About Us

Our History

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  1. We began as a group of student dining hall workers. Our first meeting was in the fall of 2022.
  2. We realized that other workers had similar problems + we could grow our numbers through solidarity with all student workers. We decided to go wall-to-wall (organize all student workers) in the spring of 2023.
  3. MUWU publicized the campaign after organizing and building support for a year in the spring of 2024! We started collecting union cards.
  4. By fall of 2024, a majority of student workers had signed union cards! On Monday, November 25th, 2024, we filed for an election with the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board).
  5. On December 6th, 2024, we came to a stipulated election agreement with the Macalester administration. In this agreement, MUWU was forced to exclude members of off-campus work study and the Bonner Scholar program from the bargaining unit, and the election ballots of workers who receive compensation in form of a stipend (RAs, summer research assistants) were subject to challenge. The decision to go forward with this agreement was voted on democratically and won with a supermajority. Nevertheless, the decision on Macalester’s behalf to force our hand to exclude these workers was extremely disappointing.
  6. We won our certification election on February 25th and 26th, 2025, by 87% of voters.