More than a year after voting to unionize, SU staff still doesn’t have a contract

More than a year later, Syracuse University administrative, technical and professional workers who voted to join the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in June 2024 are still without a contract, as the university sunsets 93 academic programs.

Donna McLellan, a College of Arts and Sciences advisor and member of the bargaining committee at SEIU, said the pace is unlike what she experienced as a former union steward.

“I was the union steward for 10 years in parking, and we negotiated three union contracts between Syracuse and Union 317,” McLellan said. 

Odette Rodriguez, Assistant Director at the Syracuse Office of Undergraduate Research and Collective Engagement (SOURCE), described the recent restructuring of her office as not just as a physical move to a new building, but also a thematic one. Her office is now co-located under the new Center for Experiential Learning, part of that consolidation process including layoffs.

Meanwhile, labor organizers like McLellan say the university’s Office of Human Resources has extended the negotiation process significantly. Rodriguez noted that bargaining was supposed to begin in earnest in fall 2024.

“While our unit and bargaining committee is ready to go — even accounting for them having their day-to-day jobs and having to manage them — the university continues to delay,” Rodriguez said.

Union organizers say the slow pace of negotiations isn’t meeting the needs of the newly formed union, as the process further affirms their decision to unionize.

“I feel like it’s very different from when I negotiated with parking because we would meet every Friday at 9 a.m. So there was a regular cadence. Not this one. It’s whenever it fits everyone’s calendar,” McLellan said.

Organizers say that despite being all on one campus and in service of one institution, there is a distinct variability in experiences across departments and position bands.

“There lacks a consistency of structure, hours, disciplinary procedures and different things like that for an hourly person,” Rodriguez said. 

Unionization has long been seen as a way to ensure protections for workers, with nearly 71% of Americans having a positive association with labor unions regardless of which political party they belong to, according to a 2026 Gallup poll.

The sentiment is even more pronounced in higher education. Between 2012 and 2024, the number of unionized faculty grew by 7.5%, according to the National Education Association. During that same time, the number of graduate student employees in unions grew by 133%.

These statistics, however, focus only on faculty and graduate students. The absence of other university workers in the statistics feeds into the push for unionization.  

“I’ve been talking to other kinds of administrative staff and a lot of them did talk about this as feeling invisible. You know, kind of like students and the professoriate are the only people we really care about here,” McLellan said.

Rodriguez sensed a larger backlash in the move to unionize, and spoke about a wider sentiment felt around the campus: that staff who wanted to collectively bargain were seen as agitators, who wanted to squeeze more out of the university.

“I think that’s a big misconception of the perception of our [bargaining] units. It’s that we hate it here and we think they’re all evil villains,” she said. “And that’s not the case. I mean, people put in so many hours because they believe so deeply about the students that they support.”

In his first speech to the University Senate, Chancellor Mike Haynie noted that “the issues and themes that dominated the work of the Senate last year were employee rights, pay and benefits, employee workload, governance and procedural policies and speech rights.”

He called on the body to not give these elements so much air time: “My aspiration for the year ahead is for the focus and substance of the work of this body first to be about advancing discovery, academic excellence and serving the learning and wellness needs of our students.” 

The bargaining sessions continue, but Rodriguez notes the university continues to highlight its finances.

“They’re constantly talking about their own financial position. And, like any business, I think they’re making choices about what to prioritize. And that’s what I also mean when I say they wish us to just kind of be invisible,” she said.