Undergraduate Students Are Essential to The Graduate Workers of Columbia Strike
GWC-UAW’s picket on Low Plaza during the Spring 2018 strike. Photo by the GWC-UAW.
Columbia students have been fighting at the forefront of student-worker organizing for nearly a decade now. On a national scale, graduate student workers have been engaged in a struggle to challenge former policy that stripped student workers of their right to unionize. Meanwhile, on campus, they have certified a union to protect all academic student workers and bargained with the University to win improvements on appointment security, childcare, health and safety, international workers’ rights, and more. However, after two years of bargaining, the University still refuses to grant the Graduate Workers of Columbia (GWC-UAW) their key demands for a living wage, healthcare improvements, fair recourse against harassment and discrimination, union security, and full recognition of all academic student-workers. As they prepare for a work-stoppage beginning Monday, March 15th, it is clear that all Columbia students have a stake in this make-or-break moment for student labor on campus.
History of Student-Worker Organizing at Columbia
Graduate workers first organized a card drive in 2014 and filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to certify the GWC. It was this petition that ushered the historic 2016 Columbia decision, overturning the Bush-era Brown ruling that disqualified graduate student workers at private universities from the right to collective bargaining. The effects of this decision rippled throughout higher education, paving the way for union-election successes at The New School, New York University, Harvard, Brown, Tufts, Brandeis, Boston College, Yale, American University, Georgetown, Loyola at Chicago, and the University of Chicago. Of these twelve universities, Columbia remains one of the few that has yet to ratify a contract protecting its graduate student workers.
Following the NLRB decision, President Lee Bollinger’s administration fought the GWC’s certification and refused to bargain with the union for nearly two years. It took an eleven-day-long strike in the spring of 2018, which disrupted hundreds of classes taught by graduate students (and many more slated to take place on the other side of their picket line), to finally win a commitment from Columbia. The administration commenced bargaining with the GWC on February 26, 2019.
The past two years have been marked by regular bargaining sessions between graduate students on the Bargaining Committee and professional lawyers hired by Columbia. The GWC has managed to reach agreement with the University on many terms, while standing their ground on provisions that have been priorities for a majority of workers since bargaining began. Despite agreeing to bargain in good faith under the framework established in 2018, Columbia has made regressive adjustments to their proposal, such as withdrawing the right to neutral third-party arbitration following the University’s internal investigation of sexual harrassment and discrimination cases.
Striking for a Fair Contract: A Last-Resort Tactic
Now, both sides of the bargaining table are pushing to bring an end to the first round of negotiations. While the GWC prepares to strike for a first contract that includes necessary provisions, the University threatens to retaliate against strikers and to walk away from bargaining altogether unless the union gives up on their longstanding priorities.
Columbia threatened during bargaining this week to establish a website for student workers to self-report whether they’re working through the strike. Columbia said they would use this data identifying strike-breakers to dock the pay of all those participating in the strike. Days later, Dean James Valentini and Dean Lisa Rosen-Metsch encouraged the reporting of striking instructors in an email to the Columbia College and General Studies student bodies.
Students also heard word of the strike through an email from Provost Ira Katznelson last Monday, branding the GWC’s decision to call for a work stoppage “regrettable” and “unnecessary.” On the issue of compensation, the Provost claimed that the graduate workers’ proposed contract terms are “neither reasonable nor responsible.” In reality, current rates for hourly pay are significantly lower than at other NYC institutions like CUNY and NYU, and compensation for Ph.D. students on 9-month appointments is much lower than at NYU. Moreover, although COVID-19 has impacted the University’s finances, they have also received CARES Act funding and will receive aid from the recently passed $40 billion stimulus for colleges and universities. While the administration has actively chosen to maintain salaries in the millions for high-level administrators, they claim that the University is suffering financial hardship that justifies drawing upon public resources through pandemic relief packages. Meanwhile, academic departments have been dealt benefit cuts and hiring and salary freezes that leave full-time and adjunct professors, as well as student workers, squeezed to perform more labor for less remuneration.
Columbia’s selective austerity, which has been even more apparent since the start of the pandemic, has left student workers with no prospect for good-faith compromise from the University unless they turn to a strike. Student workers have been pushed to this decision by Columbia’s unwillingness to meet their reasonable and necessary demands for a living wage, healthcare improvements, fair recourse against harassment and discrimination, union security, and full recognition of all academic student-workers. The administration’s recent use of communication with the student body to misconstrue workers’ demands and circulate threats of retaliation demonstrate the power that GWC wields through a strike. Columbia fears this movement precisely because these students’ work is absolutely necessary to the University’s functioning.
The Real Stakes for Undergraduate Students
Unionization would be pivotal for undergraduates employed as teaching and research assistants, who are also part of the GWC bargaining unit according to the landmark NLRB decision. Columbia is currently trying to carve undergraduates out of the contract agreement, which is why one of the key demands of this strike is full recognition, including undergraduates, MA students, and hourly workers. It is absolutely crucial that we push back against this effort by the administration to divide workers who do the same type of work. We too are affected by pressure to forgo logging overtime while performing additional unpaid work on top of our responsibilities. We have the same inadequate recourse to harassment and discrimination. And we also have encountered issues like delayed payments that have profound effects on low-income students.
However, I, as a member of the Columbia-Barnard chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), along with so many other undergraduate students, stand in support of the GWC regardless of our stake as workers in the union. We know that the best way for the University to support our learning would be to provide livable and dignified conditions for the student workers who perform a significant share of teaching and grading. When we say the working conditions Columbia deals for its student-workers are our learning conditions, this is true in a literal sense. When our teaching assistants are struggling to access healthcare and pay their rent, it’s impossible to imagine that they can approach their teaching or grading with the care and dedication that they otherwise would.
It is also true in a deeper sense that conditions for workers are conditions for students. The way Columbia has treated the GWC in its negotiations reflects an institution that would more readily spend millions on legal fees to send bigwig lawyers to bargain with full-time student workers than meet workers’ very reasonable demands for a living wage and necessary health benefits.
For students who have been a part of any movement for change at Columbia, this seems outrageously familiar. Columbia’s union-busting reflects the administration’s aversion to passing structural power off to the community of students and workers and away from administrators who are paid overblown salaries to guarantee that Columbia’s roles as an investment manager and real estate giant are always placed above its role as a university.
This semester, an ongoing tuition strike has united over 4,000 students behind five demands of the University: reduce the record-high cost of education, end its continual destruction of West Harlem communities, design safety solutions that protect everyone (particularly Black and Brown people) on and around campus, democratically invest Columbia’s financial resources, and bargain in good-faith with unions on campus. As an organizer in this movement, I have witnessed firsthand that we are all stronger when we fight together against the austerity and unilateralism that the administration treats students and workers alike with.
Organizers involved in YDSA and the tuition strike have turned our efforts toward bolstering the GWC strike through outreach to the student body and coordinated rallies. In the days to come, we will stand with workers on their in-person and virtual pickets and encourage all students to do the same, whether they can withhold academic labor or offer solidarity. Supporting the collective power of student workers on campus should be a priority for anyone who wants to see Columbia function like an institution that truly values education, research, and, most importantly, the workers who make it all possible.
Becca Roskill is a junior in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and a member of the Columbia-Barnard chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America. You can support the GWC strike by donating to the hardship fund, signing a letter of support, and joining in-person and virtual pickets.
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