As the University prepares for an in-person fall semester, the graduate student-worker union is undergoing internal reform to address the challenges it faced during its spring strike, including the resignation of all 10 bargaining committee members in May.

At the conclusion of the spring semester, the Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers bargaining committee faced an acrimonious split between the seven committee members who voted in favor of approving the tentative agreement with Columbia and the three dissenting members who pushed for a no vote.

Following the success of the no vote, all seven pro-agreement members resigned, citing, in part, the stress of alleged doxing and verbal and written harassment from anonymous union members in opposition of the proposed contract.

On July 3, a union election seated eight new bargaining committee members and two returning members and approved a new name for the organization: the Student Workers of Columbia. The SWC will contend with the aftermath of the spring semester’s weeks-long strike and the eventual rejection of a tentative agreement reached with Columbia after two years of negotiation.

The new leadership, drawn entirely from a group of 10 candidates who ran together as the “Worker Empowerment” slate, envisions a “more democratic” future for the SWC. Leadership proposes a recommitment to four key components of what it considers a strong contract, including the recognition of the entire bargaining unit, neutral third-party arbitration for cases of harassment and discrimination, improved health care coverage, and wage increases consistent with inflation and the cost of living in New York City.

One dramatic change in the union’s unit recognition policies is that the SWC now explicitly includes undergraduate workers under its union umbrella. A 2016 decision by the National Relations Board affirmed the rights of hourly undergraduate and graduate teaching and research assistants to participate in the unit, a certification that Columbia pledged to uphold in the 2018 bargaining framework agreement. Had it passed, the tentative agreement Columbia and the GWC-UAW reached this spring would have cut most hourly student-workers from the recognized bargaining unit.

Two of the eight new members of the bargaining committee include Becca Roskill, SEAS ’22, and Mandi Spishak-Thomas, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the School of Social Work. Both were key organizers of the tentative contract’s no vote in an organizing space dominated by doctoral candidates in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Roskill and Spishak-Thomas hope to achieve greater parity in representation of the professional and undergraduate schools during negotiations.

“I … occupy this kind of peripheral space not being a Ph.D. student in GSAS,” Roskill said. “I want to draw attention to the fact that [undergraduate student-workers are] facing so many of the same issues that graduate students are facing, and for that reason, we need to be members of the same union.”

Spishak-Thomas noticed that she was often the only School of Social Work student that attended union meetings despite the school’s students being among the lowest-paid doctoral candidates at Columbia, along with those at the School of Public Health. Key parity issues motivated her to mobilize her department to reject the tentative agreement, which she says would not have addressed discrepancies such as access to summer stipends or eligibility for pay raises.

“Why should it be different if I choose to do my Ph.D. in social work or my Ph.D. in public health, than if I get a Ph.D. in history or religion?” Sphishak-Thomas said. “I think that social work is such a good example of a previously unengaged department [that did not fully understand] the power of what the union could do for them.”

Six of the 10 candidates ran uncontested, but the bargaining committee election turnout was still the highest in the union’s history, according to the SWC. Just two bargaining committee members are returning: Tristan Du Puy and Lilian Coie. They are two of the three members of the former bargaining committee who spoke out against the tentative agreement reached between Columbia and the union in April.

The new bargaining committee also seeks to address operations issues that plagued its predecessors. Joanna Lee, the third dissenting voice in the previous bargaining committee, did not seek reelection. Once again a rank-and-file member, she anticipates a greater commitment to the transparency and inclusion that she believes has been missing in union operations for several years.

A GWC-UAW referendum in 2018 approved open bargaining, yet Lee noted that communication from union leadership remained purposefully vague—a tactic organizers claim was recommended by the unit’s parent union, United Auto Workers. Tracking the history of negotiations with the University was made difficult, given that only the proposal from the most recent bargaining session was available to members. Lee’s suggestion for the union’s communications committee to write more explicit emails to members was voted down 3 to 7, with the opposing members fearing liability for public communications.

The first message sent to members this month from the new bargaining committee included additional opportunities for involvement in key organizing activities and committees within the union, which Lee sees as a “total transformation” from the previous leadership’s strategy.

Amid high tensions following the no vote, many pro-agreement members of the former bargaining committee alleged that members of Columbia Academic Workers for a Democratic Union—a faction within the former GWC-UAW that included the three dissenting bargaining committee voices—created divisions between the bargaining committee and rank-and-file members. Following the resignation of the seven bargaining committee members in favor of the agreement, C-AWDU members alleged that it was actually those members of the bargaining committee—referred to as the “BC Seven”—that had been the perpetrators of such divisive behavior, though many members outside the C-AWDU claimed that this was not the case.

