Student Worker Solidarity

While many undergraduate students may remember the tremendous struggle it took to finally get the Columbia administration to bargain with graduate workers, fewer know what has been happening at the bargaining table since then. As organizers with Student-Worker Solidarity, Barnard and Columbia’s United Students Against Sweatshops local, we have consistently collaborated and organized in solidarity with the graduate workers’ union.

In his latest Spectator opinion column, Joseph Siegel, CC ’20, claims that graduate students’ striking “unfairly punishes undergraduates” and that the graduate workers are a “privileged few demanding yet more privilege.” Likewise, he writes that the potential strike is not “worth it for everyone in the long run” and argues that the University shouldn’t “reward” graduate workers’ “[un]acceptable behavior” if they do go on strike.