Pete Rorabaugh and Rebecca Hill

[00:07] PETE RORABAUGH: My name is Pete Rorabaugh. I'm 48 years old. Today's date is December 1, 2021. And we're recording at StoryCorps Atlanta. The name of my partner is Rebecca Hill, and she is a colleague of mine at Kennesaw State University.

[00:23] REBECCA HILL: It's actually December 11.

[00:25] PETE RORABAUGH: Did I say December 12?

[00:26] REBECCA HILL: You said December 1.

[00:28] PETE RORABAUGH: Oh, sorry. It's December 1.

[00:30] REBECCA HILL: So spontaneity, that means December 11.

[00:33] PETE RORABAUGH: It's December 11.

[00:37] REBECCA HILL: Just say the date for us.

[00:38] PETE RORABAUGH: Today's date is December 11, 2021.

[00:41] REBECCA HILL: Awesome.

[00:41] PETE RORABAUGH: Thank you.

[00:42] REBECCA HILL: All right. I'm Rebecca Hill. I'm 52 years old. This is December 11, 2021 at StoryCorps atlanta. My interview partner is Pete Rorabaugh, and he is my friend and colleague at Kennesaw State University. And we're both members of the union there.

[01:00] PETE RORABAUGH: Great. So thanks for bringing up the union, Rebecca. And the union that we're talking about today is the United campus Workers of Georgia and specifically the chapter that Rebecca and I are a part of at Kennesaw State University. But before we start talking about that, Rebecca, can you talk about your history with labor unions before we started this work at KSU and even before maybe you were involved in being in a union, what your experience or your impressions of unions were growing up?

[01:34] REBECCA HILL: Sure. I would say that as a kid growing up in the seventies, I knew about unions from things like the movie Norma Rae, which I remember seeing more than once as a kid. And my parents were pretty progressive politically and were big supporters of unions, even though they were both middle class people who had been, you know, who were, my father's an academic, and my mom was in academic publishing, but her father had owned a textile shop in New York, so he was definitely on the management side. But they had been raised to respect unions. And, you know, you never cross a picket line. Was like a family thing for my mother's family, for sure. So I grew up supportive of unions but not really having any reason to have much experience of them until I was in graduate school in the 1990s in Minnesota, and I was part of a campaign to try to get a union there. And we, you know, we had an election to get the union, and we did not succeed. And we were one of several failed attempts to get a union at the University of Minnesota. There was just something about that campus that made it really hard to unionize.

[02:45] PETE RORABAUGH: And was that a union just, was that going to be a union just for graduate students?

[02:48] REBECCA HILL: Yes, it was just graduate students were graduate employees. And it's a very large bargaining unit, like thousands of people in that one campus, it's like a very, very large university, and the majority of the graduate students there were research assistants, as opposed to Tas. And that was considered to be an especially hard population to try to organize. So that was my first real experience of unions, was that failed drive, which was, of course, disappointing. And then when I got my first teaching job, I was in a unionized university in New York City, at City University of New York. So I joined that union when I was a part time faculty member and was active as a part timer. And then when I got a tenure track position at that same institution, I mean, at a different campus, but the same broad city system, I was eventually the chapter chair of my chapter at Borough Manhattan Community College. So then I was much more involved in, like, the sort of seeing how the union functioned across all the different campuses, participating in things like city council hearings, where the union would be there, grievance training to learn how to handle those legally. And we had collective bargaining rights, and you could go and watch the bargaining sessions with management. We had open bargaining meetings to negotiate the contract. So that was a whole education in New York City is a real labor town. So it was also being part of a whole municipal labor movement, which was a great education in city politics, too. So I'll throw the same question back to you. What was your experience of unions or knowledge about unions before coming to. Before joining this one?

