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By: Jake S
Resident Advisors at Worcester Polytechnic Institute live in the student dormitories and offer services and resources to the students that live in their buildings to keep them safe and offer them help when they need it. RAs voted to form a union and affiliate with the United Auto Workers – the same union that represents graduate student workers at WPI – roughly two years ago, and have been in first contract negotiations with the university for the last year.
On October 31, they launched a strike demanding that WPI respond to their workplace needs and agree to a decent contract.
Working Mass met with Zoey and Christian, two Res Advisors on the union’s bargaining committee, to learn more about their roles, their union, and what they need from WPI to do their jobs that WPI is refusing to give them.
WM: What makes these jobs important?
Zoey: At its core, this job is about people. It’s about being there for our residents in a number of ways and showing up to support them however we can.
WM: What kind of things do your residents come to you with?
Zoey: There’s a lot of things. Sometimes, they’ll talk to us if they’re really struggling with academics and they’re worried that they’re gonna fail their classes because they haven’t had enough sleep. Sometimes, they’ll come to us with mental health challenges or, you know, trouble with socializing on campus if they haven’t been able to make many connections or friends. We can direct them towards opportunities and resources and help with those things. In some cases, they come to us because it’s the middle of the night, and there’s an emergency that needs to be urgently dealt with, and they know that we’ll know how to handle it – someone’s suffering from alcohol poisoning, for example. We provide a peer that our residents can go to when they’re unsafe, or if they need access to help. We’re there in the dorms with them and they know that we’re a safe person they can go to.
Christian: The important piece is being there in the halls with the residents living alongside them throughout the academic year, because you have a chance to get to know them and build up trust and that sense that if something goes wrong – if they need to come to you for something urgent – you will be there to them and they feel comfortable coming to you for something that might be more serious.
WPI is trying to dramatically change the job descriptions of Res Advisors as a union busting tactic. Here’s an RA on why their work is important and why they’re on strike: https://t.co/uW2ekbUij5 pic.twitter.com/h7aZRzlzLi
— 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗗𝗦𝗔
(@WorcDSA) November 2, 2025
WM: Why did you and your coworkers decide to form a union?
Christian: We formed the union about two years ago because a large percentage of the staff was really upset with constant and repeated changes to job expectations and responsibilities. There were several meetings over several months where management drastically changed what we were supposed to be doing and we got very – I believe rightly – upset with management over those repeated changes. The contract that we had originally signed did not align with the duties that we were now expected to perform. So, we formed our union in response to these actions taken by management.
We’ve been undergoing contract negotiations for nearly two years since.
WM: How has the University responded to that decision to organize?
Christian: We were moving towards our union election, and they just kind of didn’t.
WM: Sounds like they tried to ignore you!
Christian: There wasn’t very much of a response right after we had our election and our union was certified, either. We began our bargaining in late summer 2024. Not long into that process, there was an introduction of a pretty drastic restructuring of our positions that would fracture it into multiple different positions with totally different responsibilities. This particular piece has been a major part of what we’ve been fighting against for the past year, and is a major piece of why we’re on strike.
WM: Tell us more about your core demands.
Zoey: Like Christian said, the biggest thing is that we do not want this restructuring. They proposed it about a year ago, and they have made almost no changes to it, or movement on it, since they initially proposed it. And we have been steadfastly opposed to it the whole time because the positions are not well thought-out, they are not fully developed and ready to be put into practice. It’s barely a prototype that’s not ready for real-world use.
WM: You just had a bargaining session this past Monday in which they have not moved on that position around restructuring of the unit. Do you want to talk more about how it went today?
Christian: Absolutely. Our bargaining committee has worked tirelessly to put together a full written contract proposal that has had significant and meaningful movement on our positions. We believe that the contract that we put together and presented to them today would benefit our whole community. The most important piece to us, of course, is those three roles WPI wants to recategorize us into. The solution we proposed to resolve that was to put their half-baked roles on pause and, for the duration of this contract, keep the positions as they are. But we proposed to form a committee that would do it the right way, modifying their proposed positions or developing something new with feedback from res advisors, residents, and housing staff to put together something that makes sense for all WPI residents. This was totally rejected by management, and they maintain their commitment to the positions that they’ve proposed, and still have not been moving on them whatsoever.
