to slap room and board charges on striking workers, the Dean of Students stated, 

My goal is to educate everybody in the bargaining unit on the effects of withholding labor during negotiations or at any point in their role. We’ve heard from many RAs who are confused about what this means; they’re not getting clear communication. We need to provide that educational moment.³ 

Unfortunately, there was also a tendency for union staff’s attitudes to resemble management’s. Micromanagement in the form of repeated calling and texting workers to track progress on tasks was common. Behaving like summer camp counselors, staff typically led meetings in ways that resembled a Q&A rather than facilitating discussions among workers.⁴

STRIKING “MARATHON MONDAY”

In Spring 2024, workers began to feel the need to do something to gain more movement at the bargaining table. The annual drop in staffing over the summer and massive turnover going into the fall semester contributed to this sense of urgency. The only meaningful concession the university had made was to offer meal plans for all workers and RA and GRA stipends of $1,000 and $1,500 per semester, respectively. Prior to contract negotiations, only about half of workers were getting meal plans and a small number were receiving stipends of a few hundred dollars.

BU RAs decided to organize a strike over Boston’s Marathon Monday (“MarMon”) long weekend in mid-April. Apart from the anticipated additional workload (responding to noise complaints, investigating overly raucous parties, booking out keys to residents who lost them, etc.), that weekend was critical because it coincided with the university’s Family and Friends weekend, where ResLife workers take on additional shifts to engage and welcome BU’s visitors and patrons.

With “MarMon” as our target, the union began assessing strike-readiness. Union staff declared that we needed strike commitments from 270 of our 300 members in order to authorize a Strike Authorization Vote (SAV). This high bar was raised further when the staff required us to collect “selfie” photographs from coworkers as proof of their strike readiness and send them to staff, who would then mark those individuals as strike-ready on our wall charts. 

The process of collecting these strike-readiness selfies caused several frustrations. First, many RA organizers were confused about the logistics and purpose of the selfies. RAs themselves asked important questions about how we were tracking them, whether they would be publicized, and how they were relevant to the strike. Organizers found it difficult to explain the rationale, making for extremely awkward interactions. The lack of clarity around the process, and more importantly, the hazy analysis of the relationship between the selfies on the one hand and our collective power on the other translated into demoralization and forced us to direct our energy toward sorting these questions out with each other and with union staff. Other essential efforts, like running small group conversations focused on strike preparation, power analysis, and inoculation faded into the background. We graduated from dancing and singing for our supervisors only to send selfies to our union staff.

Some organizers attempted to address the lack of bottom-up organizing and worker segmentation across campus by starting at the “neighborhood” level. ResLife workers are split across seven residential areas, also called “neighborhoods,” that are spread out around BU’s famously long and skinny campus. Workers do not interact across neighborhoods for most of the academic year. Until this point, neighborhood meetings were either poorly attended or nonexistent. This was true for both neighborhoods that relied on union staff’s initiative as well as those that attempted a more bottom-up approach. Three neighborhoods were almost totally disengaged. Meanwhile, attendance at bargaining and collective action team meetings flagged, in part because those meetings often felt uninspiring or inconsequential. 

Some rank-and-file organizers began meeting and talking one-on-one and in very small groups with workers from different neighborhoods in an effort to build a core of cross-neighborhood stewards. One priority was engaging “organic leaders” from disengaged neighborhoods. Since we wanted more workers to take ownership of our workplace and union, we began with workers who were less habituated to staff-led decision-making. Within weeks, a new core developed, comprising about eight workers, three of whom were from previously disengaged neighborhoods. We also formed a group of about 15 rank-and-file neighborhood stewards and began sharing and discussing neighborhood organizing strategies and resources on WhatsApp.

Workers had no edit access to their own wall charts and could only leave comments. So we made our own chart, which decoupled strike-readiness from selfie commits. In the second half of March 2024, these rank-and-file leaders started strike assessments, focusing especially on three newly organized neighborhoods where staff had limited reach. 

Our approach enabled us to gain traction within certain neighborhoods. As a result, it eventually became necessary to hash out our differences with the advocates of the selfie-based strike readiness plan. This led to an emergency meeting between rank-and-file leaders and the Local president, during which workers attempted to convince staff that we were ready to strike, whatever the selfie metrics indicated. We negotiated over the number of selfies that would trigger a strike authorization, ultimately compromising on a reduction from 270 to 170, or from 90 percent to approximately 56 percent of our bargaining unit. 