[04:29] PETE RORABAUGH: So most of my adult life, I've lived in the south, so I didn't have very much interaction with, like, I've never been in a job where I could be in a union before. But two stories that I think are pretty motivating for me in this work that we do involved my dad. So my dad was in. He was an airline pilot and started in the early eighties and ended up as being a pilot at Eastern Airlines when this kind of investor, corporate guy named Frank Lorenzo, bought the airline and then began kind of intentionally dismantling it. And the Airline Pilots association, which was the union that he was in, was pretty aggressive about trying to fight those actions on Lorenzo's behalf. And so they. I just remember as a kid, there were several, like, big, kind of, like, arena sized rallies that I went to of airline pilots association members, not just people at Eastern, but people across the whole industry who were trying to stick up for the rights of these workers. I remember conversations even. I lived in a. In Peachtree City, Georgia, which was kind of saturated with airline employees. And I remember conversations at our table, my parents and I, where there were people in the union that we lived close to who, if they saw another pilot who had crossed the picket line in the grocery store, like, they would walk behind this person with this, like, clicker machine and basically harassing them a little bit. And I remember conversations at home just being like, is that okay? And why do you do that? Should you do that? It made a big impression on me. And then all of those labor actions ended up being ultimately unsuccessful because Lorenzo had kind of dismantled the airline, and my dad left Eastern right before it folded and got another job at Delta Airlines, where there was a culture of trusting the management. Fewer, a lower participation of or a lower percentage of people who were actually in the pilots union. And there was just kind of this assumption that management is going to take care of us. We don't need to be in a union. And I remember my dad talking a lot about how these people just don't get it. It can change in a minute because that's how we felt at Eastern. You know, like, three years, four years later, there was management change at Delta, and suddenly everybody at Delta that was a colleague of his was, like, trying to join the union, trying to understand what union organizing was about. And he. I just remember he was kind of high up in the union structure at that point, and he was just frustrated that people had not understood earlier what those years would have done for their organizing power had they nothing been so willing to trust that their company and their management was going to take care of them. And all of those things sit really close in my head when I think about the work that we're doing.

[07:51] REBECCA HILL: So when. So can we, in terms of thinking about management taking care of us or sort of our relationship management, can you talk a little bit about how you got involved initially, like, even before we started unionizing at KSU, like, some of the things that you had done to try to change the direction of the way things were going at the university. I mean, like, what were some of the main things that you remember being sort of, like, on the road to unionization before the union came in?

[08:25] PETE RORABAUGH: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what your experience was like, but it felt like a long trail of things that led us to starting that chapter. And for me, that started with the consolidation of southern Poly, where I worked, and KSU, where I now work, and the fact that there was two or three years of decision making at our institution that just seemed to be completely either unaware or unconcerned about what? About the lived experience and the culture experience of the people at SPSU, as they were going through that, there was just, like, an ignorance or kind of a willful ignorance of our working conditions and how us coming over into the KSU system was going to affect us. So I remember that. I remember there being student actions on our campus right after consolidation was announced, where the students were trying to reverse the decision, but it flash forwarding to a couple years later. I remember, and this is where I think you and I started to meet each other, that we had a president that came in who was appointed by the board of regents without really much of a legitimate search for anybody or fair employment practices being applied or anything. And that university president ended up. We, as faculty and staff, protested the choice to put him in charge of the campus. So I remember there being a month of us doing silent protests on the campus green. And then within the year, he had made a decision to pull cheerleaders off of the football field who knelt during the national anthem, and that sparked a student protest that a lot of us were involved in. I remember you were involved in that stuff, too. And so those things I remember as kind of, like, these moments that, like, catalyzed activist members of the faculty and the staff and just got us talking to each other so that every time there was a new thing that happened, it felt like we already had the community and the network in place and the communication structure in place to talk to each other, to trust each other, and to show up at things, to express, you know, our frustration with whatever was happening. And I remember, you know, the relationships that I built with people during that time with you and several other colleagues were really, really strong. I think I probably. I can't even imagine having been involved in the union without those, you know, early steps, like, coming from that. I'm interested to hear you talk about this time period when we were just starting to talk about a union at all, and kind of like the first meeting or the first couple of months of us all being together to start that union. Can you talk about what your memories are of that period, and maybe more specifically, what made you decide to identify, you know, early on as a member of that group? What were your hopes for that chapter as we started it?

