College Refuses to Yield on HA Compensation
URCHA representative Eli Rall ‘26 speaks at a union rally on October 4, 2024. Photo credit: Maggie Feinberg ‘28
More than a year and a half after the Union of Reed College Housing Advisors (URCHA) announced its formation at a rally on September 22, 2023, HAs have still not reached an agreement on a first contract with college administrators. URCHA and the college are negotiating on 15 articles, all of which are now settled except for compensation. On Monday, February 24, Residence Life Director Vanessa Guerrero sent HAs an update on what she claimed was “a great contract for the HAs,” which URCHA representative Eli Rall ‘26 says was “the same as HAs get now” plus a $100 sign-on bonus. Director of Public Affairs Sheena McFarland disputes this characterization of the offer, saying it differed from current HA compensation “in many ways,” without elaborating. A copy of Guerrero’s email reviewed by the Quest describes a base academic year compensation system identical to the current one. The College and URCHA have since met for additional bargaining sessions with no progress.
URCHA is asking for HAs’ stipends to be increased by $2,276 per year, something the college has ardently refused throughout the bargaining process. HAs currently make $17,260 per year, but after payroll taxes, they can actually take a net loss on their job. The annual cost of on-campus housing at Reed is $9,050 for the 2024-25 academic year, and the cost of Board Plan B is $8,210, for a total of $17,260; HA compensation is based on this amount. Because HAs’ salaries are treated as taxable income, they also reduce financial aid for future years across the board, although the amount of change varies on an individual basis. The Oregon Department of Revenue tax calculator suggests that a single filer making $17,260 would pay $1,200 in taxes, while Rall gives the figure as approximately $900 (individual HAs’ filing statuses may vary widely). Either way, taxes currently take yearly HA compensation several hundred dollars below the cost of room and board at Reed, which the union is keen to remedy. Rall says that a stipend increase was not URCHA’s original proposal, explaining, “We chose a stipend model because the college refused to meet our primary preference, which is to waive costs and not have that waiver affect financial aid.” Other colleges which administer financial aid similarly to Reed, like Johns Hopkins University, offer such a model to their Residence Advisors. The College has claimed to URCHA that this model is illegal to implement at Reed, leading the union to propose a stipend increase, which they consider their second-best option.
“The College has offered numerous different compensation models in these negotiations and the Union bargaining committee was clear that it preferred stipend payments for meal and housing,” McFarland said. According to Rall, “Most of the offered structures would leave many HAs with a bigger tuition bill and offer no way to pay for it.” The College has frequently offered waiver-based compensation models, which would waive the cost of room and board for HAs while also decreasing the amount of financial aid that HAs with demonstrated need receive by a corresponding amount. Such an arrangement would actually result in a net funding loss equivalent to total current compensation for HAs who receive financial aid, or net zero for compensation for HAs who do not. This arrangement would thus be drastically worse for HAs with financial need than the current model, while saving several hundred dollars for HAs with no financial need. Rall estimates that 30 of the 44 HAs are on financial aid. The only possible compensation for the loss associated with a waiver model would be a stipend increase, which the college has not offered in these cases. Rall says that when Max Costigan ‘25, another URCHA representative at the bargaining table, asked the College how waivers could possibly be a good deal for HAs, they did not give any reason. The union proposed a split model to the College as a compromise, in which HAs with no financial need would get the waiver and HAs with need would get an increased stipend, but the College turned it down on the basis that it was too complicated.
The bottom line for Rall is that “The numbers [in all of the College’s proposals], as we understand them, just don’t add up to helping HAs on financial aid in any way,” but do save the College money compared both to URCHA’s desired stipend model and the current compensation structure. In October 2024, Northwest Labor Press reported that URCHA’s compensation proposal at the time would cost the College only an additional $127,000 per year, the equivalent of one and a half students’ annual cost of attendance. The current proposal would be even cheaper, at barely $100,000. For comparison, the College has lost millions of dollars in annual tuition revenue due to declining enrollment over the past several years. McFarland claims that paying each of the 44 HAs an extra $2,876 per year as proposed in October would cost the College at least twice as much as the figure provided by URCHA, but did not explain how the College’s calculations differ from the basic arithmetic that produces the union estimate. Bumping HA compensation up to $19,536 per year (under the current proposal of a $2,276 raise) would be enough to put URCHA members’ after-tax income above the red. McFarland said that in a comprehensive review of other institutions, the college found that “compensation for Reed HAs [already] exceeds that of many other institutions and the job at Reed does not require the amount of work as required in other colleges and universities,” despite massive increases to HAs’ job responsibilities in 2023. The increase of responsibilities through mandatory nightly rounds and other changes without any increase in compensation was the original impulse behind unionizing. RAs at dozens of other schools across the country have also unionized in recent years, perhaps in response to a situation where a compensation arrangement in which workers receive negative money is allegedly generous.
