Student workers at Columbia University voted on Friday to end their 10-week strike, after union organizers struck a tentative agreement with university administrators late Thursday. The strike, which began on November 3, was the largest active strike in the United States at the time it ended.
The union’s 3,000 members — including graduate and undergraduate students, research assistants, and graduate instructors of record — called for higher wages, more robust health coverage, and the right to third-party arbitration of harassment and discrimination complaints. The size of the strike meant that hundreds of undergraduate classes were canceled for lack of a graduate instructor.
“There is no doubt that this has been a challenging period for the university, yet all who were involved in collective bargaining shared the common goal of creating a stronger Columbia for those who teach and learn, conduct research, discover and innovate, work and study here,” Mary C. Boyce, the provost, said in a message to the campus on Friday. “We are proud of this agreement, which would make Columbia a leader in higher education on a long list of issues affecting student employees.”
The tentative agreement, according to a summary posted on Columbia’s website, would last four years, retroactive to August 1, 2021, and include an immediate raise of at least $3,000 for all doctoral students on appointments, and a 16-percent pay increase over four years for doctoral students on 12-month appointments. Stipends would increase by 3 percent each year.
The new agreement, if ratified by the union’s members, would also provide dental benefits for doctoral students and their dependents, and create support funds to aid students with out-of-pocket medical expenses. Student workers would, under the agreement, be able to pursue harassment and discrimination complaints through neutral third-party arbitrators after investigation by Columbia’s Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Office.
Any student employee who performs instructional or research work at Columbia, as defined by a 2017 decision by the National Labor Relations Board, would be recognized as a union member, a classification that includes hourly workers.
“We are thrilled to reach an agreement with Columbia after seven years of building toward this first contract,” said Nadeem Mansour, a member of the bargaining committee and a doctoral candidate in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies, in a news release. “What our members achieved is impressive, but this is only the start. We look forward to building on our strong union culture to ensure the university continues to meet the needs of student workers.”
A Strike’s Length and Power
The nearly two-month strike was the longest in higher education in more than a decade, said William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, at the City University of New York’s Hunter College. From 2012 to 2018, the average faculty strike lasted just 2.9 days, Herbert and Jacob Apkarian found in a study published in 2020. From 1966 to 1994, only six faculty strikes lasted more than 50 days. (The Columbia strike clocked in at 65 days.)
So why was the strike so long? Two key issues in the tentative agreement — union recognition and neutral arbitration of harassment and discrimination cases — were among the holdups. Ethan Jacobs, a doctoral student and member of the bargaining committee, called the arbitration provision the “centerpiece” of negotiations. The group held out for the inclusion of hourly workers in the bargaining unit, too, rejecting an offer that met most of its other demands to do so.
The length of the strike was part of its power, Jacobs said. A shorter strike, or one with a planned end point, such as the three-day strike Harvard graduate workers staged in the fall, is “OK if you want to get people to retweet things and make statements. But ultimately, it doesn’t really affect the bottom line of the university,” he said. That undergraduates weren’t able to get credit for courses they were paying to take, because they weren’t able to log enough hours in the classroom, constituted an increasing liability for Columbia as the strike wore on.
The Zoom-broadcast bargaining sessions dispelled “any notions that you would have had that Columbia is somehow different from any other employer in the U.S.”
Members of the union — Student Workers of Columbia, affiliated with the United Auto Workers — gathered for in-person and online picketing throughout the strike, including demonstrations that blocked campus entrances. Those actions escalated when Columbia administrators told workers, in a memo in early December, that only those who ceased striking would receive appointments for the spring. (Those who didn’t stop striking by December 10, the message said, would receive spring appointments only “if available.”) Many saw the memo as a threat to replace striking students with scab employees, and claimed that such a move would be illegal.
