ResEdChat Ep 67: Recognizing the Emotions and Support Needed to Successfully Navigate a Student Staff Union Petition with Jean MacKimmie

Stewart Robinette:
Welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast. This is a platform to showcase people doing great work and talk about hot topics in residence life and college student housing. I’m guest hosting today. Once again, my name is Stewart Robinette. I use he him pronouns and for almost 20 years I served in various Res Life and housing roles throughout the East Coast in many different institutions. Now although I stepped away to now become a civil servant, I am still keeping my ear to the ground and also my eyes out there seeing what’s happening out there in the Res Life and housing world. And I’m very excited about what we’re going to be talking about today. I’ve got my good friend Jean on the line here with us today. Hey, Jean.

Jean MacKimmie:
Hey, Stewart.

Stewart Robinette:
And we’re going to be talking about unionization in Res Life. And the reason that I love that we’re going to be having Jean on here today is because she is seen as one of the experts in the field because in the US, and she may correct me in a second if I’m wrong, I believe that her institution that she was at, and I won’t date when it happened, but she may do it or you can look it up afterwards, was the first institution in the US to have an RA student group petition and successfully unionized. And they have remained a union up until this day too.
So I will share that this is also near and dear to my heart. I also had a petition as you know, Jean, and one of the great things about Jean is that she’s one of the first person that I spoke to because Jean’s that type of a person that just calls you and is like, “Hey, heard this is going on, friend. Is there any way I can help?” So once again, I just want to thank Jean for being on here and helping once again and this discussion that we’re going to have. But I want to stop for a second and make sure that I’ve given you the due that you need, Jean. Do you mind doing a quick intro to yourself and just a little bit about yourself and your history with RA unionization?

Jean MacKimmie:
Absolutely, Stewart. So I’m Jean, as Stewart indicated Jean Ahlstrand MacKimmie. I am the Director of Residential Life at UMass Amherst. I was at UMass when the RA’s petitioned to unionize in 2001, so I will provide you with the date. I was also here when our peer mentors, which is a live in position petition to join that group in 2014. I currently serve as the director, so I’m on the bargaining team for management, have bargained three successor contracts and lots of impact bargaining agreements during the Covid pandemic. So we were the only ones for a very long time at UMass Amherst that had unionized resident assistants. So I was really the only person with experience, not a chosen area of expertise, but certainly a place where I was the only person really who had the experience.

Stewart Robinette:
And I know that many people have called upon that experience and you continue to share it and I know that we are always so thankful that you do that, Jean. And the thing that I’m really excited about with this discussion that we’re going to have is that many of our listeners and viewers may remember that recently Roompact and ACPA hosted, it was about, I think, an hour long or 90 minute webinar on your staff is unionizing. How does it work? And it was by one of your staff members, right? Was it Tyler Bradley that did it? Am I remembering correctly?

Jean MacKimmie:
Yes, correct.

Stewart Robinette:
He did a great job. I encourage all of our viewers and listeners to take a listen to that if you haven’t already, but we’re going to be taking a different view on it because you can read about how it works and hear great from Tyler on that. But we wanted to get into a Res Lifey topic on it and we wanted to get into the feelings of it. So I hope y’all are ready to get into the feelings of unionization and what it means. So let me just jump into this question that whenever I’ve talked to anybody, people have mentioned this to me, Jean, they asked me this. I know that when I first started talking to you about this and you called me up that day, it was one of the first things you started talking to me about, and it’s this, if you’ve had an RA union at UMass Amherst for many, many years now, does having that union change the relationship and the community that your staff and your residents and your student staff that they have there at UMass?

Jean MacKimmie:
Honestly, for us, it hasn’t. I mean, we have a great residential program. We have been able to shift and change that program over time based on the needs of students and trends in the field. There are certainly moments in unionization where it does change the relationship that during the pandemic when we were talking about impact bargaining around the various different issues, it was hard and it was sometimes contentious, but overall, we’ve been able to run a really good program and have great relationships with our student staff.

Stewart Robinette:
I remember when you and I spoke about that, that brought relief to me because in many ways, and maybe this was just my own feelings at the time where it was such an unknown thing or where it would be different. It could bring this horrible, horrible change that would completely take the direction that we want to take community building in a different way. You haven’t experienced that at all, right?

