I am not sure what the U of C student Unions does but I was a member of the student Council at the U of S.
One good example was the academic advocacy department. If a student had an issue with a professor, was charged with plagiarism, was being having problems getting credits recognized etc. There was an individual to help the students jump through all of the paperwork, hoops, and appeals to get their complaint heard. The big key to this was that it was independent of the university and actually represented students rather than a some mid level manager working for the university. I worked there for a year and we got some really good results. A professor lost half of the final exams for a bunch of engineering students and was trying to screw them over when creating final grades and we worked with the students and the university to solve the problem rather than just a bunch of students trying on their own.
The other place a student association is good is a government needs someone to talk to regarding Student issues and this is a good place to have one point of contact and to be a voice advocating for students.
Where student unions are terrible is when they try to build empires. Why does the SU need to run businesses? Why do they need student space? Why do they run Mac Hall? All of these things can be better done by the university itself or by private enterprise.
The worst thing I ever heard from the USSU was when we proposed the USSU set up an online classified add site to sell textbooks. The response from the administration side of the USSU was they didn't want to do it because it might compete with their physical used book store. That concept is very prevalent throughout Student Unions. They want to protect their empire rather than serve students.
So what to do? My advice would be to get on the Student Council as your college rep and then get on the finance committee. These positions aren't a lot of work ( a few hours a month) but come with a lot of power. Once on these committees focus on cutting budgets and eliminating any service that isn't advocacy. When I was there for two years we cut a lot but resistance is huge. The people who want to play politics and the administration who want to empire build and the lawyers who write the contracts do a good job at maintaining the bureaucracy. But it is a fun fight and worth doing.
The fight against the CFS saved every student at the U of S $9 per year. So at 14000 students and 6 years later we saved students $1,000,000 dollars in fees.
So while the student union does good things, they need to be kept in check so love or hate student politics you should get involved with it
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