[11:52] REBECCA HILL: Yeah. So I had always, like, after having left my previous institution, because I came to KSU, after having been at another university for ten years, where I had been in leadership in the union.

[12:03] PETE RORABAUGH: Right.

[12:03] REBECCA HILL: And then coming to a non unionized campus, I experienced it as a much less trusting and collegial environment for faculty than my previous institution, because one of the things that. That I had appreciated about being on a unionized campus was just how much people functioned as a community and had a different attitude about the role of faculty and management or the administration. Like, we would consider the administration management, and just the analysis of power in the workplace, even when we weren't involved in an active campaign, was just really different.

[12:38] PETE RORABAUGH: So, like, it was closer. People were more trusting of each other.

[12:42] REBECCA HILL: People were more trusting of each other. People were lessen, resentful of colleagues around things like salary. I mean, also because salary was less personalistic and was more. I mean, we had a contract, it was standardized, and we had cost of living increases, and we fought to increase those cost of living increases together.

[13:00] PETE RORABAUGH: Right.

[13:01] REBECCA HILL: And so it was like, a very different, you know, having that kind of culture. There was just much less kind of. I mean, there were still personality conflicts. It's not like it was a paradise, right. But, you know, like, you knew what side you were on, and, like, if something happened, people knew, like, oh, here's the grievance officer. Like, here's the place you go when you're having an issue. Like, it was. I mean, we had 800 members on our campus, and 500 of those members were part time faculty.

[13:29] PETE RORABAUGH: Wow.

[13:30] REBECCA HILL: Yeah. And, like, we would have meetings once a month, and we had a scheduled meeting that was required. Like, the management had to let us have a meeting without administrators present in a campus room where it was scheduled. Like, they couldn't schedule other meetings during that time.

[13:45] PETE RORABAUGH: Once a month?

[13:45] REBECCA HILL: Yeah, like, we had something called the club hour. So anyway, like, which was, like, what ours is now, but it's different time of day anyway, you know? So we had that established culture, and I missed it when I was at KSU. So if anybody had said, let's unionize, I would have raised my hand immediately and come running. Let's do it, because I just feel like they're a positive thing in the workplace.

[14:07] PETE RORABAUGH: Before you go on, can we hang on this for a second? I mean, I want to get to that answer that you're going towards, that I asked. It's interesting to me, and I'd like to hear you just talk for a minute more about how the culture of these two campuses were different. Like, this collegiality component that you're talking about. And, I mean, it sounds like you really do credit the union culture or the existence of a union and the culture that that created with building some or all of that community. Is that true? Do you think that's real?

[14:42] REBECCA HILL: Yeah, I do. I really do. Like, I think that channels of communication were very, very different. Like, compared from when I. When I first came to Kennesaw, individuals take their case to the dean or to the provost. When there's something they don't like in the union, individuals take their case to other members of the union. So it's not that you wouldn't ever go to the president or whatever, but you have you. I mean, especially because of the contract, and people knew the contract. Like, just to give an example of a couple of funny, like, little weird things, but, like, we had an annual leave that was set with dates in the contract as of whatever date in May, at the end of the semester, you could not be asked to come back to campus to do any work without pay until a certain date in August.

[15:31] PETE RORABAUGH: Right.

[15:32] REBECCA HILL: And if anybody asked you to do that work, like, they would hear from the union that you had to be paid to do it. So it was, like, your time, and people know that. And then you have this protection, and this group that's protecting you is other members of the group. Right. There's, like, we would have a regular meeting every month, but you could have 50 or more people to talk about issues happening on campus. So, like, the union is there as a sort of voice of the faculty. This was only faculty union. There was staff.

[16:05] PETE RORABAUGH: I see.

[16:06] REBECCA HILL: They had a different union.

[16:07] PETE RORABAUGH: I see. Okay, interesting.