Jean MacKimmie:
No, and I do think because we’re a large campus, the supervisors of our RAs aren’t in the management bargaining position, and I don’t put any of the other members of my team in that position so that RAs can see them as supervisors and leaders and that RAs can go to their supervisor or supervisors with concerns and not also see them as management. So my experience is from a large institution and there is some separation.

Stewart Robinette:
I’m sure that your frontline professional staff really appreciate that too because I know with my staff when I had them, the relationship that you had with your student staff was so important. And I mean, even for me when I look back when I was a frontline staff member, those memories are just incredible. And some of the relationships I’ve kept with RAs that I was our hall director of. I talked that I wanted to focus a little bit more on the emotional part and we had some good conversations leading up to this podcast. We wanted to focus on the feelings that go along with it.
So this is where for some of our, I want to say younger, but I’ll say less experienced audience members, this may be easy for them, but for Jean and I, give us a little bit of support here because we’re going to go a little bit back in time, which is longer than some of you all, but I wanted to really focus on the memories of when that petition first hit your desk, Jean. I know that I was really lucky. I had been in law school, I’d focused on labor law and so logistically, and as far as how the process would happen, I felt good about that and that was known. The emotional part was a lot different for me to navigate. But I’m curious from your perspective, what was it like for you? Do you remember those feelings and what it was like?

Jean MacKimmie:
Yeah, so I was not the director, so the petition did not land on my desk, which was good. We were in a very different time. I mean, the thought of undergraduate student staff forming a union in 2001 was unprecedented. I know the campus resisted at every step of the process engaging in that process until it decided finally to bargain a contract. So I know for the leadership in residential life at that time, it was really challenging and we were in the news, our chancellor wrote to The Chronicle of Higher Education. The chancellor also wrote to students asking them to resist the petition.
I mean, it was quite contentious and I was an assistant director at that time, I mean, those of us in the field were just really trying to continue to work and do good work. Also, to be perfectly honest, I was pregnant on leave and parenting an infant during that one year period of the petition to the vote, and so I was sleep deprived, I don’t remember a lot, but I do really remember focusing on live-in staff and the Ras, make sure that they felt supported and valued through that really public process.

Stewart Robinette:
Well, before we start talking about the live-in staff and your focus on them, because that’s been one of the hallmarks, I know, of your professionalism throughout the years, the way you really focus on your staff members, your team members, I want to focus on how others supported you during that time. Now granted, you were on leave and had you had your child yet or were you getting ready to have it? I know a petition usually is a long process.

Jean MacKimmie:
I had my child right in the middle between petition and vote.

Stewart Robinette:
Wow. So how did your supervisor or other people in the field or colleagues, what type of support did you get and what were maybe some of the things that weren’t so supported during the time?

Jean MacKimmie:
I don’t remember a lot of support from the field. I think other people were like, “What is happening at UMass Amherst?” And didn’t really know how to talk about it because it was so new. I had an outstanding supervisor at that time, and so felt like she was really able to balance being in that management level and doing that and still really supporting the team. And so I felt very supported. I felt very supported during my leave. So overall, had a good experience and it was hard.

Stewart Robinette:
Right, and well, that’s one of the things. You can have a hard experience but still be really good and really supportive, but at the end of you’re like, “That’s really hard.” I think it changed with my experience because the support of the field was there. I remember I got a call from Mary DeNiro from ACUHO-I. I got a call from you, I gpt calls from other mentors and resources out there, and I guess that’s something that’s changed over the years. One thing that is probably different too, and I just want us to really highlight going back to 2001 versus now. I know you speak to people about this, social media and the way we communicate and the way society takes information and puts it out there, it’s really changed. Any memories of the emotional impact at that time on you or your team versus what you hear from others looking at that social media dynamic that, I mean, it was present in 2001. I mean, I’m always a late adopter with technology. I don’t know about you, but 2001, I mean, it was there, but not like it is now, right?

Jean MacKimmie:
Right. I mean, like I said, one, it was over 20 years ago, so you’re testing the memory and I was sleep deprived. It felt like a very campus-based issue at the time from my recollection. I don’t remember a lot of other conversations about it. Certainly it was getting attention at the state level. The people in the director level positions may have had very different experiences than I did.

