Union

Members of the Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers have voted 1,833 to 77 in favor of authorizing a strike in response to what union members have labeled as the University’s unsatisfactory approach to negotiating key bargaining points.

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.

As postdoctoral and associate researchers at Columbia, we know firsthand how inadequate compensation can undermine the quality of our work and inhibit the development of a truly equitable, qualified, and inclusive research community.

Following almost two decades of back-and-forth for union recognition, Columbia announced its decision to negotiate with the Graduate Workers of Columbia in November 2018. Negotiations started in February 2019, proceeding the creation of a 10-point outline of the conditions for collective bargaining. Notably, the bargaining framework includes an impending deadline: a clause that prevents the union from striking until April 6, 2020.

Union Theological Seminary has had its fair share of student protests in the last 50 years in response to ongoing campus renovations that critics say will disrupt student life and limit campus space.

The University intends to continue bargaining in good faith with the Graduate Workers of Columbia-UAW, despite newly proposed regulations by the National Labor Relations Board that would threaten the federal teaching and research assistants’ right to organize, Interim Provost Ira Katznelson announced in an email on Monday.