The strained relationship between the University and labor unions on campus became a hot-button issue Wednesday evening in a discussion led by Dorian Warren, an assistant professor of political science.
In an appearance organized by the Columbia University College Democrats, Warren, who teaches courses on labor in American politics, discussed the historical progression of local labor unions and the challenges the University has posed toward workers seeking to unionize. Columbia has contracts with nine different unions covering workers in 13 different bargaining unions, but discontent continues, according to Warren, as the University maintains a loath stance towards union recognition.
“Overall, the University has been fairly hostile to labor relations,” Warren said, while comparing Columbia’s labor relations to some of its peer institutions. “Yale hates unions—it plays hard ball all the time. Harvard is just the opposite. … Unions have almost always gotten what they asked for. Columbia is somewhere in between.”
Warren addressed a slew of difficulties currently facing unions on campus. He chronicled a 2004 struggle between graduate students and research assistants who sought unionization, and the administration. He explained that originally, the National Labor Relations Board required all universities to recognize the right to unionize. But when members of the union Graduate Students Employees United held elections in 2004, Columbia got a court injunction to prevent the graduate students’ votes from being counted. Around the time that this was happening, the Bush administration reversed the requirement imposed on universities of union recognition, ultimately allowing Columbia to recognize graduate students only as students--not employees. In light of the situation, graduate students began staging strikes in conjunction with Yale and NYU students.
Ultimately, this caused a contentious relationship to develop between professors and their graduate students, Warren said. Professors would threaten graduate students who became involved in the push for unionization, telling them that they would not write letters of recommendation for them when the time came for them to enter the job market of academia.
The dispute became so heated, according to Warren, that “our former provost Alan Brinkley issued a memo instructing department chairs to discipline graduate students if they were going to go on strike.” Warren described the situation as a “nastier” one.
Warren segued into two prominent issues concerning labor unions on campus. One problem, he said, is layoffs and the need for protection and security against them, while the other deals with a tactic that employers use to circumvent unionization. Warren explained that union workers will lay off unionized workers and reclassify the same exact job into a different job description, such as manager or supervisor, thereby making them ineligible to unionize.
Students in attendance remarked that the discussion was an informative one, and touched on a host of issues that need to be discussed in the context of a dialogue among all Columbia students.
“As a business, we expect Columbia to have some of these bad labor practices,” Maddy Joseph, CC ’12 and membership director of the College Democrats, said, “but what’s upsetting to a lot of us on the College Dems is that people are not aware of the issues.”
Others echoed Warren’s emphasis on the importance of labor unions, and argued that the University must become more tolerant and hospitable towards local unions.
“The basic guiding principle is that you don’t balance your budget on the backs of working people, and working people make our university what it is,” said Avi Edelman, CC ’11 and vice president of the College Democrats. “All these people create the experiences for us as students. That’s the reason we’re able to come to Columbia.”
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