URCHA and the College participated in two mediated negotiation sessions earlier this year in hopes of breaking the deadlock. The content of those sessions is confidential, but no agreement was reached, and the College and union have since returned to unmediated negotiation sessions. McFarland said, “the College’s bargaining committee has met with the union for negotiations over fifteen times, for extensive amounts of time at each meeting,” a claim Rall considers a “stretch.” Most meetings have only been one hour long, Rall said, and in the recent March 10 bargaining meeting, “the college spent at least 20 minutes… to meet in a caucus where the college’s bargaining team communicated with a secret team of administrators who are not present at the bargaining table.” Reed administration’s official representatives at the bargaining table are Vanessa Guerrero, Dean of Students Chris Toutain, Human Resources Director Heather Quinn-Baron, and outside lawyer Nicole Elgin of Barran Liebman. The College has a legal right to conduct such caucuses with other administrators, but they slow down bargaining. Rall says that when URCHA asked the College’s representatives who they were talking to, they declined to disclose the identities of their mysterious associates due to concerns of potential harassment from the union and because the College does not believe it is obligated to provide such disclosure. Disputing the College’s reasoning, Rall said, “If their input is that important to the College’s bargaining decisions then they should be at the table, not behind a curtain [of] anonymity.”
“I think this conversation about [a] waiver [as compensation], or not, and the obstruction of the benefits and harms that this model would bring is important to bring understanding about how the college has bargained about compensation,” Rall said. Offering their own analysis of Reed administration’s tactics, they described the College’s actions as neoliberal obfuscation. “Neoliberal obfuscation is when people in institutional power use that position to deny people without any institutional power the material actions that they are asking for from those in power. In the case of URCHA, this has been a denial of our demand for better compensation. Those in power then use the additional knowledge that is conveyed upon them by the position that they hold to wring their hands and say they can’t do any better. For URCHA this has been the college mantra of ‘financial aid is complex.’ The real motivation for this non-action is obvious, and it is a dishonorable way to conduct yourself in any situation. Particularly at a place that claims to be a progressive institution.”
City Councilor Mitch Green, one of three Portland City Council members representing the district that includes Reed, implored the College to accept URCHA’s compensation requests. “HAs are what give premier liberal arts colleges like Reed the quality of its student experience, and deserve to be compensated fairly for their work,” Green said. On the College’s obfuscation, he said, “it’s particularly egregious to learn that the administration refuses to explain why they are unwilling to meet the union’s demands for compensation, dismissing the issue as too complex for these student workers to understand. Are these workers not also Reedies? That’s insulting and it’s frankly a good reminder of why they need a union in the first place.” Green said it was time for Reed administration to settle on a fair contract with URCHA, adding, “These workers [are] residents in my district and I offer them my fullest support.”
Rall stressed that URCHA and OPEIU Local 11, affiliated with the AFL-CIO, have stronger institutional contiguity than other student groups the Reed administration may have dealt with, and stalling until current union members graduate will not work. Rall is a junior, and Costigan is a senior, but URCHA leadership is actively looking for both new HAs and existing union members to find new leaders as needed. OPEIU Local 11, to which URCHA belongs, has existed since 1945 and has 2,000 members. Reed administration’s historical strategy of outwaiting activist movements until students leave or graduate, as with the aftermath of the 2018 HA unionization attempt, is thus unlikely to shake out with URCHA, which has exceptionally strong institutional backing compared to other Reed student organizations.
URCHA and the college return to the bargaining table again soon. Rall says the union, with the support of OPEIU Local 11 and the AFL-CIO, is prepared to escalate if negotiations continue to stall, although specific plans are confidential at this stage. URCHA has at least two escalating actions planned for the semester, if necessary. “I don’t know why the College won’t just fork over the compensation increase,” Rall said. “I…expected better from my administration when I came to this college and I have been severely disappointed.”