Georgetown University resident assistants (RAs) filed three labor law charges against Georgetown University, a union representative confirmed to The Hoya on May 6.
The three charges, known as unfair labor practice (ULP) charges, allege the university engaged in union busting and retaliation, which a university spokesperson has contested. The filing with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) came a week after the RA union publicly alleged the university is weaponizing its collective bargaining agreement (CBA) against the RAs, citing increased disciplinary actions for minor infractions and a policy change that removed their ability to select suitemates.
The NLRB will investigate the university and review if it has violated the National Labor Relations Act, the primary statute governing unions in the United States.
A university spokesperson said the university honors the CBA and the university’s Just Employment Policy, a commitment to fair compensation.
“We deeply value the contributions of Resident Assistants (RAs) to our living and learning communities,” the spokesperson wrote to The Hoya. “We are committed to upholding Georgetown’s Just Employment Policy and honoring the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the university and the Georgetown Resident Assistant Coalition (GRAC).”
“We regularly engage with RAs and their union in accordance with the collective bargaining agreement (CBA), which provides a forum for union and University representatives to come together and discuss issues of mutual interest and concern,” the spokesperson added. “We are committed to working in good faith through the processes established in the CBA to discuss and address concerns.
Izzy Wagener (SFS ’26), GRAC’s chairperson and an RA for Darnall Hall, said the union looks forward to the investigation and is confident Residential Living has acted retaliatorily.
“I think that a lot of Res Living’s actions speak for themselves, and whether or not that’s going to be enough in the end to definitively prove retaliation, I don’t know,” Wagener told The Hoya. “I think that based on everything we’ve seen this year, we didn’t file the charges lightly.”
The first charge claims the university has leveraged the CBA when supervising RAs, using it to justify disciplinary action. The second and third charges — which involve the change in suitemate policy and not rehiring RAs, respectively — allege the university has retaliated against RAs for unionizing.
Following GRAC’s April petition, a university spokesperson contested GRAC’s allegations and said the university adheres to the CBA.
“We disagree with these characterizations and note that many of the statements are not accurate,” the spokesperson wrote to The Hoya on April 23.
A representative for OPEIU Local 153, which represents GRAC, said the first charge alleges the university has engaged in union busting by using the CBA as justification for punishing RAs, mirroring similar allegations RAs made in April.
“They’re weaponizing the collective bargaining agreement in disciplinary settings,” the representative told The Hoya. “So just about every disciplinary meeting, every termination letter, every write up, they’re citing the collective bargaining agreement as ‘because it says this in the collective bargaining agreement, we’re going to have to terminate you.’ And it’s like citing the progressive discipline clause, and that clause in this contract is meant to protect RAs — it is meant to give them a formal process so that they cannot be terminated without just cause.”
“What we’re seeing is the opposite of that,” the representative added. “They’re trying to make it, as a form of union busting, trying to weaponize the collective bargaining agreement.”
Wagener said the second charge, which addresses the suitemate policy, shows the university has violated the NLRA by retaliating against union members.
“It discriminated against RA members by reversing past practice wherein we were able to self-select our suitemates,” Wagener said.
“We believe this also had a chilling effect on the bargaining unit,” Wagener added.
Previously, RAs in suite-style housing selected all members of their household before the formal housing process. Under the new policy, RAs can only select direct roommates, allowing any student to select into the open rooms — prompting pushback from some RAs who will now live with suitemates they did not choose.
The third ULP says the university violated the NLRA by not rehiring some current RAs.
“The employer violated section 8(a)(3) of the act when it discriminated against RA union members by failing to rehire current RA union members,” the charge reads. “This action has had a chilling effect on the bargaining unit.”
The union representative said GRAC is willing to settle with the university and withdraw the charges filed with the NLRB if the university and Residential Education Executive Director Heidi Zeich improve their relationship with RAs.
“All we want is for them to stop the union-busting and to let these RAs continue to work in peace,” the representative said. “If they are willing to cease and desist, there’s a world where we would drop the charges — absolutely, that’s what we want. We want to have a better have better labor relations at the university, and when the university starts respecting our RAs’ right to have a union and be in a union, and stops this kind of culture of retaliation that they have created under Heidi Zeich, then yes, absolutely, we are happy to withdraw the charges.”
“But we have certainly not seen that they are interested in ceasing this kind of retaliation anytime soon,” the representative added.
Wagener said no matter the outcome of the NLRB’s investigation, she hopes the process will shed light on RAs’ experiences.
“I just hope that Res Living stops using our unionization and our contract as an excuse to treat RAs the way they have been, which I find disrespectful across the board, regardless of what the outcome of the actual investigations are,” Wagener said. “I hope that it will show that RAs try their hardest to do their jobs — and, if anything, Residential Education’s management style over this past year has just made that harder and more adversarial when that’s not what any of us actually want.”
Ajani Stella contributed to reporting.
