In response to what they describe as foot-dragging by the administration in contract negotiations, student workers at Columbia University have authorized a strike. We spoke to some of them about their demands.
Columbia University has been a political flash point from the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, with the administration launching a legal and financial assault on the university in response to student Palestine protests and initiating politically motivated deportation proceedings against student activists like Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi. That conflict may now be entering a new phase, as the union representing graduate and undergraduate student workers, Student Workers of Columbia–United Auto Workers Local 2710 (SWC), has just voted to authorize a strike.
The strike vote comes after months of negotiations between student workers and the university, in which, workers say, there has been little progress. The union’s proposals include protections for noncitizen workers, restrictions on the use of artificial intelligence, ensuring adequate health care coverage, and pay increases commensurate with New York City’s cost of living. SWC held a strike authorization vote from February 20 to March 6, and on March 10, the union announced that 91 percent of voters had opted to authorize a strike, with 75 percent of eligible members participating.
For Jacobin, Ashkan Jahangiri spoke to three elected leaders of SWC while the vote was ongoing. They spoke about graduate workers’ key demands as well as the stakes of a potential strike — including the prospect that a hostile Trump National Labor Relations Board might take the opportunity to reverse the 2016 decision that opened the way to legal recognition of student worker unions at Columbia and other private universities.
The first issue is money. It’s intolerable to live in New York City right now with how much we are paid. Columbia only pays us 68 percent of the living wage for Manhattan. That’s far lower, in terms of the cost of living, than what comparable institutions pay their student workers.
That’s the median amount made by members — 68 percent of Manhattan’s living wage?
It’s more complicated, because we have a weird pay structure; we don’t have pay parity between workers. In engineering, we’re all on twelve-month appointments, so we get paid for a whole year, but there are a lot of people in the humanities who are on nine-month appointments. So you can get a summer stipend but only as long as you have guaranteed funding. There are people in our unit right now who are only making about $35,000 a year, because they are past their guaranteed funding and don’t get a summer stipend.
It feels pretty intolerable. The cost-of-living crisis is really resonating with a lot of people. And with the accumulation of all the tariffs, I’ve started to see people feel the financial pressure more acutely. That’s a big driving force. Obviously, we want a higher salary, but we want the cost of living addressed too — so if there’s inflation, we can still afford to live and do our work and not be struggling to scrape things together.
I have coworkers who are moving farther and farther away, because they can’t afford to be here: moving to New Jersey and then being like, “Even here, I don’t know how I’m going to do this.” Or saying, “I want to fulfill my course work faster, so I can move back to where I’m from and do my research where it’s cheaper to live.”
And at this point, the [academic] job market is so dismal that it’s not like you can be like, “I’ll hold out for a few years. It’ll get better.” We don’t know what’s going to happen; we have to struggle where we are to survive.
What sort of compensation increase are you asking for?
The number we proposed was about $76,000, which is the cost of living based on the MIT Living Wage Calculator, plus the amount the university recommends saving on its own website, subtracting the cost of health care since we’re on a Columbia-provided health care plan.
I’ve witnessed firsthand how Columbia is actively losing talent to other universities because we don’t pay as much. When I was participating in an admitted student day last year, I got close to this guy who was pursuing very similar research interests as my own, and he was deciding between here and University of Chicago. But because UChicago pays more relative to Chicago’s standard of living, he said pretty explicitly, “This is why I’m choosing to go to UChicago.” So I missed out on that opportunity for academic collaboration, because Columbia didn’t pay as much.
There are additional pressures that PhD students face, not directly tied to compensation. A lot of people feel forced into Columbia’s housing system. The university claims to offer subsidized housing, but then we’re forced to live with multiple roommates and the vast majority of the apartments are furnished with dorm-room furniture. I’ve spoken to a lot of people, at least in my department, who feel we should be able to afford a one-bedroom or studio apartment in New York City with our own furniture rather than live in a dormitory situation. I’ve also heard firsthand accounts of people in my department being forced out of their Columbia residences because the university is converting them into dorm structures.
Columbia is evicting graduate students for undergrad housing?
Yes. Because they’re massively raising the undergrad and master’s student enrollments to bring in more tuition.
In meetings where we were discussing funding cuts, the administration said, “We’re just going to enroll way more master’s students, and that’s how you all will be funded. And I’m sitting there thinking, “You’re telling me that it’s a good thing that you’re increasing my teaching load.”
