Not wanting to burden her working-class immigrant parents who still had two kids at home, Hosaena Tilahun was only at Dartmouth College for a couple of weeks before she began looking for a part-time job to pay for living expenses not covered by her financial aid package.

“It was kind of a no-brainer that I’d have to work and go to school at the same time,” she told me. “I wasn’t going to ask my parents to cover my everyday expenses.”

She also didn’t want to saddle her parents with her college debt. Under Dartmouth’s financial aid formula, Tilahun’s family was responsible for paying about $10,000 a year toward the cost of enrollment.

In Hanover, Tilahun found work in the college’s dining services. Four years later, she continues to work in a campus cafe, making coffee drinks, running a cash register and training new student workers.

Only now as a senior, Tilahun earns more than double the hourly wage that she made as a first-year student. And she has the Student Worker Collective at Dartmouth to thank.

The union, which represents roughly 300 students, formed in 2022. With its original contract set to expire, the union remains at loggerheads with college officials over a new deal.

Seeking protection

The dispute isn’t really over money.

Although they’re proposing different routes to get there, the two sides seem to agree that starting pay for students who work in dining services should jump to about $23 an hour — a $2 increase from the current contract. For a college with an $8 billion endowment, that’s pocket change.

A major sticking point boils down to whether the college is willing to stand up for some of its most vulnerable students now that Donald Trump has returned to the White House.

The Trump administration has made it clear that non-citizens are fair game for deportation. Particularly, if they participated in any pro-Palestinian rallies that cropped up on college campuses — including Dartmouth — after the start of the Israel-Hamas war in 2023.

The Student Worker Collective is fighting to protect a portion of its membership who are international students from poor families. Sadly, it’s not a fight that Dartmouth officials seem eager to join.

They’re mostly worried about Dartmouth becoming the next Columbia, where the Trump administration is threatening to cancel $400 million in federal grants and contracts over the school’s handling of last year’s campus protests.

Where does that leave Dartmouth’s Student Worker Collective?

Without written assurances that Dartmouth will do everything in its power to keep federal immigration agents and anyone else with a badge and gun from roaming the campus, I wouldn’t rule out a workers’ strike.

At the most recent session on March 6, the two sides agreed to extend the current contract, which was set to expire on Tuesday, to mid-April.

After then? All bets are off.

‘Overlapping identities’

Tilahun is playing a pivotal role in the contract negotiations. She serves on the union’s organizing committee, which gives her a seat at the bargaining table.

She’s well qualified to represent student workers.

Tilahun was 5 years old when her family relocated to the Washington area from Ethiopia. Her father found work at a chain restaurant, but was fired when his English didn’t improve fast enough to please his bosses. After losing a second job in the retail sector for the same reason, he earned his license to become a city bus driver.

A union provided him “job security,” Tilahun said. “I saw the difference being in a union made for him.

“He still works very hard. I didn’t see him too much when I was growing up because he was always working overtime.”

Meanwhile, her mother holds down jobs as a caregiver and retail sales clerk.

Many of the students who work in Dartmouth’s dining services come from modest backgrounds in the U.S. or a developing country. Many also are first-generation college students.

“What made our first (union) campaign so successful is that we could relate to each other,” Tilahun said. “We have overlapping identities.”

Tilahun has a second campus job as an undergraduate advisor, also known as a resident assistant. In May 2024, undergraduate advisors voted to join the Student Worker Collective, which is now negotiating an initial contract on their behalf.

Since talks began last fall, the union and the college have held five negotiating sessions without reaching an agreement.

In 2023, the college brought in attorney Rachel Munoz to lead its office of labor relations. She held a similar position at Barnard College, where Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock served as president until taking over in Hanover in 2023.

Before working in academia, Munoz was a partner at Jackson Lewis, a national law firm known for its anti-union activity. The firm’s clients include Amazon, Google and Tesla.

Dartmouth recognizes that it has the upper hand — at least until students vote to strike. The Student Worker Collective can’t afford to hire a labor attorney or an experienced union negotiator. In its most recent annual filing with the National Labor Relations Board, the union reported $8,048 in total receipts. (The union takes out 2% of students’ paychecks for dues.)

“They’re smart kids, obviously, but they’re definitely at a disadvantage,” said Chris Peck, a longtime painter at the college, who is president of Local 560 of the Service Employees International Union that represents more than 500 Dartmouth employees. “It’s not a level playing field.”

‘Democratic power’

Educating new students about the history behind the unionization effort and explaining why it behooves them to support the worker collective is an ongoing challenge.