Unfortunately, in the same meeting, we were less successful in winning over coworkers or staff to the idea of an indefinite strike. The staff proposal for a four-day “warning strike” over MarMon ultimately prevailed, hoping that the threat of a strike would win specific demands like back pay, better training provisions, and having masks in offices. Although unconvinced that this could force such concessions from the university, our new group oriented towards this action as a “practice strike” – i.e. a window to learn BU’s pressure points and tactics, as well as our areas of strength and weakness, in order to organize for an indefinite strike during the move-out window at the end of the semester. Within a mere week, led in large part by a surge in the newly organized neighborhoods, ResLife workers hit 92% assessment, 70% of whom were strike-ready, and another 12% leaning yes. The Local conducted our SAV, which passed comfortably: we were going on strike. 

In hindsight, our approach had not adequately prepared for the realities of a strike. Our assessment of strike-readiness had fallen into the trap of getting as many Yes votes as possible at the cost of creating power-building spaces where workers could collectively build the necessary relationships, skills, and structures to navigate high-stress, high-stakes situations. There was no way we could critically discuss and respond to problems that arose in real time. 

After the strike, rank-and-filers got together to discuss what we had accomplished, how we fell short, and where we were headed. The strike forced small victories. We began to receive masks at big meetings and our RA training the next academic year was much improved in terms of duration. By summertime, BU also provided air conditioning for all RAs and relocated summer RAs out of the notoriously stuffy rooms at Warren Towers. We had managed to strike roughly 90 percent of assigned shifts over the MarMon weekend. However, this overwhelming success was achieved, in part, by strike-ready workers swapping shifts with less confident workers. This, of course, was only possible because we were not on the long-term strike that we thought was necessary to win. 

We also identified the picket line (combined with staff insistence that the strength of our strike could be gleaned from picket attendance) as a site of demoralization, alongside the pervasive feeling of just trying something disruptive and hoping that it might work, rather than formulating a defensible strategy based on a rigorous assessment of our leverage relative to our demands. Workers came away from this “warning” or “practice” strike less, rather than more, unified, coherent, and ready to fight. Our plan to organize for a subsequent indefinite strike was in tatters, and our experience defied the commonplace wisdom of successively escalatory action. 

Finally, we reflected on the role played by union staff and considered possible ways of navigating our relationship with them differently in future. We discussed setting boundaries with them and crafted a memorandum that we then signed, presented to, and discussed with staffers. The memo emphasized that workers would maintain full control of our organizing strategy, timelines, goals, wall charts, and data. Staff were directed to refrain from repeatedly calling or texting us.

“I’VE NEVER SEEN THIS MUCH PARTICIPATION IN ALL MY TIME ORGANIZING”

By the end of the four-day MarMon strike, our major contract demands remained unmet and an agreement was nowhere in sight. Though much of the unit had turned over between the Spring and Summer semesters, a small core of committed rank-and-file organizers remained. Restrictive timelines regarding SAVs in the Local’s constitution made the prospect of launching a sanctioned strike incompatible with striking at the point of our highest leverage vis-a-vis the employer: namely, Fall move-in. Our core organizers decided therefore to organize towards a wildcat strike to begin on the first day of Fall semester move-in.⁵ Fortunately, the intensive RA training in August provided, in addition to much frustration with supervisors, an opportunity for RAs to discuss this plan.

During August’s RA 2024 training, core organizers called a general membership meeting that saw our largest attendance yet, with more than a third of the unit showing up. Importantly, there was a new energy and hunger in the room and this moment felt to workers like a high point in our campaign. In a vote, 94 percent of us agreed to start preparing for a move-in strike by talking with our coworkers who were not present. At the same time, these deliberations revealed concern about striking without support from the Local, as did a follow-up survey, filled by close to 80% of membership. However, the genuine swell of militant energy and collective deliberation from below was not lost on the Local’s staff or officers. Following a second meeting attended by more than half of the membership, one of them said, “I’ve never seen this much participation in all my time organizing.”

The conviction of workers pushing for immediate action even compelled the union to permit a constitutional amendment that would allow an SAV to pass quickly enough that we could strike at least part of move-in. The SAV stipulated that, in order to pass, we would need 80% of the entire unit to vote Yes and it is a testament to this swell of momentum that such an outcome was possible. We cleared this high bar and set out on strike. Here is the reflection of a core undergraduate organizer:

Even after participating in the MarMon strike, striking move-in felt wildly new, exciting, and empowering, although very challenging. The emotional rollercoaster lasted from strike preparations all the way through the strike itself. The morning of the walk-out, my racing heartbeat woke me up before my alarm could. I would regularly remind myself that even though fear and doubt would always seem more valid responses to the decision we were making, I was choosing to strike because I believed in the justice we were seeking, because I knew it was what was right and it would be worth it, and because I committed to myself and my coworkers that I would give it everything I could. 

