Macalester’s administration declined to bargain with the school’s student worker union last Friday, Feb. 13, due to the presence of non-bargaining committee members, who packed the room during the scheduled negotiation session.
The Macalester Undergraduate Workers Union-United Auto Workers (MUWU-UAW) encouraged student union members early last week to attend what they hoped would be an open bargaining session that Friday. Open bargaining allows all union members to be present during a negotiation with their employer.
Macalester Director of Human Resources Deb Ekren informed the union last Wednesday that Macalester’s administration would not accept an open bargaining meeting, according to Xavier Honer ’28, a member of MUWU-UAW’s bargaining committee. At that point, the union had already begun organizing students to attend bargaining meetings, Honer added.
The topic of open bargaining originally came up in a labor management committee meeting between union representatives and Macalester on Nov. 20, 2025. In this meeting, Macalester management said it did not support open bargaining, according to an email that Chief Financial Officer and Vice President of Administration and Finance Patricia Langer sent to The Mac Weekly.
MUWU-UAW has continued to push for open bargaining because it considers the issue to be important to the democratic nature of its process.
“A union is about integrity and transparency,” Laura Hebert, a UAW international servicing representative advising MUWU-UAW, said. “Members should be able to hear and see the dialogue that goes on with the employer about proposals.”
Macalester has concerns over the impact non-bargaining committee union members would have on bargaining sessions.
“Bargaining with an audience tends to impede productive negotiations by shifting the process away from candid problem-solving and toward performative advocacy rather than reaching common ground,” Langer wrote.
Before Friday’s meeting, MUWU-UAW leadership had communicated via email to student workers that if they were going to observe the meeting, they must not speak. They could instead pass written communications and questions to bargaining committee members.
“We put an emphasis on decorum to assuage any fears management might have that having members in the room could be disruptive, while still involving workers in the process as much as possible,” Honer wrote in an email to The Mac Weekly.
Neither unions nor employers are required to bargain over non-mandatory bargaining subjects, according to Section 8(d) & 8(a) (5) of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Langer cited this law and claimed that observers’ presence during negotiations falls into the non-mandatory category, often referred to as a “permissive” bargaining subject.
In the opinion of MUWU-UAW leadership, there is no National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) case law establishing open bargaining as a permissible subject, though “there have been non-binding opinions suggesting that it may be,” Honer wrote.
An opinion letter from the NLRB’s Division of Advice regarding Canterbury Villa of Alliance, issued on March 31, 2004, held that a California union’s “insistence on an open-door policy permitting its entire membership to observe negotiations, is a non-mandatory subject of bargaining.”
Langer cited this letter and a more recent 2021 case involving a Minnesota nurses’ union as a rationale for treating open bargaining as a permissive subject.
Neither case has established a binding legal precedent. For this to occur, a decision would have to be appealed to the NLRB in Washington, D.C., where the full board decides to set standards from contested NLRA cases.
Macalester also stated its prior practice of closed bargaining with other on-campus unions as a rationale for its decision this Friday to decline negotiations.
The ongoing closed bargaining sessions between Macalester and the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees (MAPE) at Macalester, the union representing the college’s non-faculty and non-supervisory employees, have been “cordial and respectful,” Adam van der Sluis ’11, a MAPE at Macalester bargaining team representative, said.
Although MAPE at Macalester has not pushed for open bargaining, they have not ruled out the possibility of doing so if deemed necessary by the union, according to van der Sluis.
Student union members, along with Hebert, remained in the Harmon Room of the DeWitt Wallace Library, where negotiations had been scheduled to take place, while the Macalester administration gathered in the Reading Room. Hebert entered the Reading Room to discuss open bargaining with the Macalester administration on a few occasions, but the administration maintained its position on the matter and eventually walked out of the library, declining to bargain in the presence of observers. The administration never entered the Harmon Room to begin bargaining.
Approximately 40 student union members were present in the Harmon Room, according to an email sent to student workers by MUWU-UAW representatives on Feb. 14. The Mac Weekly has not verified this number.
All but one student union member in the room on Friday voted to stick to MUWU-UAW’s position on open bargaining, according to Honer. Hebert, the union’s bargaining committee and many members stayed in the Harmon Room to discuss organizing plans for nearly an hour after the college’s administration left the building.
“Our position at this time is that the next bargaining meeting should be open to all members,” Honer said. “That’s the position of our members. So that’s the position of our committee.”
“We want to be collaborators together, and the transparency is so important,” Hebert added. “In the country right now, where we have an administration that’s trying to take rights away, does [Macalester administration] really want to take a position that takes away rights from student workers?”
For Oskar Hafner-Orange ’28, who works as a sound and lights technician in Macalester’s concert halls, attending Friday’s bargaining session was a “no-brainer.”
“More than anything, what’s compelled me to get more and more active within the union is just the fact that Macalester’s administration has been so resistant to it; that they fought so hard to not be transparent and to shut us down at every turn,” Hafner-Orange said. “Today definitely was a pang of frustration. It also did not surprise me in the least.”
MUWU-UAW has scheduled a “march on the boss” rally for Thursday, Feb. 19. During the march, the union plans to deliver a petition signed by its members to Langer’s office in Weyerhaeuser Hall. The petition demands “that the Macalester administration bargain with MUWU-UAW with general members present.”
Hebert emphasized that MUWU-UAW was committed to working in good faith with Macalester and collaborating during the bargaining process.
In her email, Langer expressed a similar focus on good faith. In response to a question about whether Macalester is considering taking legal action against MUWU-UAW if they maintain their position on open bargaining, Langer said that Macalester aims to reach an agreement through collective bargaining, not litigation.
The next bargaining session between the two parties is scheduled for Friday, Feb. 20 from 2:30 – 5 p.m. in the Harmon Room.
