GEO at the University of Michigan stands in solidarity with the Graduate Workers of Columbia University – UAW Local 2110 and call on Columbia to begin bargaining with the GWC immediately. We condemn Columbia University’s recent announcement that they will break the law by refusing to bargain in good faith with the GWC.
The teaching and research assistants at Columbia chose overwhelmingly to unionize in December 2016, voting 1,602 to 623–or 72%–in favor of unionization. While Columbia delayed bargaining in the courts, the GWC continued to demonstrate majority support for their union, electing a bargaining committee, developing a bargaining platform based on surveys with responses from over 2,500 graduate workers, and launching a petition against sexual harassment and assault on campus with over 2,000 signatures from graduate workers. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has now rejected all of Columbia’s legal arguments against unionization, as well as their effort to nullify the unionization vote, and certified the union in December 2017. By refusing to honor the vote, Columbia defies their legal obligation to bargain and betrays the principles of democracy and the free exchange of ideas that they purport to uphold.
Instead of upholding these principles, Columbia is choosing to defy labor law in the hopes that a Trump-appointed NLRB will revoke graduate workers’ right to unionize. In so doing, Columbia sides against workers in and outside of academia and shares in Trump’s willingness to target the vulnerable to shore up power. We urge Columbia to renounce their anti-labor stance and begin bargaining with the GWC immediately.
This issue is particularly close to home for the University of Michigan’s Graduate Employees’ Organization because Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s president, was once president of the University of Michigan. As former GEO president Eric Dirnbach wrote in an open letter to Bollinger, Columbia’s current president used to recognize that graduate workers are employees when he bargained with us years ago. What was true then is true today: graduate workers perform real labor, and as such they deserve a labor union.
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