According to the Columbia Spectator John Coatsworth, provost at Columbia University in New York City, sent an email to the graduate student union admonishing them for a.) being a union, and b.) threatening to strike.
Graduate students voted to unionize under Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers in December 2016 after Columbia’s efforts to prevent a vote were defeated in court. Since then, however, Columbia has refused to bargain with the union and has attempted to overturn the ruling that authorized graduate students to unionize.
Columbia has yet to truly acknowledge the union, and a call for a vote on “strike authorization” has been gaining traction.
In the email, Coatsworth wrote, “The University will not be altering the position set forth in my January 30 letter. Our principled disagreement with [the union] about the employment status of teaching and research assistants is … [a] fundamental legal question … that should be decided by the courts.”
However, the email stated that the University would face “incalculable damage to [its] world class teaching, scholarship, and research” if graduate students stopped teaching classes or left their research posts. Engineering students expressed a similar sentiment at a town hall last year: Several students argued that a strike would be particularly harmful to the School of Engineering and Applied Science graduate students because, unlike their counterparts in the humanities and social sciences, they cannot do research from home and must do so in labs on campus.
Columbia has a longstanding history of union-busting techniques that would make John Ford or the Pinkerton Agency smirk.
At Columbia, where the students just concluded a weeklong strike in tandem with their brethren at Yale, a previously undisclosed internal memo (just obtained by The Nation–download here) reveals that the administration has been flirting with union-busting tactics that go well beyond anything an academic institution should contemplate. The memo, dated February 16, 2005, is signed by none other than Alan Brinkley, a well-known liberal historian who is now serving as Columbia’s provost. Brinkley has gone out of his way to assure outside observers, including New York State Senator David Paterson, that “students are free to join or advocate a union, and even to strike, without retribution.” Yet his February 16 memo, addressed to seventeen deans, professors and university leaders, lists retaliatory actions that might be taken against students “to discourage” them from striking. Several of these measures would likely rise to the level of illegality if graduate student employees were covered under the National Labor Relations Act.
That was from 2005. Columbia’s general tune has not changed since then. As graduate workers have explained, while Columbia has always argued that graduates are “apprentices,” the harsh reality of graduate workers’ “apprenticeships” seem to be more semantic chicanery. The Graduate Workers Union feels that the school’s administration is delaying negotiating until a more conservative judicial ruling comes about favoring them.
Union leaders have previously alleged that Columbia is delaying negotiations until a newly conservative National Labor Relations Board can overturn the original ruling that allowed Columbia graduate students to unionize. Although President Trump has the power to appoint new commissioners, slow progress in selecting and confirming nominees means that the NLRB does not yet have a majority of Republican nominees.
Without a clear majority in Columbia’s favor on the NLRB and with an appellate court hearing potentially months or years away, Columbia may continue to refuse to bargain with the union.
You can read the Graduate Workers of Columbia-UAW Local 2110 letter below.
Dear President Lee Bollinger,
We urge you to honor the certification of our overwhelming democratic vote for unionization and to start bargaining with Graduate Workers of Columbia-UAW Local 2110.
For more than three years, a majority of us have supported GWC-UAW as our union. And for three years, your administration has refused to respect our choice.
Despite your attempt to nullify our historic 72 percent vote in favor of unionization by filing objections to our election, support among RAs, TAs, and from our allies on and off campus has only grown. An even larger majority of RAs and TAs, as well as 30,000 of our supporters, signed a petition publicly asking you to drop the objections. More than 200 elected and community leaders, nearly 200 faculty, students and alumni have also publicly and privately urged you to respect the vote and start bargaining. The Columbia Spectator has called on you to recognize GWCUAW as "a matter of democratic principle."
Now that the NLRB rejected your attempt to nullify our vote and certified GWC-UAW as our union, your administration has a legal - in addition to a moral and democratic - obligation to bargain.
Given the unprecedented current attacks on international student rights, gender equity, racial justice, affordable education, and funding for scientific research, it is more important than ever to work together to defend the core values of our universities. Your refusal to respect our choice hinders the potential to work together in upholding and defending these values.
If you continue to defy the legal obligation to bargain, the GWC-UAW intends to hold a strike authorization vote. We, the undersigned representatives from departments across the university, commit to organizing our colleagues to authorize our elected bargaining committee to call a strike if you make it necessary to do so.
We again urge you to respect our choice and start bargaining.