“It gets harder every year,” said Tilahun, a geography major.

“People forget” what it was like before the union came along, added Roan Wade, vice president of the Student Worker Collective.

Students had to settle for whatever the college was willing to pay, which not that many years ago wasn’t much above minimum wage.

Students in nonunion campus jobs have also benefited from the worker collective. When college officials finally recognized the threat of a union was real, they raised students’ pay across campus to $16 an hour in hopes that it would quell the dining workers uprising.

It didn’t.

“We’re building democratic power on campus,” Tilahun said when I sat down with her and Wade this week. “We’re not dependent on the good nature of the administration. We have a lot more control of our daily lives.”

Some foreign students also send a good portion of their earnings to their families back home. International students “really need the money, and just not because they want to go out on weekends,” Peck said. “I don’t think the college realizes that.”

For financial reasons, Dartmouth also needs students who will take less-than-glamorous jobs to make ends meet. Even if it could find people in the Upper Valley or beyond to fill the positions, the college would most likely have to provide health insurance and other benefits that students don’t receive.

Dartmouth likes to tout the economic diversity of its student body. There’s still no getting around, however, that roughly half of the college’s 4,400 undergraduates come from families with the financial means to cover the $90,000-a-year cost (not counting beer money) to matriculate in Hanover.

Dartmouth’s reasons for recruiting students from working-class families and developing countries aren’t purely altruistic. Who else will show up for a campus cafe’s opening shift at 7:30 a.m. on a weekday or stick around to turn out the lights on a Saturday night?

“The rich kids aren’t going to do these jobs,” Tilahun said.

‘Sanctuary campus’

No matter how much its working-class members need decent paying campus jobs, the union can’t lose sight that there’s more at stake than just dollars.

With Immigration Customs Enforcement, or ICE, lurking in the shadows, keeping students safe has to be a union priority — even if Dartmouth officials are scared to do anything that will put them under a government spotlight.

“We are still pushing them to agree to a sanctuary campus model which means no cooperating with immigration law enforcement except with the presence of a warrant signed by a judge,” Tilahun wrote in her email. 

An early bargaining session was “particularly hostile,” Tilahun and Wade said. Munoz, the college’s in-house labor lawyer, shared a “vague message about how non-cooperation with ICE was not guaranteed,” they said.

While the most recent bargaining session went better, “disappointingly, (Dartmouth’s) response to our international and noncitizens work clause was just a copy and paste of insufficient campus services and officers,” Tilahun wrote in her email.

The college’s take?

Dartmouth is “committed to protecting the privacy and rights of its community members with the framework of the law,” Jana Barnello, the college’s director of media relations and strategic communications, told me via email on Friday.

“Dartmouth has an existing protocol for interacting with federal agents on campus,” which asks students and other community members to notify the college’s safety and security department if contacted by ICE on campus, Barnello added. College lawyers will then assess the “legality of what federal agents are requesting,” she said.

Keeping in mind the Beilock administration’s track record on protecting students’ constitutional rights that’s not reassuring.

Last May, Dartmouth officials allowed dozens of state cops in riot gear to march across the Green to arrest 89 people during a peaceful pro-Palestinian protest. After what happened that night, “no one trusts the college,” said Wade, the collective’s vice president.

Wade was one of two student activists arrested in October 2023 for setting up a tent on the lawn outside the president’s office. They were found guilty of criminal trespass, a misdemeanor.

In the contract negotiations, the union is asking the college to establish a legal assistance fund for international and noncitizen student workers who might find themselves the target of federal immigration officials. The union wants Dartmouth to put $15,000 a year into the fund.

After what just what happened at Columbia, the union should be asking for more. Last Saturday, U.S. immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia master’s degree graduate of Palestinian heritage, inside his New York apartment building, which is owned by the school.

The Trump administration is threatening to deport Khalil, 30, for helping lead pro-Palestinian protests on the Ivy League campus last year. Khalil holds a green card and is married to an American citizen who his eight months pregnant, The New York Times reported.

In the current political climate, Dartmouth students that Tilahun knows from African countries are “trying to keep their heads down,” she said.

As for herself, she’s not worried. She’s a U.S. citizen, having gone through the naturalization process in high school. Her parents, on the hand, wouldn’t mind if she kept a lower profile, she said.

But Tilahun, who is headed for graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall, can’t stop now.

Students behind the union need to stand up for what’s right, even if their college’s leaders lack the moral courage to join them.

Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.