“I think none of us were happy about how we were treated during the strike and the aftermath of that. … We felt like we’d put in all this work, we’ve gotten what we felt was a strong contract, [which] was voted down, and the same people that were trying to delegitimize the vote that didn’t go in our favor felt empowered,” Miles Richardson, a biology doctoral student and member of the former bargaining committee, said. “There’s only so much being yelled at and so many angry emails that you can really take before you’re like, ‘What am I doing here? No sane person should have to go through all this.’”

[RELATED: Our contract was rejected. That’s not why we resigned from the bargaining committee.]

Organizers count mapping their unit’s participation rates and distribution across departments as a first priority in preparing for the continuation of negotiations, in addition to rebuilding communications and strategic infrastructures that can operate independently of the UAW.

“We have all sorts of disparate lists floating around, and we don’t really have a good sense of where we are weak and where we are strong,” Amelia Spooner, a doctoral candidate in the history department and a union organizer, said. “So for me, the first step is just trying to figure out exactly where we are and where we need help and take very concrete steps to reach out to people and grow our union but also grow our movement.”

The new bargaining committee has not only increased access to join union committees and working groups but also distributed a fresh survey to have empirical backing at the negotiating table regarding members’ needs.

“It’s impossible to have two or three thousand members in the room. … This is an easy way to make sure that we are clear on the facts,” Coie said. “It’s not that Columbia doesn’t know [our members’ needs], but … having these survey numbers makes it easier for us to communicate to the public that this Ivy League institution is trying to sway the public in a misleading way.”

During the no-vote organizing process, Roskill came to realize that very few union members felt that the tentative agreement was sufficient. Instead, discord emerged between those who preferred the expediency of short-term relief and organizers who felt the union had sufficient power to hold out for a stronger contract.

“We’ve also been thinking about ways that we can retroactively try to bring people some of the relief that they would have received had we ratified a contract in the spring,” Roskill said. “We’re understanding the full extent of what’s possible when we organize through a model that’s actually driven by worker power, instead of the one before, where we’re just negotiating at Columbia’s will.”

The union’s period of reform comes amid a transforming landscape in New York City and higher education labor politics. New York University’s student-worker union, Graduate Student Organizing Committee-United Auto Workers, won significant concessions that some Columbia organizers see as a buoy to their own negotiations. In June, the GSOC-UAW ratified the tentative agreement reached in May with NYU administration following a three-week strike. The contract includes a 30 percent increase in wages for hourly workers, guaranteed annual compensation raises for Ph.D. teaching assistants, and expanded health care coverage.

Coie remembers speaking with members of NYU’s bargaining committee following GWC-UAW’s rejection of the tentative agreement, while the GSOC-UAW was still in negotiations with NYU’s administration.

“[The GSOC-UAW] said that [Columbia’s] no vote helped them at the table because NYU was scared that at NYU the same thing was going to happen. NYU was forced to give more and more and they were forced to push the university’s bottom line,” Coie said. “That’s how [the GSOC-UAW] was able to get such a strong contract because previously, [NYU’s] lawyers had been using our previous tentative agreement’s numbers to make NYU’s contract worse.”

Columbia’s administrative team has simultaneously undergone a significant shift following the conclusion of Ira Katnelson’s term as interim provost at the end of June and the beginning of former School of Engineering and Applied Science Dean Mary Boyce’s term as provost, effective July 1. Although Katznelson is a noted historian of the labor movement, members noted this did not seem to play a significant role in his approach to the University’s bargaining strategy or relationship with the union.

“The way that leaders interact with the union, or the way that leaders make decisions about things like tuition, how they treat workers, how they treat the surrounding community, aren’t their individual whims or their individual ideologies, but their structural position,” Roskill said. “Their role is like a mouthpiece for the motives of the institution which are, in large, profit.”

As the SWC turns a hopeful eye toward a more democratic future for the union and the resumption of negotiations, organizers see a need to reframe the union’s logic to prioritize organizing and messaging that targets structural issues.

“We cannot continue to rely on this approach of appealing to the nice people, appealing to even politicians to pull some strings in the back doors, to talk to Columbia and Columbia’s board of trustees. Because I think at the end of the day, that doesn’t really transform our workplace in a deep way. It perpetuates the way in which it functions,” Lee said. “I don’t want our union to just spend our time trying to get a foot in that door. I want to … break the door down entirely.”