[16:08] REBECCA HILL: So, yeah. Creates a different kind of idea about, like, where you go to get problem solved, essentially. And then I think there was another question in there that I wanted to answer. Oh, like, another example, just around timing of stuff. One time we got a notice that final grades were due on December 26, for sure, the winter semester, of course. And I think finals might have stopped on December 23.

[16:37] PETE RORABAUGH: Okay.

[16:38] REBECCA HILL: You know, and I, as the union chapter chair, I wrote an email to the registrar who was taking in final grades, and I said, you know, it's 72 hours from finals, but isn't the 25th the holiday? And, like, do you want us all to be spending the whole Christmas day grading our final exams? And they said, oh, gee, sorry, we didn't realize that. And then I was able to send out. I was also given capacity as a union representative at a recognized union to communicate with the entire faculty, like, with an email, whether they were active members or not. So I can say, you know, thanks to the union, that we've been able to get your grading deadline move back. You know, we got you an extra day of holiday.

[17:20] PETE RORABAUGH: Right.

[17:20] REBECCA HILL: You know?

[17:21] PETE RORABAUGH: Wow.

[17:21] REBECCA HILL: And we had a newsletter that everybody read, you know, so, like, it just, like, people knew who we were. We had elections that people voted in. Like, there were contested elections where we had different slates running for the offices, so we had campaign meetings. I mean, it was a totally, like, the union was an important part of people's work life, and that was a union that had been established in the 1970s. So that university was used to having that presence there. So it's a little bit like the way people see a faculty Senate, I guess, but having more ability to do things right. So, I mean, to actually get things done. So, like that. I mean, for me, in terms of my experiences at KSU with the union were like, you talk about the consolidation. I think for me, one of the really big issues was the Eccor decision, which also happened during the merger. Right.

[18:17] PETE RORABAUGH: We should probably, like, build some context for what Eccor is. So remind us what that is.

[18:22] REBECCA HILL: So it's all online degree program, right? Or is it a degree program or just a set of general education courses?

[18:31] PETE RORABAUGH: I think up until this point it's been just general education courses. But I think that there's, like, currently EcCoR is developing into a larger thing that, like, maybe you can actually get your associate's degree eventually.

[18:42] REBECCA HILL: And I think it comes from outside. Right. It's not like generated by a case. I mean, like, KSU people can teach eccor classes, but the curriculum is.

[18:50] PETE RORABAUGH: That's right.

[18:51] REBECCA HILL: It's produced somewhere else.

[18:52] PETE RORABAUGH: It is produced by Eccor, which is a unit of the university system of Georgia. So it is like an outside curriculum development, delivery teaching unit that delivers those courses to students all over the state electronically.

[19:08] REBECCA HILL: So our Gen ed council, as part of our faculty governance process, unanimously voted down participating in Eccor, and the administration said, we're doing it. So that, to me, was one of the early motivating things that, like, it was just all of the faculty governance that we have. Like, we could have a totally unanimous decision about something that was very important to people's work life, and the administration just could ignore it. And that was a very frustrating experience. So that was a key thing. I remember early on the same thing with, you know, the president being appointed without any consultation and with the faculty very clearly opposed. That was a key event. And then I remember AAUP meetings, which is not the union, but a different organization that just filled up during that era that people just became more interested, and then it was like there was energy to do something more.

[20:06] PETE RORABAUGH: Right? Yeah. And that group AAUP, which stands for American association of University Professors, in some states, I mean, that's a national group. In some states, that group is your union. But because of the labor laws that exist in Georgia and the culture that we have when AAUP, when people start AAUP chapters, I guess in our state, they're certainly not union related. They're more like professional organizations. Right? Is that how you understand that?

[20:37] REBECCA HILL: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think they could, but, you know, for the purposes of, like. But then that would just be faculty, which, which actually brings me to my question for you, is, how did you first learn about the UCW, the united Campus workers, and what made you decide to contact them?

