Resident assistants and peer mentors at Temple University have voted to unionize, joining a wave of student-worker organizing on local college and university campuses.

In a four-hour, paper-ballot vote held Tuesday, 97 of the 126 bargaining group members participated, and all of them voted in favor of joining the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 153.

“People hear that someone’s unionizing and they think it’s because they hate the job that they’re in,” Gavin Dellaria, a sophomore RA at Temple, said ahead of the vote. “I’m unionizing because I love this role, but I want other people to also love it, and have the same experience. I can also see myself getting burned out, so I want to prevent that because this is a very important role to me.”

Last year, the student workers delivered a letter to Temple leadership asking them to voluntarily recognize their union. According to OPEIU Local 153 lead organizer Scott Williams, the bargaining group is the first undergraduate student workers at any Pennsylvania public university to unionize.

“Temple has a long history of positive working relationships with all its 11 collective bargaining units, and we look forward to enjoying the same type of productive relationship with Temple Union of RAs (TURA),” said Temple spokesperson Stephen Orbanek on Tuesday. “We deeply value the contributions of these students and will always be committed to providing them with outstanding leadership opportunities and learning experiences.”

Temple’s peer mentors and resident assistants are expected to work a minimum of 20 hours per week, OPEIU Local 153 has said. Their responsibilities include meeting with residents, coordinating events, and attending staff meetings every week.

The student workers are compensated with free housing and a meal plan, and they are paid a $200 stipend per semester, which is put toward their tuition.

RAs and peer mentors at Temple started organizing when the university moved away from offering “diamond dollars” to student workers as part of their compensation package, Williams said, referring to this change as “a big pay cut.” Temple spokesperson Orbanek said that’s an “inaccurate” description, and said the “structure” of the pay package was “adjusted.”

Williams said the student workers “really want a seat at the table to outline, overall, what the terms and conditions of their labor should be.”

OPEIU Local 153 represents resident assistants at the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and Swarthmore College, all of which have unionized since 2023. RAs at Penn got their first union contract in June 2024.

Temple has many unionized employees across a number of worker groups. The university’s graduate student union, with 750 members at the time, went on strike in 2023 for more than a month.

Nurses and technicians at Temple Health passed a strike authorization vote last month amid contract negotiations. Their contracts were set to expire on Sept. 30 and they’ve threatened to strike if a deal is not reached by Oct. 13.

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