Similarly, it is strange that Columbia puts its PhD workers on the same health care plan as undergraduates, when a majority of our unit is coming back to the PhD older. Often, you’ve worked a job; you’re not twenty-one. You have different health needs. You need access to a primary care provider off-campus or the ability to get specialist referrals without having to go through Student Health, which is abysmal. You can never get them on the phone; you can never get an appointment.
So that’s another big demand for us: give us a choice between faculty health care plans. There are a few different faculty and staff options. We would like workers to have the choice to opt in to whatever plan is better for them. The current system of putting us in the same health care plans as the eighteen-year-olds is not working out well.
Another proposal is about the health care fund. One of the things that we won in our last contract was a pool of money for reimbursements for both employees and dependents’ out-of-pocket health care costs. Right now, that pool of money is so much smaller than our demonstrated need. Last year, we had over $1 million in requests for reimbursement of out-of-pocket funds, and the health fund is about $400,000. So less than half of the requests can be reimbursed. We want more money for that to meet all our needs.
Another demand is for improved anti-bullying protections — protections against bullying of staff by faculty — and protections against discharge and retaliation.
One of the big things that would help a lot of lab workers that we’re asking for is transitional funding — financial support if switching primary investigators (PIs). Basically, if you have an issue with your adviser, no questions asked, you can get money from a centralized pool to go find a different adviser and give you a little bit of time to start doing research with them; for example, if you have to write a new grant, because who knows if the professor you want to work with now has money. We want to give people flexibility and be able to get that money no questions asked.
It’s very hard for lab workers right now, especially given the difficult funding climate, to move labs if there’s an issue with their adviser. Often people start getting pushed out for unclear or essentially made-up reasons; the supervisor will then try to pin it on an academic issue. Like, your lab just lost all its funding, and you’ve been performing super well — but all of a sudden you’re not meeting your academic milestones and need to leave with a master’s degree. So having some sort of transitional funding mechanism and protections against adviser bullying are huge.
The noncitizen issues are very big too. That includes making sure people aren’t disenrolled and that they can continue to get paid if they have an issue with their visa status.
What has bargaining been like so far?
Our contract expired in June of 2025. We had been trying to bargain with them since December 2024, but they didn’t agree to meet with us until March 2025.
Then there was a lot of organizing in our unit about what to do because the university walked back allowing Zoom observers in the bargaining session, which was something that we had in our last contract negotiation cycle. Open bargaining was super helpful then.
But the administration didn’t want Zoom observers. There was huge pushback from them, saying, “You’re recording the session, and we don’t want you to have footage.” We weren’t recording. We were like, “You know how this works because you literally bargained over Zoom during the pandemic.” But I think Columbia saw what it did to energize workers when they’re being ridiculous at the table, and they didn’t want that.
So then we had a long struggle to try to win Zoom observation during the session. We ended up having to move forward without it, but we are allowed unlimited in-person observers.
How many members have been showing up to observe bargaining?
It depends on the session. Our first session, a hundred people showed up. I was talking to one of my coworkers the other day, who went for the first time, and she was like, “This is so ridiculous.” And I said, “Yeah, I’m glad you saw that.” It’s really affirming to see how they behave across the table. It’s been very politicizing.
You all are holding a strike authorization vote (SAV). How do you feel about it?
My department, political science, tends to be a little more conservative than the other departments. But I felt a lot of energy. Roughly eight or nine out of every ten people I spoke to in my department said that they would vote yes. I think people are very galvanized.
[Some] workers are feeling a bit more hesitant about what it would mean to go on strike now, when we’re in Trump 2. There are a lot of considerations that we’re having to talk and think through together, about how we’re going to turn to each other and protect ourselves in case of. . . Who knows what could happen? So many things are on the table now with rampant lawlessness in the government.
We’re trying to figure it out. But regardless of these challenges, we need a better contract, and the university is going to keep stalling at the table and quibbling over meaningless things. It doesn’t benefit them to engage substantively with us at all. People are starting to see that and want to apply more pressure. Without the pressure of the SAV, I don’t think Columbia would be inclined to give us anything material that would change our working conditions.
To zoom out a little bit: Over the past couple years, we’ve done a good job of building a strong stewards network. I say “steward” in the broad sense — not necessarily meaning an elected formal position but just somebody who’s organizing in their department or work site. We’ve developed a network that’s focused on developing organization at the level of the department or the lab or the work site, and we’ve been able to share ideas with each other.
