BY HANK REICHMAN

Today more than 3,000 student workers at Columbia University in New York City went on strike after more than two years of unsuccessful negotiations over the university’s first graduate student labor contract. The walkout comes more than four years after student workers voted to unionize, forming the Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers (GWC-UAW), and after last year’s unauthorized graduate student worker strike against Columbia’s inadequate response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Today’s strike coincides with a tuition strike at Columbia by more than 1,100 undergraduate and graduate students demanding decreased tuition costs and increased financial aid. The strike also comes on the same day that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced that it was withdrawing a rule proposed in late 2019 that would have barred graduate assistants at private institutions from engaging in union organizing and collective bargaining under the protection of federal law.

Graduate employees currently have the right to organize and bargain as the result of a 2016 decision by the NLRB in a case involving the graduate teaching and research assistants at Columbia. The AAUP has long supported the bargaining rights of graduate employees and submitted an amicus brief in the Columbia case, which was cited and relied upon by the board in its decision. The 2019 rule proposed under the Trump administration would have reversed this decision and would have established that students at a private college or university who perform any services for compensation in connection with their studies, including but not limited to teaching or research, would not be “employees” under the purview of the National Labor Relations Act.

Striking research and teaching assistants at Columbia are demanding living wages, expanded health benefits, job protections, and fee and tuition waivers. The graduate students are also fighting for a contract without a “no strike” clause, which the university administration has rejected in over 65 bargaining sessions.  A strike authorization vote last year was approved by a 96 percent majority of union members.

One union member, writing last week in the Columbia Spectator, explained the background of the strike in “A letter from your TA on the upcoming strike:”

The initial vote to unionize took place during my first semester of graduate school on December 7-8, 2016, and passed with a resounding 72 percent in favor of unionization. In the weeks leading up to the vote, Columbia’s administration gave every indication that it was prepared to accept the outcome. After the result was announced, graduate workers even received an email from then-Provost John Coatsworth acknowledging our decision to unionize and thanking us for our participation.

A week later, we learned that the administration had filed objections to the certification of our vote based on a number of procedural complaints. It took about three months for the regional National Labor Relations Board to issue a decision rejecting these complaints, recommending “overruling the Employer’s objections in their entirety.” The administration quickly appealed the result to the NLRB in Washington, D.C. It wasn’t until December 2017–more than a year after our vote had taken place—that the NLRB, which had the final word on union certification, dismissed the administration’s objections.

Less than two weeks after the NLRB ruled for the union for a second time, Coatsworth sent an email informing us that instead of bargaining, the administration would “seek review of the status of student assistants by a federal appellate court.” To be clear, the administration had no basis for legal recourse. By refusing to bargain, they were simply inviting us to file an unfair labor practice with the NLRB—a move which could have dragged out the process for at least another year. Though the law was on our side, time was on the administration’s. It couldn’t necessarily prevent a union contract from being signed, but—by continuing to delay—it could guarantee that no current graduate workers could benefit.

Rather than play into the administration’s hand, we held a vote to authorize our first strike in April of 2018. Out of 1,968 ballots cast by teaching and research assistants, 93 percent of voters voted “Yes.” Over 1,500 workers signed in for our picket line, which at times stretched the length of College Walk from Broadway to Amsterdam. The administration knew we were serious.

What ultimately got us to the bargaining table was the threat of a second strike the following semester, this one scheduled to run through finals. Bargaining finally began in February 2019, more than two years after our initial vote to unionize. Another two years have passed since then. I am now finishing my fifth year as a graduate student. I have grown a beard and presented research at a conference. I adopted a cat and published my work in a journal. I still do not have a contract.

In interim Provost Ira Katznelson’s email sent last week, he characterizes an administration that is eager to negotiate a fair contract with the University’s graduate workers, if only it had a little more time. That is not an accurate portrayal of the administration that I have observed over these last four years. I have seen one that is willing to use every legal maneuver at its disposal to stall negotiations while some provost waxes philosophically about the greatness of our University and the sacredness of advisor-advisee relationships. It’s getting old.

Former provost Coatsworth’s sorry role in Columbia’s union-busting efforts was the subject of an open letter that I, a Columbia alum, wrote back in 2016 after the initial NLRB ruling.  The letter, which enjoyed broad circulation in the Columbia community, concluded by noting Coatsworth’s own background as a radical pro-worker graduate student at Wisconsin in the ’60s.  “We’ve all changed since those days,” I acknowledged.  “But it is one thing to abandon the arrogant idealism of youth for a mature and tolerant realism.  It is quite another to betray the basic principles that those of us who came of age in the ’60s have long upheld.”