[20:58] PETE RORABAUGH: I mean, I remember, I mean, I, my experience of being in higher ed from the beginning in Georgia has always been fraud. There have always been decisions that didn't make sense to me and ways in which the state level or university level administrators just don't seem to think things through from an employee perspective. They don't seem sensitive to that position. But I remember that feeling certainly being increasing more when I was at SPSU and then at KSU after consolidation. And I remember people saying, it seemed like there was a year where, like, every conversation I had with a colleague was about how things were bad or how things were wrong. And I remember somebody saying several times, well, what do you think we should do about that? And I remember saying, like, we should have a union. Like, if we had a union, this would be different. And people would always just laugh that off and be like, oh, there's no, that's never gonna happen. And I think people would say that for a number of reasons. One, because it's unrealistic to have a union in the state of Georgia. But I think some people have always said that. Cause they think it's illegal to have a union in the state of Georgia if you're in the, if you're working for the state government. And, you know, certainly we know that's not true. It's just harder. There's just more barriers. So I vividly remember somebody sending me an email. It was either, it was one of our two colleagues that you and I both know. And they said, I just got some alert through Google that there is a higher education union at UGA. And I thought, this is ridiculous. Like, this has got to be not true. But I followed the link and read the story and looked them up and went to their website and, like, in 24 hours had a telephone call with the main activist and member at University of Georgia and was super excited about the fact that we might be able to make the same decision that they made because they'd been doing it now for two years or a year and a half. And I contacted all of you that I had been doing activist stuff with. And I remember it was a group of anywhere from ten to 15 people. And in a week or ten days, given the excitement that people had from that idea, we set up a meeting at one of our colleagues houses. We all went. Two of the members from the UGA union and one of the state level organizers came to that meeting. They gave a presentation on the history of their chapter and what they were working on. And I think our first members joined the state level union that night. So I think. Yeah, so I think that's kind of the night that our chapter started.

[23:52] REBECCA HILL: Yeah. It was a rainy night in Georgia.

[23:54] PETE RORABAUGH: It was. It was in November 2018. And that really, I mean, honestly, that's why I asked you that question about the change in the culture that you saw moving from New York to here. I would say in reverse. That has been the story of my time at KSU, because before that. Before that night, really, I did not feel community or I an intentional equity or any kind of progressive network. I mean, I had colleagues and contacts that were like minded, but it just seemed like we were so distributed, and there wasn't a way for us to kind of, like, build power together. And from the point at which we started that union in November 2018, I felt that a lot. So, yeah, that was a really important moment for me.

[24:53] REBECCA HILL: Yeah. And I think that that's the question you had asked me before about what was the experience of that night.

[25:01] PETE RORABAUGH: Yeah, absolutely.

[25:02] REBECCA HILL: I was really excited, and I felt like, you know, there was a way that. Sorry, you have 15 minutes left. Okay, cool. Sorry about that.

[25:16] PETE RORABAUGH: Let's go back to the beginning. Set that up again.

[25:18] REBECCA HILL: Yeah. So I remember being excited and also, like, a little afraid in a different way than I had experienced in a place where it was much more acceptable to be in a union. This was like, oh, right, where you have to meet in someone's house. Like, we're afraid that we're gonna get discovered.

[25:32] PETE RORABAUGH: It felt like we were hiding.

[25:34] REBECCA HILL: Yeah. And it's such a funny thing to think about, but it is really the context of being in the south and being in a place where people haven't been in unions before. People were really worried about what the consequences might be of taking this step of joining. And I think the other thing that I was really excited about, which I learned about more at that meeting, I think, than I had prior. I mean, even though we knew that we were going to meet with some folks, was that there were a lot of staff members who were active in the union. At UGA, and that it would be a really different way of understanding our campus as a community to have faculty and staff in the same union together, including, like, potentially buildings and ground staff, cafeteria workers, you know, anybody who works, student employees, like everybody, could be part of this union, which is one of the odd benefits of not being covered by collective bargaining at this moment, because the state hasn't defined a bargaining unit in this very sort of narrow way that sometimes happens where they break up your job categories and stuff. So we can define our own identity as a union where we are all the workers, and it's the campus workers of Georgia, it's not a faculty union. So anybody who works on campus can be part of this. And I really like that. I like that. And I had, as an academic, studied unions as a scholar, and, like, that model of unionizing is something that has been more democratic, more inclusive, because workplaces are so segmented by race and gender. Having your union be like that is a way to work against those divisions in the community. So I really appreciate about that, about this union. So that's been something I've been very excited about and interested to see how. How we think about issues on campus differently, because it's like we're not just thinking about our particular faculty issue, but maybe, like, what are the part timers issues? Or what are the issues that staff face around classifications and promotions and being able to understand what those issues are and advocate together instead of seeing ourselves as in our own little interest group.

