Columbia’s Student Workers Preparing to Strike
By Sunni Bean
Columbia University’s student workers voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike for the second time this year. They could be on the picket line as early as later this month, according to union leaders.
More than 88 percent of student workers supported strike action, most of whom are PhD students as well as other graduate students. Last year, the union changed their name from the Graduate Workers of Columbia to Student Workers of Columbia to include undergraduate workers. They want a living wage and increased benefits, concessions that other high-profile universities such as New York University have made in recent labor disputes.
“We don’t expect Columbia to meet our demands without a strike, just due to our history,” said Tristan du Puy, a third-year PhD Student in philosophy and a bargaining committee member for the Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers.
Last spring about 800 Columbia research assistants, teaching assistants, trainees, graders, and instructors, spent almost two months picketing, cancelling classes and office hours and not grading assignments. Negotiations eventually resumed, but union members refused to ratify what would have been Columbia’s first student labor contract, and instead became the first student union in the nation to reject a tentative deal.
As a result, all 10 members of the union’s bargaining committee stepped down.
“Rejecting a contract is a very, very strong signal,” du Puy said.
Columbia’s union has been at odds with the administration since 2000, when NYU students won a landmark case adjudicated by the National Labor Relations Board that enabled graduate workers to unionize. The administration argued- and still argues — graduate students workers are not just employees, but students earning a degree. Students at Columbia University, Brown University, Tufts University and the University of Pennsylvania also began to organize.
Columbia students eventually won the right to unionize in 2016, , but still weren’t officially recognized by the administration until 2018.
This year, the union hopes to join its peer unions in their recent wins.
Last year, NYU made headlines when their strike brought substantial concessions that included raising the wages for hourly workers by 50 percent, providing free dental care, and up to 90 percent reimbursements for dependents’ healthcare premium costs. Brown’s union won concessions in a three-year contract, and Harvard finally came to a one-year contract that employed a third-party arbitrator for disputes, a key demand for Columbia students. After that contract expired this fall, Harvard authorized a strike at the same time as Columbia.
Currently, student workers earn a $31,140 in a standard nine-month stipend, $14,000 less than a living wage in New York, and $11,700 less than students are paid at NYU.
“There are a lot of extremely prestigious institutions, where the university basically expects us to eat prestige,” said Johannah King-Slutsky, a third-year doctoral candidate in English and comparative literature, and the press secretary for SWC-UAW.
“We are extremely talented, early career scholars who schools fight over. And yet once we come here, they treat us like crap,” said King-Slutsky.
Ira Katznelson, the Interim-Provost before stepping down this past June and a key administrator in negotiations, declined to comment and referred inquiries to an email his office sent to the entire Columbia community last spring.
While he acknowledged the students grievances over compensation, he wrote that the difficult circumstances of the pandemic limited funding.
“As I said to the bargaining committee…, what we are offering regarding compensation is not optimal, but, in present conditions, fair,” he wrote.
“After all, across the University, faculty and staff have had to forego any wage increase for a year, a limitation graduate students did not experience as their stipend increase was set and announced for 2020–21 before the wage freeze was put into effect.”
Perhaps the most controversial dispute revolves around the use of a neutral third-party arbitrator to resolve issues with staff, rather than a Columbia employee. It gives the university too much power over a student, and allows it to be both judge and jury in cases of alleged misconduct, according to the union.
“You have to keep in mind, university workplaces are a really bizarre situation,” explained King-Slutsky. “I’ve worked outside of universities for many years before I came here and if you’re in a normal workplace, you are probably not beholden to one to two people who have total control over your entire career. And you can leave. You can go to another workplace, you can talk to a lawyer. We don’t have those options here.”
The administration would not agree to relaying the adjudication of discriminatory or harassing behavior to an outside body because of the distinctive status of graduate students who oscillate between student and worker, according to Katznelson’s email. Instead, the administration proposed modifying the process to have appeals decided by an appellate panel of faculty and administrators who are at arm’s length from the Office of the Provost, where the process currently takes place.
“To date, the response has been to reject this initiative on the ground that ‘no one at the university can be neutral,’ which, in truth, whether intended or not, is something of an affront,” Katznelson wrote.