Throughout that day and each that followed, me and my coworkers exerted our collective power, took action, and formed new bonds of comradeship together. We stood by each other while we anxiously waited to be picked up by a strike train. Every chant I sang, every flyer I handed out, and every poster I attempted to put up was part of a larger struggle. I also fought for former coworkers, and every future and current 19-year-old RA who deserved better than the harassment my friends and I should have never faced. I even fought by doing TikTok dances in our ResLife polos with a friend I’d made just days before, in the most visible spot on campus, when we were too frustrated with each other to make another rushed decision.

We won the battles we faced simultaneously as individuals and collectively. We won as we met each other’s eyes when passing on the picket line. We won as security guards raised their fists and cheered with us as we walked out of campus’s largest dorm. And we won as students, parents, faculty and staff members, community members and leaders expressed their support through every email, tweet, and repost, through loud shouts of encouragement, through the moments they spent listening and calling on our behalf, even the smallest gestures of solidarity.

Notwithstanding such tireless efforts, confidence in the strike had begun to erode with the many sudden turns and lurches in the lead-up. Not a few who had previously agreed to strike pulled out. This was partly due to misinformation from Local staff, who were trying to rework restrictive internal policies to support our strike (we are the first RA unit in the Local). Core organizers were also under great pressure to make high-stakes decisions within a compressed time frame and tried to do so democratically. But the high tempo of informational and procedural changes, charged emotions, and clunky mass decision-making wore us out. Another challenge was that a large proportion of workers were brand new to the job, much less the union.

In the days that followed, ResLife workers went on what turned out to be a minority strike, with uneven numbers of workers withholding labor across neighborhoods during their move-in shifts. After the time lost in the back-and-forth with the Local, the strike ended up beginning on the fourth day of the week-long move-in and continued beyond it. Seven days into the strike, the university threatened to impose room and board charges for striking workers. Organizers, scrambling to respond, tried to assuage fears by saying workers would be more protected if more people struck. This was the wrong approach, especially as numbers dropped, because it divested workers of a sense of their own power when striking by sidelining genuine questions of strategy. It instead encouraged workers to find security in abstract metrics rather than to build structures, processes, and resources that would support a long-haul strike, one that might even have been powerful if concentrated in specific neighborhoods, despite relatively low overall numbers. There was widespread demoralization when some coworkers pulled out of the strike, creating a domino effect and the eventual collapse of the strike. 

CONCLUSION

To workers’ surprise, BU increased their semesterly stipend offer from $1,000 to $1,700 after the fall move-in strike ended, despite its weaknesses. We think that the chaos and visibility of the strike meant that management, far from being unbothered, felt relieved that things did not get as disruptive as they might have. The many last-minute emergency meetings called by middle management, as well as the outbursts of various managers, suggested a workplace in panic. Although many of our shifts were successfully scabbed, our strikes caused logistical headaches for management because we do essential university labor in housing safely some 12,000 residents and patrons, who each pay upwards of $16,000 annually in room and board.

Importantly, both ResLife strikes occurred alongside a militant long strike undertaken by the university’s graduate workers. From March to October 2024, the BU Graduate Workers Union (BUGWU) ran the longest graduate strike in US history, pushing for demands such as a cost-of-living-adjustment tied to the rental market. When ResLife workers hit the picket, the university was also facing the prospect of another semester with BUGWU workers on strike. It is conceivable that the university, sensing this new worker militancy from RAs on the ground, was eager to settle the ResLife contract to foreclose the possibility of another strike like BUGWU’s. Less than a month after the RAs reached a tentative agreement, BU also made unusually quick concessions in a clear effort to reach a contract with BUGWU and end the strike. Their contract was eventually ratified in October.

Despite the persistent and frustrating condescension by our employer and, at least initially, our union staff, budding militancy within BU’s ResLife union delivered us to two strikes that pushed our Local and won us materially significant pay and compensation increases from the boss, as well as stronger protections and a relatively streamlined training program. From where we sit, the collective deliberation by rank-and-file workers, which dramatically changed the course of our campaign, was the real “educational moment,” impressing upon management and our Local staff certain lessons they won’t easily forget. After the strike, a staffer said to one of us that getting ResLife representation on the Local’s chapter executive board was critical to reforming the Local’s existing policies – clear recognition that we had something to teach the “old timers” as well.

Building up and layering this kind of militancy in both graduate and RA unions within the same university, in order to strategize and move in tandem, is a clear next step. While the connections between these struggles were glimpsed at BU, where some workers are members of both BUGWU and ResLife and where we share the same Local, we cannot claim to have fully developed the potential leverage of joint solidarity against the employer. This is no simple prospect, but appears newly in reach in the aftermath of our respective struggles, and might be pursued wherever undergrad and grad workers are in motion, whatever their organizational affiliation.

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