Brown’s Student Labor Alliance has seen a resurgence in membership and activity following a decline during the COVID-19 pandemic. SLA has long supported labor organizing both on and off campus, forging ties with dining, libraries and facilities workers who have been a part of United Service and Allied Workers of Rhode Island since 2003.
As organized labor has spread across campus, the alliance has expanded to advocate for newly formed unions that represent computer science TAs, shuttle drivers and medical residents.
“SLA has been around for (a) number of decades, but we lost a lot of institutional memory, like a lot of clubs during COVID,” SLA President Maddock Thomas ’26 said. “It became very difficult to do labor organizing when virtual and separate from the campus.”
SLA has previously protested the University’s outsourcing of Mail Services jobs and led the campaign that helped bring air conditioning to the Sharpe Refectory.
According to Thomas, the student organization’s membership has risen since he joined in 2022, growing from “five or ten” in attendance to “thirty-five with twenty that show up on a weekly basis.” SLA has grown from a “close-knit group of friends” to an initiative aiming to get everyone involved, said Carlo Kim ’27, SLA’s director of organizing.
In the fall, the group helped organize a protest in support of Brown’s USAW-RI workers and shuttle drivers that unionized in fall 2023. The group has been “great at getting the word out to students” about various campus services like dining, facilities and libraries, said Amy Cardone, the business agent of USAW-RI.
“SLA has done a lot of the public contract fight for them,” Thomas said. In November, in the days leading up to the rally, the organization published an open letter to the University in The College Hill Independent with over 500 signatures.
The student group also functions as a centralized hub for labor at Brown, Thomas said. Its leaders hope to facilitate conversation between unions across campus and with larger unions statewide.
“Every union has its own internal structure,” Thomas explained. “But SLA — especially now in the last year or so — has been trying to function to bring a lot of the labor movement on campus together because normally a lot of these unions really don’t talk to each other.”
Michael Ziegler GS, the president of the Graduate Labor Organization, said that SLA is particularly valuable because it “acts as a coordinating center between the three different locals that are currently represented on campus: ourselves, USAW and Teamsters.”
“This allows us to be able to organize as a broader coalition of unions on campus,” he added.
The SLA is currently planning its third annual State of the Unions event, which convenes labor organizers from Brown’s student and staff unions to discuss their bargaining goals and organizing strategies. The event also aims to give students ways to support organizing on campus.
“We bring unions from all over the area to come speak to students,” Kim said.
Ziegler said he began communicating more with the organization after he was invited to speak at SLA’s State of the Unions. At the time, GLO had just begun bargaining its most recent contract, he said.
“What I spoke about was what we’re trying to win with the contract and … how undergraduates could help,” he said. “That’s sort of how I began to know the organization — beyond that, we try and keep in regular contact.”
The State of the Unions is tentatively set to be held this March, according to Kim.
Since SLA is an undergraduate student group, members can provide a unique perspective to staff on campus that promotes progress on contracts with the University, according to Ziegler and Cardone.
“There is a real interest in keeping a good relationship with the undergraduate community,” as undergraduates pay tuition and will potentially become donors, Ziegler said.
“The University knows that without the students, they don’t have a university,” Cardone added.
The organization hopes to continue expanding its membership, supporting labor movements on campus and advocating for broader social issues, SLA leaders explained.
“It is very grounding to speak with workers, understand their issues and fight for them,” Kim said. “It shows that there’s a life after Brown and a life outside of Brown.”
Emily Feil is a senior staff writer covering staff and student labor. She is a freshman from Long Beach, NY and plans to study economics and English. In her free time, she can be found watching bad TV and reading good books.