The strike made waves outside of higher education, too. In a letter in late December to Columbia’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, the State of New York’s comptroller urged him to reach an agreement with the student workers, “for the good and welfare of all concerned, including the greater good of New York City.” Three U.S. representatives did the same, writing to Bollinger that they “fully support good-faith bargaining from both principles to reach a fair agreement.” A New York State senator, Robert Jackson, joined the picket line in December, while the actor Danny DeVito took to Twitter in support of the strikers, writing that “New York is still a union town!”
The strike enjoyed widespread support on social media, too. A hardship fund, organized to “support students who can no longer afford rent, groceries, or health care because of Columbia’s failure to provide adequate wages and sudden change to pay policy,” drew nearly $400,000 in donations.
Inside the Negotiations
Relations between Columbia and its graduate workers have historically been strained. In 2016, Columbia activists helped overturn a National Labor Relations Board decision forbidding private-college unions to engage in collective bargaining. Two years later, the union held a weeklong strike, and 2020 saw a group of graduate students organize a labor and rent strike.
This was the second walkout in six months for the union, which went on strike in March and reached a tentative agreement with the university in mid-April. But the contract, which would have been the union’s first, was voted down by its members on April 30. Some rank-and-file members were upset by the bargaining committee’s decision to pause the strike, which it did without consulting the membership. Throughout the spring, leaders of the movement to reject the contract called for reform of the bargaining committee, and new elections were held in the summer. (Only two members of the bargaining committee returned, and both had opposed last spring’s tentative agreement.)
The new negotiating team, and the fact that bargaining sessions were open and watched by hundreds of members via Zoom, made it easier to build support internally, said Gloria Huei-Jong Graf, a doctoral student in epidemiology. “The ability to come in and watch the abuse that the union-busting lawyer was heaping on members of our bargaining committee,” she said, “really dispels any notions that you would have had that Columbia is somehow different from any other employer in the U.S., that it’s somehow more benevolent or is looking out for us as students more than anything.
“That was a dynamic,” she continued, “that you could see very clearly if you attended any of our bargaining sessions. In some ways, I think it strengthens your resolve.”
Even with a crucial mass of union support, “the negotiations were pretty ambitious from our part,” Jacobs said, with most of the significant articles in the spring agreement revised and new ones added. “I remember over the summer, so many people saying, ‘This is crazy. You can’t ask for this much.’” But through constant conversations with rank-and-file members, he said, the committee decided it could set its bar high, and as a result “we were able to follow through on essentially all of our core demands and then some.”
The union will now enter a 15-day discussion period, followed by a weeklong ratification period, as provided in its bylaws. Results will be announced on January 28, at the end of the ratification period. “Union organizers note that members are ready to reject the tentative agreement or return to strike if the university does not offer sufficient compensation for make-up work for all striking members,” the bargaining unit wrote in its release.
A threatened strike elsewhere could lead to compromises, “because now it’s not just a threat, but it’s a genuine threat.”
Back pay for striking workers had been a sticking point for both sides in the final days of negotiations, with bargaining sessions breaking down over the issue earlier in the week. Pay for make-up work will be disbursed through individual departments. But the lack of a uniform mechanism for those policies could be bad news for workers whose departments weren’t sympathetic to the strike. Whether the tentative agreement is ratified, organizers said, will depend in part on rank-and-file members’ experience in receiving those funds over the next few weeks, and the degree to which Columbia officials show that “they want to restore this relationship with us,” Graf said.
If the contract is ratified, it could become a “lodestar” on which other academic unions base their own bargaining, Herbert, of Hunter College, said. It’s also more likely, he said, that a threatened strike elsewhere could lead to compromises, “because now it’s not just a threat, but it’s a genuine threat, where there’s an example” of apparent resolution at Columbia for administrators at other colleges to consider.
To Bárbara Cruvinel Santiago, a doctoral student in physics, Friday’s vote was a powerful message for graduate unions across the nation. “Precedent matters,” she said. “If you strike for long enough, the university will realize that you are important for the university to function and that they need to treat you fairly.”