Stewart Robinette:
Well, let’s talk about the staff then, because you mentioned about the support that staff was receiving at the time. When I got the petition and we shared it with the staff and everyone else, it was tough because I remember others, and I’ll go back to social media now, there was a lot of negativity put on social media about what my frontline staff had done to cause the RAs to unionize, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. The staff was amazing at that time and they had great relationships with the RAs, but supporting them became one of the things that I was missing a little bit at the beginning and then as a university, really had to figure out how to support that professional staff. What have been your experiences with that at the time, and as you advise others and have seen others as we enter in today’s age, what does that look like from your perspective?

Jean MacKimmie:
Yeah, I think that’s really important. I mean, one of the first things I say to people is what you talked about, it’s not personal. A decision for RAs to petition to unionize is not about Jean, it’s not about Stewart and it’s not about some decision we made. There’s a lot of factors. Those factors are different campus to campus, student group to student group. So I think that’s really important. I think it does take a considerable amount of time from the director level when there is a petition to unionize. So campus meetings, you get into bargaining, you start identifying what all the proposals are. I mean, just through that process, there’s a lot of time. That time looks different depending on how the campus decides to approach it, whether they agree to immediately, go to bargaining and accept the petition or fight the petition, et cetera.
But really thinking through how, as the leader of the department, you can carve out that time and still support staff and take that time to support staff and understand what the campus dynamics and expectations are around what you’re sharing, what you’re not sharing, what you’re able to talk about, what you’re not able to talk about. That varies campus to campus. I was just looking earlier on a couple of campuses websites that really outlined process and frequently asked questions for their student staff when we didn’t do that at UMass in 2001. So it seems like they were able to talk a little bit more about what was happening. We weren’t. We didn’t talk about it with our student staff, and I still don’t talk about what’s the details of bargaining and what’s on the table with the staff that I’m working with.
And so for me it’s about helping them understand where we are in process, making time that people can come and ask questions or get support or their student staff are saying one thing, can I help them process through that? So really for me, it’s a time challenge in a lot of ways. I mean, you have to have those relationships with your staff to start.

Stewart Robinette:
Right, the relationships are key because I remember there was a time to before conversation just zipped up around me from my front line staff realizing that, hey, if they’re not talking openly here, two things are happening and both of them are bad. One, they’re not talking about it at all. They’re just bottling it, which is not healthy. And the other thing is they’re talking about it amongst each other but with no direction and no answers to their questions. I think when you talk about the relationships and it’s one of the core principles, the importance that that plays into it is huge. This sparked a question in my mind. If we could go back to where you were talking about, you said Umass, at first, came out really against it, and I mean, I don’t think we’re sharing any gossip or secrets. It was pretty public, right?

Jean MacKimmie:
Very public. You can still find things online about what we did.

Stewart Robinette:
So it was pretty public. I realized early on that I had to be careful with the tone that I was seeing from, I call them the higher ups or your senior leadership, but provost and presidents and the people in the suits, your inside council or outside council, about how I was making sure that I was thinking about how I take the emotions that I’m seeing from them or how they’re processing it and not potentially saying, “Okay, that’s the way I should be with my staff or others.” When you’ve talked to others, have you heard that type of a sentiment and how have you advised people to navigate the emotions associated with navigating your own emotions while trying to also help your frontline staff, your middle management navigate it?

Jean MacKimmie:
Yeah, I think that’s a really good question, Stewart. Even when our peer mentors petitioned in 2014? Is that what I said it was? the university filed with the Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission to block that petition as well, and I was involved in going to the hearing and all those things. And for me, relationships became a really critical part of that. Although I had to go to the Department of Labor in Springfield and talk about why this shouldn’t happen, my relationships with the student staff still needed to be positive. So I think sometimes I was in the hallway talking to them outside of this hearing and then going into the hearing room to have a different conversation, and that felt strange for some people. It didn’t feel strange for me. So how do you continue to value the people that are working in residential life and the work that they do when the university may not be valuing the petition to unionize, which are very different things.

