Columbia’s anti-Israel grad student union makes big demands, prepares to strike

Graduate student unions are relatively new: they weren’t around when I was in graduate school in the Pleistocene.  They are officially part of larger labor unions (the University of Chicago grad student union, for example, is part of  the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (GSU-UE, Local 1103).  Today’s piece is about the Columbia University grad-student union, affiliated with the United Auto Workers.

The rationale for students joining unions is that they consider themselves employees rather than just students, and that comes from requirements that students often have to teach to get their degree (they can be paid by the university if they’re on fellowship, as I was at Harvard, and taught for a year as part of the degree requirements). Teaching and even the requirement to do research is considered “employment” in the same way that making cars is considered employment, though many grad students disagree, considering their activities involved in getting a graduate degree—including learning to teach—to be education, not employment. The resolution of these differences involves grad students voting: if enough of them want a union, they get a union.  Whether or not they must join a union or pay dues to a one depends on the university. Neither Chicago nor Columbia requires membership, for example, but the benefits all students get are those agreed on via bargaining between the university and the union.  Chicago grad students have to pay someone, however. As Grok tells me:

University of Chicago graduate students are not required to join the union (GSU-UE) as members. However, those in covered teaching or research positions must pay union dues or an equivalent agency fee as a condition of employment, per the collective bargaining agreement effective April 2024.

The two articles below, the first from the Free Press (FP) and the second from the Columbia Spectator (CS; the student paper) describe a potential upcoming strike by Columbia graduate students. Click on either headline to go to the article. I’ll identify where quotes come from, and all quotes are indented.

The CS describes how grad-student unions bargains with the university; this holds, I think, for all universities:

Under the National Labor Relations Act, the union’s legally mandated role involves bargaining with the University over wages, hours, and working conditions, which are ‘mandatory’ subjects of collective bargaining; the employer and the union are legally required to bargain over these subjects if one of the parties raises concerns. Other topics which may be brought for bargaining include any condition outside of wages, hours, and working conditions. Neither party may insist on bargaining for permissive demands, but they may discuss them.

One of the problems with requesting big increases in student salaries, as Columbia’s union is doing, is that it ultimately leads to the admission of fewer grad students, for the funds for grad students are limited. (This shrinking has happened, I’m told, at the University of California.)  Another problem, highlighted in the FP but not the CS article, is that student unions, which have historically taken political stands (including endorsing candidates), can and have made demands for the university itself to take political stands. In the case of Columbia, this often involves anti-Israel stands, and you can see that many students—especially Jewish ones—don’t want to be part of a union that is explicitly and blatantly anti-Israel.

The FP article (not archived):

And the CS:

Columbia students went on strike for 10 weeks in 2021, and that of course degraded classes in which grad students teach, and also research (nobody is supposed to teach or do research during a strike). Now they’re threatening to strike again, and the union’s demands are big. From the CS:

The Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers [SWC] opened a strike authorization vote Friday to “ramp up the pressure” for the University to meet its demands amid seven months of stalled contract negotiations.

The vote follows continued disagreement between the union and the University over the scope of issues subject to collective bargaining and is open to all union members through March 8. If affirmed, the vote would authorize union leadership to hold a later vote to decide whether and when to initiate a strike. SWC-UAW last went on strike in 2021 for 10 weeks during its first contract negotiation before signing a contract with the University.

Here’s what Columbia students get now and what they’re asking in terms of benefits (from the FP):

Now that the union has gotten around to its economic demands, they are far beyond what graduate students at comparable academic institutions are typically offered. On top of a full tuition remission valued at over $55,000 per academic year, SWC has demanded an annual minimum salary of over $76,000 for PhD students who are teaching or conducting research, even though they are expected to work only about 20 hours per week.

The union also is seeking a childcare subsidy of up to $50,000 per child per year. For so-called casual employees, including undergraduate student workers, the union is demanding minimum pay of $36.50 per hour, up from $22.50 per hour, and more than twice New York City’s minimum wage of $17 per hour.