[27:43] PETE RORABAUGH: Right. Yeah. That really is some of the most affirming things that I've seen happen while we've been doing this work, probably evidenced the most by when we all leaned into this campaign that had to do with workers that got furloughed. So there were, I can't remember, 24 workers that got furloughed from KSU sometime within the first three months of the pandemic. And do I have that right?

[28:15] REBECCA HILL: I think that's right, yeah.

[28:16] PETE RORABAUGH: Okay. And none of these workers were faculty? They were all staff, and most of them were people. Well, I guess some of them were people that had been at the institution for a while. Some of them had been there just a couple of years. But the energy that I saw people in our chapter throw towards trying to challenge the furlough of those positions and to get. To support those workers in their abilities to challenge that or get support or write an appeal or whatever, whatever, it's just really, it's just such a testament of worker power and the fact that people are willing to lean into and support others, even if they are not, like, intimately connected inside of their own. I mean, these were people that none of us even knew existed before. Many of them were not even union members. But the fact that they were on our campus and they had been furloughed and given, in the middle of a pandemic, two weeks or a month to clear out their desk and be gone.

[29:30] REBECCA HILL: And had no health insurance.

[29:31] PETE RORABAUGH: And had no health insurance. And in some cases, we're making already an abysmally low amount of money. That was just awful. But I was really excited that there was a majority of the people in the chapter who were willing to do any number of things to help those workers, to support those workers in what they were going through. And when I think about, like, our. When I think about our, like, campaigns to increase the potentially the minimum wage on campus to $15 an hour, there are lots of people that do the same job that you and I do who probably don't even know that a job like that even exists on our campus. Or if they, you know, that somebody could possibly be getting less than $15 an hour on our campus. People who have been working on our campus literally for, like, over a decade who are making less than $15 an hour.

[30:35] REBECCA HILL: Oh, well, this actually, just as you say this. One of the things we did early on, before the COVID pandemic hit, was we did that big data analysis.

[30:44] PETE RORABAUGH: That's right.

[30:44] REBECCA HILL: We did that huge analysis of those records to see what the distribution of pay was. And that we learned, like, you know, well, women of color are making less money. I mean, it's not a surprise, but, like, we had all this data to show where was the low paid work at the institution and that our union was interested in finding that getting that picture of the workplace was also really eye opening to understand. Like, it's not just the faculty. It's like every. You know, this is a big institution that works through the dining hall and through all these residence life things. There's so much happening here besides just what's happening in the classroom.

[31:21] PETE RORABAUGH: Right? Yeah. And I think that, I mean, there's a difference between having abstract assumptions about how people are treated in the workplace, or even on your own specific, like, at your own specific work site, but not having the means or the interest to go look up what those actually are. There's a difference between that and actually looking at them, because once you look at them and you have an avenue towards making some of that stuff more equitable, you kind of have a lot. You feel a lot of responsibility to do that work more than people who walk around and just say, well, I'm assuming that women get paid less or people of color get paid less, and that's horrible. We should do something about that. But then not really having, not really knowing what you could do, the benefit of being in the benefit and the responsibility of being in this kind of a, in this kind of an organization is that you kind of have to, you kind of have to lean into it to the degree that you're able to. That's realistic for you.

[32:30] REBECCA HILL: Right. And then the question, which is sort of where we're at now, is like, how do we get more people involved? How do we find, you know, how do we reach out to folks, right. How do we make connections to people who aren't necessarily, like, who don't have the same job as us, who we don't normally talk to from day to day? Which, of course, because of COVID is even more difficult if you're not physically on campus. You know, I think back in the, you know, 2019, I could have probably eventually organized most of the Starbucks counter in our building because I used to go there every day. I got to know everybody, but now it's totally different people working there.