Stewart Robinette:
Part of that valuing too is when we talk about valuing viewpoints and unionization, at least from my experience, has become, well, it hasn’t become, I think it’s always been since the rise of it. I mean, I’ll share a little bit about my background that I don’t think we’ve ever talked about. I grew up in the coal camps of Appalachia and my father was a coal miner, and so I’ve seen unionization both from management side and also from the worker side and from those that are unionized that are workers and those that aren’t unionized as workers. And what I have made as my own viewpoint is that it’s not good nor bad. Also in my mind, it’s not that it just is what it is, but it can be good or it can be bad depending on what the environment is and what the ultimate outcome is.
But I guess what I’m getting at there is when you’re having to navigate what can be a very dualistic, “I’m either for unions or against unions because I have this political leaning or that political leaning” or “I know this person that is… Did you navigate that with any of your team members or have you ever encountered that and what’s your advice on that?

Jean MacKimmie:
Umass Amherst is a highly unionized campus, and so that is part of our fabric. I mean, we have multiple unions. Our graduate students were unionized before our undergraduate staff, so were our professional staff. And so I think we had a little bit less of that. There were certainly people who didn’t understand it, didn’t have experience, were wondering why people doing this, didn’t understand why they were in a union as a professional staff member and those kinds of things. So there certainly was a range of views within the residential life staff. There probably still are, although people come here knowing that we’re union shop, and so that’s part of the experience and there are positives and challenges. It’s not good or bad. There’s both all mixed up in the sauce of both positives and challenges of having unionized undergraduate students in particular.

Stewart Robinette:
How do you advise, and I just want to drill in a little bit more, are there times before you’re having a conversation with someone, you can tell that they’re very, very pro-union or they’re very, very anti-union, and how does that show itself in the workplace and what’s your advice for maybe managers of those team members if this happens?

Jean MacKimmie:
I think I see less anti-union here just because of the environment that we’re in.

Stewart Robinette:
That makes sense.

Jean MacKimmie:
I think very, very, pro-union. I mean, I have experienced there being challenges of unionized staff, also supervising unionized staff and navigating, if you’re adamantly in support of, how do you help people make decisions about their own position on whether to join the union or not or be part of the vote and those kinds of things. And so I think that’s what’s harder is having people personally be very positive and sit with someone else who’s trying to make those decisions about what this means for them.
When I was very early in my career, I sat in the same, I was a residence director when the professional staff unionized at UMass Amherst, and I had no union experience prior to that. My father was a owner of a small machine shop, had a very small staff. Those folks were not union. I learned a lot from my father about managing employees that I really appreciate. So it was new to me and I didn’t really understand why, as a professional staff member, I needed a union. So it took me some time to understand that, why that might be beneficial, what might be some of the challenges, so I went through that same process.

Stewart Robinette:
And now you’re seen as probably one, if not the, expert with RA unionization in the US.

Jean MacKimmie:
I know. Funny, huh?

Stewart Robinette:
I wanted to take a moment to think about a group of staff that is sometimes forgotten that’s near and dear in miles, it’s middle management. And I think middle management just because one of the primary things is how do they, not control communication but really help with communication? What sage advice do you have for middle management or those supporting middle management when a petition comes or when a staff may look like they’re going to be unionizing?

Jean MacKimmie:
I would say a few things. One, my first thing I said before, don’t take it personally. You have to understand your own feelings about it and learn some things, but in order to move through this process, you have to do some of that management of emotions for yourself and not on other people.
And so I think having a network of colleagues outside of your institution is always important, not just in a unionization situation. Having those people other places that you can talk to who can give you that support is really valuable because there may be things you can’t talk about on your own campus that you could then talk with colleagues about. Really asking the questions about what you’re able to talk about and not. Again, different campuses have very different perspectives on how you can engage with people on this conversation when there’s a petition. You may have to just say to everyone, “I’m not at liberty to have this conversation,” if that’s your institutions stance. Which I still see as transparent. If you can say, “I am not able to talk.” To just avoid it, I don’t think it’s helpful, but if you can say, “I can’t talk about this.”

Stewart Robinette:
Yeah, or maybe seeing where you can take the discussion of parts that you can talk about or at least explaining why you can’t talk about it. I’ve been in those situations to where it’s avoidance rather than just acknowledging, “Hey, I know this is going on, but I can’t talk about it.” Just saying those words are so powerful to your team members, especially those that you’re supervising.

Jean MacKimmie:
Right, and you can still listen. I mean, you may be able not to talk about it, share your view, share what’s happening on campus, you can still listen. Help people make decisions without influence. We all learned good listening skills in the course of our career around helping people unpack what they’re thinking, and I think most of the time, we can do that.