SWC also plans to bargain for union shop status, which would force student workers to join and pay dues to remain employed, or for agency shop status, in which nonunion members must pay a fee to cover bargaining costs.

Some Googling indicates that grad students now make up to about $50,000 per year, so they’re asking for about a 50% increase in salary.  And depending on whether a member has kids, the demands could total as much as $200,000 per year.  Further, the “union shop status” they’re requesting means that all students must join the union, and since the union is demanding political stands, that can be problematic. From the FP:

The battle isn’t primarily about wages or working conditions. Instead, it is focused on the demands of anti-Israel activists on Columbia’s campus. Some student workers say this activism means that they feel uncomfortable about seeking help with basic functions like workplace conditions or health insurance.

“They’ve singularly focused on pursuing policies that are meant to disenfranchise Jews and Israelis, as opposed to pursuing and negotiating on policies for the betterment of all student workers,” one Columbia grad student told me. An engineering graduate student added, “If you look at what the union is doing now, you can see there’s no sane people left.”

SWC’s president, Grant Miner, isn’t even allowed on campus. He was one of the 22 students arrested following the occupation of Hamilton Hall in 2024, was expelled, and therefore is no longer employed by the university. Yet Miner is paid over $46,000 a year by the union, according to a contract reviewed by The Free Press. Miner did not respond to a request for comment.

Some of the Columbia union’s demands (from the FP):

The union has demanded that Columbia public safety officers not “use force against Columbia affiliates or non-Columbia affiliates under any circumstances,” carry weapons, or require anyone to show their university identification. SWC also wants Columbia to dismantle its security cameras, halt Columbia’s dual degree program with Tel Aviv University, block the opening of a new facility in Tel Aviv, and divest Columbia from Israel.

. . .Olya Skulovich, who is Jewish and Israeli, said SWC deserves credit for improvements in health insurance and other areas. “There was not even coverage for spouses” when she started, said Skulovich, who arrived at Columbia in 2018 and earned a PhD in earth and environmental engineering.

But she was shocked when the union quickly veered away from economic priorities after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. SWC described Israel as “genocidal” and called on Columbia to divest from the “Israeli war machine.” The statement was approved by just 100 of the eligible union members.

“I lived a big part of my life in Belarus, and I know what antisemitism is firsthand,” Skulovich said. Brian Frost, a union steward for the engineering school, resigned from his SWC post over the post–October 7 statement. “The lists of demands are not labor demands,” he wrote in an email to other PhDs in his department. The statement was “uncharacteristically heartless for a labor organization,” said Frost.

Once the union had taken an official side on the war in Gaza, it began to support student protesters. SWC voted to join the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition, the main anti-Israel campus group that includes Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). The three groups are not recognized by Columbia and were therefore ineligible to organize protests, but union leaders believed that SWC could veil their activities as labor actions.

“We were putting up rallies for the student organizations who weren’t allowed to protest on campus,” union steward Ioanna Kourkoulou told other UAW branch organizations. She bragged that SWC was “allowed to picket whenever the fuck we want.”

I have never been involved in any of these negotiations or votes, as I was a faculty member when the union began at my school, and I can’t even tell you what deal was made between the union here and the university, though I doubt it forces the University of Chicago to take political stands, which is prohibited by our Kalven principles.

I thus can’t say how many grad student positions here have been lost here because of bargaining, but if the Columbia uni9on gets its demands of a $76,000 annual salary and childcare subsidies (on top of the $55,000 tuition remission), I expect there will be substantially fewer grad students.  That is for the talks to decide.

What I most object to is the union’s anti-Israel demands, which include university divesting from Israel,  blocking the Tel Aviv facility, and joining three anti-Israel groups (and sponsoring their rallies)—at least two of them (SJP and JVP) that I see as antisemitic. This would force Columbia to take ideological and political stands, which would violate its existing policy of institutional neutrality and chill the speech of Jewish or pro-Israel students.  It is the political positions of grad-student unions that, I think, make them different from “normal” labor unions and inappropriate for universities. Whatever Columbia decides to do about grad-student funding, it must not agree to adopt these ideological positions.