One thing several departments have done is host biweekly lunch meetings where grad workers in the department get together and talk about workplace issues. In a bunch of departments, we’ve developed issue campaigns around things like reforming PhD student handbook policies around academic probation or resisting censorship and retaliation against Palestine-related teaching. And also just collectivizing individual issues — getting together and strategizing around individual everyday problems like late pay or overpayment or issues around eligibility for teaching assistant funding.
In departments where those meetings are happening, the union feels real to people, because it’s basically just what we do together to assert a sense of dignity and self-respect in our everyday working lives. So in those departments, it was pretty easy to get SAV turnout. You can just drop a reminder in a group chat, and suddenly a supermajority of people have voted already. The numbers follow organically from a qualitatively robust department culture of self-organization. In other places, it took a bit more hustle to reach workers who are less integrated into these organizing spaces.
When I have talked to my immediate coworkers, generally the sense is that we’ll strike if we have to. People aren’t necessarily jumping at the bit to strike because of the general repressive climate. It’s especially hard for noncitizen workers to assess the risk. It takes a lot of collective trust in each other and confidence, which I think we have built in many places.
Some of my coworkers are holding out hope that the SAV itself will move Columbia a little bit. Others of us are more skeptical that that will do the trick given how intransigent Columbia is. And we’re not just doing this SAV as a spectacle to show some flashy numbers and expect movement at the table just from that. We’re actually prepared to go out on an indefinite strike. People are thinking really seriously about how we can extract concessions by disrupting university operations.
Columbia has been part of a surge in grad worker militancy we’ve seen over the past few years. How do Columbia grad workers fit into this larger movement?
There has been a series of grad worker strikes over the past five or six years. The wildcat strike at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2020 really touched off a sequence. After that, we had our strike; there were two, but the one in the fall of 2021 was ten weeks long.
There was also a four-month-long strike at the University of Michigan in 2023 and the Boston University strike in 2024, which was the longest one yet — seven months. There was the 2024 Dartmouth strike, mainly STEM lab researchers, which was really inspiring because they went out on May Day and also had the Palestine encampment the same day.
Harvard’s contract expired the same month as ours, and similar to us, they have had a prolonged conflict over open bargaining or bargaining rules and getting seated at the table.
Also, there’s definitely a lot of anxiety, especially among union staff, about the decertification threat — the worry that Trump’s NLRB might reverse the 2016 decision that said grad workers at private universities have the right to unionize. And there’s an astroturf group here pushing for decertification.
The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
I got a funny message from them explaining that I could afford to buy a PlayStation 5 if I canceled my own union dues.
Then there’s that other group, Students Against Antisemitism.
They filed a lawsuit. There have been lawsuits against our union and against the Cornell union — basically these astroturf things that are projects of the Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
There’s also a concern that, if we file unfair labor practice (ULP) charges, will that poke the bear? Will that lead the NLRB to revoke grad workers’ organizing rights? Yeah. There are many debates about all this stuff among union staff and lawyers.
But we’ve also talked to people at Indiana University, who have been doing premajority unionism without recognition for years. They went out on strike for a few weeks in 2022 and won a nearly 50 percent raise for minimum stipends for grad workers. So the way I see it is, we just have to adapt whatever happens. If we do the work that really counts, then we’ll be ready to continue whatever happens, on that legal terrain.
There’s also massive restructuring of the sector underway. There are existential threats in the sense of the possibility of shrinking or eliminating graduate student labor.
We’re seeing shrinking cohort sizes. In general, whether it’s due to actual resource constraints or just a fear of funding being lost, we’re seeing contraction. Columbia is trying to get rid of our labor. One of the more alarming things is they sent all of us in engineering a fun and exciting email that was like, “We’re piloting AI teaching assistants in our classes.” And I’m just like, oh my God — students paying $90,000 a year to learn from ChatGPT.
Does the union have a proposal around AI?
It says don’t replace our labor and allow us to choose how we want to use this tool in our work. We’re the experts in our fields, and we should be able to assess whether this is actually a useful tool to use in our research or teaching, or if it’s not and is going to detract from the experience. But the main thrust of it is, give us more ownership over the conditions of our work and don’t replace our labor with a substandard thing that diminishes the quality of education.
I would add that the appointments article in our contract demands says that hiring levels should not be more than 10 percent below the 2024 cohort size. So we’re trying to protect against reduced cohort sizes.
On the point about decertification, something I’ve been telling my fearful coworkers is that Columbia’s ULPs against the union probably pose the biggest threats of decertification. And going on strike and getting a tentative agreement would probably be the best way to have Columbia drop those ULPs and prevent that from actually happening.
What are your major contract demands?