They claim that our proposal with this committee doesn’t meet anywhere in the middle. We disagree.
We have been steadfastly opposed to it the whole time because the positions are not well thought-out, they are not fully developed and ready to be put into practice.
WM: What do you think is motivating the restructuring of this unit?
Zoey: We’ve heard a lot of things over the months. One thing they said is that they’re not doing it for monetary reasons. They believe that the RA role as it is isn’t good enough, and they want to “modernize” it. Maybe their idea is meant to be some sort of new flashy thing that they want to advertise. It seems like it might just be sort of the pet project of the Dean of Students.
During bargaining, the Dean of Students talked with us a bit about why she’s sticking to this vision, and it was something that we’ve heard from her a bit before. Basically, it’s that four years ago or so WPI had a pretty serious mental health crisis. There were seven suicides in a period of six months. This was during the COVID pandemic, a very tumultuous time in the world, and in that span of time somebody at WPI talked to some RAs and heard that RAs were struggling to do everything that they were doing. They were expected to do too much. And this is apparently what they think the solution to that looks like. Meanwhile, we have our RAs and our whole community speaking out to tell them that this is not the path forward.
WM: It’s interesting that, under crisis, WPI is moving to eliminate the RA role rather than to address the needs of their RAs with more support – hiring more of you, for example. A friend of mine used to serve as an RA at WPI, and it seemed like he was on call basically all the time for his floor. It was a very stressful, demanding job that didn’t give a whole lot back to him. Do you believe them when they say at the bargaining table that this has nothing to do with money?
Christian: It’s hard to know for sure exactly what they’re thinking, but of course there’s a monetary aspect to this. I mean, WPI has a lot of money… the endowment alone is massive and always growing. WPI just bought two new hotels to turn into new student housing, and we have tons of grants that continue to flow in to support different programs. I really can’t imagine why they would want to do a restructuring of our roles that they know could harm residents unless it would be for financial gain.
WPI just bought two new hotels to turn into new student housing, and we have tons of grants that continue to flow in to support different programs. I really can’t imagine why they would want to do a restructuring of our roles that they know could harm residents unless it would be for financial gain.
They claim it’s not, they claim it’s for these other reasons, but they haven’t made any movement based on the feedback anyone has given them on the basis of their supposed reasoning. That’s what we saw at the bargaining table again today. So, it makes it really hard to believe that there isn’t a financial incentive, or at least some ulterior goal from the upper administration that they’re trying to accomplish.
WM: Do you think it also has something to do with employer control in the workplace?
Zoey: Absolutely, I would say it does. In their insistence on sticking to these roles, really what they’ve been saying is that they believe it is their right to unilaterally decide what the job descriptions are, and they universally have the right to create any additional roles or additional job descriptions without talking to us about it beforehand.
As WPI’s previous president left the position, she took home a compensation package of just over $2 million. Converted to an hourly wage for a 40-hour work week, that’s nearly $1,000 an hour. Res advisors are not currently paid a wage or stipend. Many of its next top earners are administrators being paid base salaries deep into the six figures. The school’s endowment sits at nearly $650 million; its total assets held, roughly $1.3 billion.
In February of this year, WPI was recognized as an R1 research university, distinguishing it as an institution that produces a high number of doctorates and has significant resources at its disposal for funding academic research. Room and board costs for first-year students (who are required by the school to live in the dorms) have ballooned to more than $16,000 for a single academic year. And over the last ten years, undergraduate tuition has climbed steadily from roughly $45,000 to just over $60,000, representing an increase of over 30% – more than double the average rate of undergraduate tuition increase across Massachusetts.
Jake S is a Worcester DSA member and a former member of United Auto Workers (UAW).
The post WPI Resident Advisors On Strike Against Destructive Restructuring and Unionbusting appeared first on Working Mass.
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