[33:11] PETE RORABAUGH: I mean, that brings up, I don't.

[33:13] REBECCA HILL: Even know if they actually fit in because if they're from a franchise.

[33:16] PETE RORABAUGH: Right. Yeah. That's a whole other complicated thing that we've had to navigate is whether some of the people who work on our campus actually work for the school or whether they work for an outside company. I mean, interestingly enough, there are people that work on our campus that work for an outside company that is unionized, like the people that drive the buses and the shuttles. Those folks are unionized, which I found interesting and only came up because I started talking to one of the shuttle drivers about joining the union. He was like, I'm already in a union. Y'all can have yours. But that does make me wonder if you like what kind of experience you've had since we've been in the chapter doing recruiting work. Like, is there a story or a conversation that you can remember having with somebody where you felt like it was really successful, that you interested somebody in joining or at least in looking into the union? Have you had that experience?

[34:17] REBECCA HILL: We did a bunch of phone calls at one point during COVID during, I mean, it was midway through, so we were already teaching remotely. It was before, I think, the campus had reopened with in person classes. And I had a conversation with somebody who was a faculty member. I can't remember if he was full time or not, but we had a pretty decent conversation, and his sister was there and she was kind of chiming in because it was like one of these odd things where somebody's at home normally in a recruiting kind of situation with union, you're going door to door to an office. You're just calling them. So it's like, oh, what's going on? But that person joined that day after our phone call or maybe a couple days later. But we had a good chat about everything. And I mean, a lot of it, I mean, you've had this, too. A lot of it is just listening to what that person thinks are the issues. So as much as you're talking to them about the union, you're also asking them questions about, well, you know, what would you want a union to do? What's your experience and what are the issues? Because even if they don't join, you might also take that back with you and think, well, here's what we should be doing as a union to attract more people.

[35:28] PETE RORABAUGH: Right.

[35:29] REBECCA HILL: So what was. Have you had one that you want to talk about?

[35:33] PETE RORABAUGH: One that I've thought about some is I have a really good, close relationship with the custodian in our building, and I. And we've just, like, checked on each other different times. Like, especially during COVID I have her number, so I would, like, text her or give her a call and say, like, what are you guys doing? Like, are you guys, like, are they making the custodians clean the buildings more, or are they giving you time off while they figure out how to do, you know, this is all in the early weeks of the pandemic, but she and I have had several conversations about the union, and I don't, like, I'm relatively unconcerned about whether she has joined, but I know that our conversations have resulted in her sending people to me. So whereas it's been difficult for some of us in the chapter to figure out how to physically show up to a place where, you know, physical plant workers or groundskeepers or office staff congregate, you know, it's hard to find those spaces where we could come and just kind of, like, pitch our case and find out, you know, what people want. Like, you're saying that's been difficult, but the benefit of just talking to random people about it is that they find, you know, other people. So this. This person was hired, and he talked to her a couple of days about him coming from a place that had a union. And she just immediately gave him my number and connected me with him. So I think that just that kind of awareness that we give our colleagues who aren't in the union, that we're interested in what they're doing and what they want, whether they're in it or not, can sometimes really connect us with people that we wouldn't have even been in front of, that we don't even know, you know, are with us.

[37:37] REBECCA HILL: Right. So maybe we're already, at least in your case, starting to get to that position where I was describing in New York, where it's like, when people have a problem, where do they go? Like, they come to the union. That's good, right?

[37:47] PETE RORABAUGH: Yeah. Hmm. I'm trying to think if there's one more question or story that's worth. Can you talk for just a minute about what you're looking forward to in the work that we have coming up? Like, we just came off of a retreat. We've talked about some goals for the year. Is there something that you're looking forward to in that work?

