BY HANK REICHMAN

In March, 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.  Yesterday they walked out again, this time indefinitely.  The Student Workers of Columbia–United Auto Workers has bargained with the University over 85 sessions and for nearly three years but there’s been little progress on the three main contract issues: a living wage, comprehensive health care and third-party arbitration.  In May, the union members voted down, 1,093 to 970, a tentative agreement that the union had claimed “would codify important economic improvements, strengthen equity and inclusion at Columbia, establish numerous workplace rights for student workers and create a foundation for a strong union moving into the future.”  The SWC-UAW bargaining committee has elected eight new members since the rejection of the tentative agreement.

Hundreds of Columbia graduate students, community members, and graduate students from other New York City schools participated in the union’s rally on the Morningside Heights campus yesterday.

The walkout comes more than four years after student workers voted to unionize and after last year’s unauthorized graduate student worker strike against Columbia’s inadequate response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to reporting by the Columbia Daily Spectator,

The largest outstanding demands include arbitration for discrimination and harassment claims; unit inclusion for students who work casual jobs for less than 15 hours a week; higher compensation levels including $45,000 and $42,000 stipends for doctoral students on 12-month and 9-month appointments, respectively; and improved healthcare covering vision and dental care. . . .

This week, the University announced a new provision to extend financial support up to a semester for graduate students changing from abusive or unhealthy advisor relationships. The University also said during a Nov. 2 bargaining session that it would consider some restricted form of arbitration, one of the SWC-UAW’s main priorities. This comes following a similar development at Harvard University, in which Harvard’s administration offered its workers an unprecedented system of neutral arbitration for discrimination cases.

Historically, Columbia has been opposed to guaranteeing arbitration for its student-workers and has, instead, preferred to improve its Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action processes and create avenues for internal solutions. . . .

The union has also taken steps toward compromise with the University. Its initial total demands made up $200 million more than was agreed upon in the tentative agreement rejected last spring. This week, the SWC-UAW shaved down the gap to $140 million by excluding casual workers who are employed fewer than 10 hours a week and dependents of undergraduates and masters students from its health benefits proposal.

According to a report in Business Insider,

This summer the university announced a change to stipend pay schedules for graduate student workers, opting to distribute stipends semimonthly as opposed to in two lump sums at the start of the fall and spring semesters.

The school said the change was to bring uniformity to student-worker compensation by paying stipends on the same schedule as student wage payrolls, the Columbia Daily Spectator reported. Graduate student workers and the SWC argued that the change was in retaliation for the previous semester’s strike over contract negotiations and that it could put many students in debt.

Graduate students told Insider the lump sum the school previously provided covered costs like moving and security deposits for the start of the semester. “Money is a lot more tight these days with all our upfront expenses,” Nick Olsen, a doctoral student in chemical physics, said.

In a survey conducted by Columbia’s Arts and Sciences Graduate Council last year, 54% of respondents said they spent more than 50% of their income on rent.

Graduate student workers also told Insider the school provided a schedule for when they would be paid via the new system. Seven students provided pay stubs and emails showing that the school had been late on payments based on that schedule — one of those workers said they’d received only one of the four checks promised to them so far.

Last year Columbia’s endowment increased by 32.3 percent to $14.35 billion, suggesting that the university, which has in the past decade opened a major new campus further north in Manhattan, can well afford what the strikers need.

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.  A 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.  In March, the NLRB announced that it was withdrawing the proposed rule.  The announcement came on the same day as the March strike at Columbia began.

Here’s some video of yesterday’s picket line:

@SW_Columbia back on the picket line!!! #CUonStrike pic.twitter.com/3awKud3uWX

— Jordan Mayfield (@jordanmmayfield) November 3, 2021