Stewart Robinette:
Well, and then taking what you’ve heard also and making sure that you’re passing that conversation up appropriately. I know that can also be difficult when it doesn’t get passed on. We’re so good sometimes at the communication aspects, and there’s other times where I’m like, “Man, we really missed it there as a team. We could have managed that better and made better decisions if we just had the communication flowing there on it.”

Jean MacKimmie:
Absolutely. Yeah, sharing up, I think taking care of yourself. You can’t take care of other people if you’re not taking care of yourself. Residential life people, whether it’s directors, mid-managers, we are the experts in our work. The labor people, the HR people, the councils on our campus aren’t experts in their work. They don’t know what necessarily what a resident assistant does and what’s important about the program. And so really recognizing our expertise too and middle management to share their expertise and knowledge of what’s happening on the ground with folks who are at the table. I find that really valuable when people are like, “Hey, heads up, Jean, this is what’s being talked about right now.” It’s like, “Thank you very much.” I can prepare for that.

Stewart Robinette:
I just want to highlight what you said there because that’s been such an important guide post for me is when you’re at the table with others and we talk about imposture syndrome, something like that, just because it’s a lawyer with a JD from a fancy law firm, just because it’s a provost, if you’re at that table, it’s because your opinion and your voice matters, and you can sway the direction that the strategy or the way you’re going to support your team or be able to recover from what can sometimes be a very difficult event by using your voice when you have it. So don’t listen to me on this, listen to Jean because she said it first, but I had to highlight that, Jean. I think it’s so important.
I know we’re getting to the end of our time here and I’m so appreciative of you joining us on this podcast, but I wanted to circle back to the beginning of our discussion and really just make sure that our listeners hear what your experience has been and your views on it. So I’m going to ask it again. If one of our listeners gets faced with a petition to unionize or their director, if they happen to not be the director or they happen to maybe be on leave for pregnancy or other reason, but if they get faced with a petition or their office gets faced with a petition, is it that big of a deal?

Jean MacKimmie:
From my experience, I mean, our original, it was a big deal in people’s perceptions. I think it depends on your campus culture and some of those things around how much of an impact it’s going to have. So it could be, it might not be. And we are long-standing. Our department didn’t fall apart. We have made changes. We’ve continued to be a strong residential program. We do some things better, I think, because we have unionized staff around our training and our expectations and our consistency and those kinds of things. There are challenges too, and so those are just things we have to understand, but it’s not the end of the world. And I do think if we look at the current trend, we’re going to see more of this. And so the Northeast in particular seems to be very busy in this area right now.

Stewart Robinette:
Yes, yes. We’re seeing those there. I love the point that you’re making there. I remember my associate dean at the time, we were about halfway through the petition gathering all the information, and we had this aha moment, but we headed. I want to give credit for credits due there to Tim Miller and he said, “Look, at the end of the day, we’re either going to have an RA union or we’re not going to have an RA union.” So the most important thing for us right now is to support our students and support our staff to make sure that no matter where it ends up, we’re able to continue to build a community that we’re building. And it sounds like that’s something that has guided your practice too. So I just always take that quote away with me that Tim said to me, because it just really stuck out in my mind that day when he said that to me.

Jean MacKimmie:
That is very wise. So thank you for sharing it.

Stewart Robinette:
Jean, I want to thank you again for chatting with us, for sharing your expertise. I know I can’t speak on behalf of the profession, but I feel I must for sharing your expertise with the profession when anyone calls or when you call them. I know that I was very grateful for it. I think it was five or six years ago when you called me. But again, thank you so much. Remember too out there that are listening and viewing this, the experts that you have there, the groups like Roompact that is putting out webinars on this topic, their blog posts where they’ve got writings on it too, but also your association with others. We’re a tight community to be able to support each other, to help each other make the best decisions so that we can all rise up together on this.
If you ever have any topics that you want Roompact to be able to speak about on ResEdChat, please, please, please send those on to us. We would love to hear them so that we can meet you all where you are and provide those types of podcasts. But other than that, thank you Roompact for letting me do this guest hosting opportunity again. Hopefully I get to come back. And with that, we’ll see you sometime soon. Bye everybody.