Over a dozen members of NewSWU, the group working to unionize nonacademic student workers, marched to New School Interim President Donna Shalala’s office with a roughly 10-foot-long petition asking for a fair union election on Wednesday, but were denied a meeting with her. 

NewSWU organizers hoped to have a productive conversation with Shalala regarding their current unionization effort, but were told she was unavailable — after first being blocked from accessing her office floor — in what “felt like a signal that The New School administration was stiff-arming us out,” Jovanna Liuzzo said, a NewSWU organizing committee member.

As they moved from a rally outside the UC to the eighth floor of the 12th Street Johnson Hall building, where Shalala’s office is, organizers brought with them the physical version of their petition with almost 800 signatures. The document asks that the university not object to an upcoming ruling from the National Labor Relations Board that will determine the group’s eligibility to unionize. 

The NewSWU organizers chanted “Let us vote!” and banged orange buckets as they stood in the president’s office lobby on the eighth floor, but they were initially unable to access it when the elevator unexpectedly stopped at the floor below it.  

The organizers pivoted and climbed the stairs to the ninth floor, then took the elevator back down to the eighth floor, circumventing the stoppage. The New School acknowledged that it reduces access to the floor under certain circumstances. In a statement to The New School Free Press, the university said, “as a matter of policy, access to the eighth floor is limited in circumstances when significant crowding is anticipated. The eighth floor stairway doors require authorized ID access.”  

However, Liuzzo said the university’s elevator stoppage “felt like a clear message that they were not ready to engage with us as student workers.”

“We would really like the administration to engage with us as people and individuals,” Rhiannon Hale said, another NewSWU organizing committee member. “The main thing [we want] is to try to see her face-to-face to acknowledge each other as people.”

Hales said the organizers chose Wednesday afternoon to deliver the petition to Shalala because they heard she was holding office hours with select students at that time. “We thought, since she made the commitment [to be available] to students, we might have a better chance to meet her,” she said. Instead, they were met by Shalala’s chief of staff, who told organizers that the interim president would not be speaking with them. The university told the Free Press that Shalala “was in meetings all day.” 

Organizers left the large petition in her office lobby draped across the entryway. They hope to meet with her in the near future to discuss their concerns.