[38:15] REBECCA HILL: I like the idea of more one on one organizing and reaching out to people beyond who's already joined. I do that. I mean, like the sort of door to door thing or the phone calling thing.

[38:30] PETE RORABAUGH: You like that?

[38:31] REBECCA HILL: I do. I mean, it's hard.

[38:32] PETE RORABAUGH: So many people shy away from that. It's good that. It's good that you enjoy that.

[38:36] REBECCA HILL: I mean, I have to sort of make myself do it initially, but once I'm doing it, it's like, it's interesting because you meet people you wouldn't otherwise. You have interesting conversations even if people don't join and you learn something about your workplace and how it functions. I mean, I had a great conversation with somebody who really didn't want to join the union, but it helped me understand something about that person.

[38:57] PETE RORABAUGH: Right.

[38:57] REBECCA HILL: And their position. So it was helpful. But I would say also I'm interested. I really like the resource of being a statewide organization and having allies on other campuses that we're working together with and being able to see the whole USG system instead of just focusing so much on our own campus. I mean, it's two. Right. There's some things that are just our campus, and then there's some things that are like, could we reform the board of regents? What could we do to change the governance structure of the university? I mean, we need a lot of power to do that.

[39:31] PETE RORABAUGH: Right.

[39:32] REBECCA HILL: But it's an interesting, I mean, I like that vision.

[39:35] PETE RORABAUGH: Yeah, I agree. That's a great, that's a good horizon for us to look at.

[39:40] REBECCA HILL: What about you?

[39:44] PETE RORABAUGH: It's just not a huge thing. It's kind of a smaller thing. But it's a probably important to talk about, since we haven't talked about this yet, is, you know, you know, that we have members and then we have like an overarching state structure who's, you know, that has employees and the union dues and the money from the parent union pay those folks salaries and those folks work, you know, in many ways for us. Like, they help us organize and they collect, you know, they do all kinds of data analysis for us and they give us great advice. I would like, I'm looking forward to spending more time this year working on the connections between us as members and those state organizers because I think that the union has grown so fast that it has just been struggling to keep up with the amount of people that are joining chapters that are coming online. And so I think they've had to, the structure has had to move so quickly that there hasn't been as much thought yet put into the best kinds of relationships between the organizers and the chapter members. And because of some things that happened in this last year, I feel really invested in trying to help the statewide union understand that relationship better and maybe work towards helping to build those stronger, equitable connections between members and the state organizers.

[41:26] REBECCA HILL: Thank you for you both. If you don't mind.

[41:29] PETE RORABAUGH: Sure.

[41:30] REBECCA HILL: If you just briefly, like, tell us what your position is, you know, within the union at KSU.

[41:40] PETE RORABAUGH: Oh, like what? Like what title or something?

[41:43] REBECCA HILL: Yeah, if you have one, if you don't mind sharing. So I'm a member of the KSU chapter and I am on the coordinating committee of the chapter because I am the representative of our chapter to the statewide executive board of the union. And I am currently running to be secretary of the statewide, which I had previously been in that position. And I took a step back when I was on leave. I was on a research leave, so I took a step back, but now I said, I'm willing to come back to being the secretary.

[42:17] PETE RORABAUGH: Got it? Yeah. And we have a coordinating committee structure that is made up of people who are chairs of small, like, individual committees. So all the people who, each one of each person that runs one of those committees is part of the coordinating committee for the chapter. And I was previously the co chair of the external communications committee. So we did the blog and social media stuff and press releases and stuff like that. And so I was in the coordinating committee for the first year or two that we even had that structure and then stepped off of that this year to focus on some other work, but, so I don't have a formal title beyond being a member currently, but I'm looking forward to coming back into leaning into that work some more this year.

[43:13] REBECCA HILL: We have elections coming up, so we.

[43:14] PETE RORABAUGH: Don'T know we do.

[43:15] REBECCA HILL: It might not be. It might not be secretary.

[43:17] PETE RORABAUGH: Who knows? Who knows what we'll all be. But thanks for that clarifying question. This was fun.

[43:27] REBECCA HILL: Yeah.