Which brings me to Coatsworth’s successor, interim provost Ira Katznelson.  A political theorist, Katznelson was not just a radical in his youth.  He is a well-known progressive scholar who once actually worked for the UAW as a strategist!  Now, however, Katznelson wrings his hands and clutches his pearls to beseech his student employees not to harm the institution he and they both cherish (oh, how well I recall that sort of rhetoric coming from “liberal” faculty way back in 1968, when I was one of hundreds of Columbia students occupying buildings to protest the university’s rapacious effort to build a segregated gymnasium on public land and conduct secret weapons research).  In emails to graduate students Katznelson said a strike would be a “significant burden that our campus would be compelled to bear … during one of the most stressful times in the history of students, staff, and faculty at Columbia.”  Acknowledging that teaching assistants have been “remarkably effective, sometimes heroic” for “the thousands of students who have been grappling with non-traditional education,” Katznelson called for these university “heroes” to embrace “mutual realism” when it comes to bargaining, in which “no single round can produce optimal results.”  In regard to higher wage compensation, the provost bluntly stated that “there are lines we are unable to cross.”

That last line is priceless.  Columbia’s endowment sits at well over $11 billion.  The cost of tuition for a Master’s student at Columbia is over $51,000, which does not include housing, food and books.  According to the GWC-UAW’s  bargaining updates, at Friday’s bargaining session the union decreased its demand for a minimum salary for 12-month Ph.D. worker appointments from $45,850 to $43,596 and dropped its demand for a minimum hourly rate for graduate workers from $35/hour to $28/hour and from $26/hour to $22/hour for undergraduate workers.  Meanwhile, the university has been steadfast on settling on a minimum hourly rate of $16/hour for student workers, only $1 above New York City’s minimum wage.  The base salary for research assistants at Columbia is $36,000 and $26,000 for teaching assistants in one of the most expensive cities on the planet.

Here’s the latest bargaining update from the union’s website:

Less than 24 hours before the March 15 strike deadline, our teams met to make one last attempt to come to an agreement before student workers across the University walk off the job. The session began late, but the University for the first time shared some cost estimates with us, and we had a clarifying discussion that would have been truly helpful months ago, but here we are. We also had a productive exchange on the University’s plans to help student workers whose research progress was delayed by COVID-19; however, Columbia resists addressing the problem through contract language.

We presented revised proposals on Recognition, Health Benefits, Fee and Tuition Waivers, and Compensation. The University moved on only two proposals: Health Benefits and Recognition. Their Health Benefits position showed progress; they raised the fund amount to $200k per year and now have language ensuring full medical premium coverage for all PhD workers and their dependents. Their Recognition proposal, however, still does not include the full NLRB-certified unit, specifically when it comes to Course Assistants who may be working less than 15 hours/week.

We did not see any progress from the University on Compensation or Non-Discrimination and Harassment—a grave disappointment but not a surprise. We did not hear anything on Union Security either, although they appear to be holding a revised proposal in reserve as a possible bargaining chip. In short, we did not receive enough movement from the University to avert a strike or even stop the clock on the strike deadline.

Our open issues remain:

• Recognition of the full unit consistent with the NLRB certification and the 2018 Bargaining Framework Agreement;

• Union shop so that our union has resources to enforce the contract;

• Neutral arbitration to dispute EOAA outcomes and to handle cases of bullying;

• Living wage for all through increases for both hourly and salaried workers;

• Healthcare fund of $250k per year and partial coverage of dental premiums for PhD workers.

Columbia has made clear that it will retaliate against striking student workers by docking their pay and financial aid stipends during the duration of the strike, which is set to go on until a contract agreement is reached.  The university even created an on-line daily work-reporting system to identify all workers on strike and sent an email to the student body asking students to report striking workers to their academic departments.

Undergraduate students responded by setting up a hardship fund for striking workers on March 10, which has already surpassed $55,000 in donations from more than 800 individual donors.  Please donate at https://www.gofundme.com/f/solidarity-with-columbia-academic-student-workers. Please donate generously!

Here’s a brief video of the picket line:

Join on the Broadway and Amsterdam gates! Fair contract now! #CUonStrike pic.twitter.com/MP2Mhdb9RT

— Graduate Workers of Columbia (@GWCUAW) March 15, 2021