Myths from Mary Boyce, a Response
Dear fellow members of the Columbia community,
For weeks, the Student Workers of Columbia-UAW claimed that arbitration was their principal concern, the one without which they would not agree to a settlement. Now that the University has agreed to arbitration, the Union has identified a different issue in its place as a requirement for any agreement: unit recognition.
The demand for full recognition has remained a fundamental part of our negotiations with Columbia both before and after we entered mediation. Based on a unit-wide poll that identified recognition as one of the key priorities of the unit, the bargaining committee has repeatedly emphasized the centrality of this issue to Columbia’s team. Last spring’s Tentative Agreement was in part voted down by our unit members because of its lacking Recognition article. Thousands of our members voted to authorize our current strike specifically because of Columbia’s unwillingness to recognize everyone currently in our unit. Just last week, in a poll of 700 SWC members, 81.2% reported dissatisfaction with Columbia’s Recognition proposal. Our stance has been, and remains, that arbitration and recognition go hand in-hand to protect all of our workers. In light of this, we are surprised by Columbia’s failure to understand that anything short of full recognition is a deal-breaker for our unit.
Columbia’s position on recognition is expansive and goes beyond what is required by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). It should not be invoked as a reason to prevent an agreement at this late stage.
This is not true. Recognition is a fundamental aspect of any collective bargaining agreement, and has been at the core of our demands for years. It took three years of protracted litigation at the NLRB for Columbia to recognize student workers at Columbia as workers. We are simply asking Columbia to follow the law. Our Recognition proposal merely directly and explicitly cites this decision (available from the NLRB website here). Columbia’s position falls short of our NLRB-certified unit by stipulating that casual workers will only become eligible for union membership after performing 250 hours of labor, or when on the books for 15 hours per week. We see no reason for casual workers who have been on strike with us to be told that they are eligible for union protections only after the arbitrary limit of 250 total hours, or 15 hours per week.
The package as a whole is fair and comprehensive and is our best and final offer. It includes major movement by the University on arbitration, economics, union security, and many other issues. These terms collectively represent an entirely new standard for higher education.
Columbia’s current offer still fails to provide student workers with a living wage in New York City, during a year in which rates of inflation have reached 39-year highs. While this package represents Columbia’s willingness to bargain in good faith, it is entirely surpassed by contracts reached by our sister unions at peer institutions, and other unions Columbia has agreements with. We recognize that Columbia’s offer represents some of their most significant movement to date, no doubt due to the immense pressure our strike and the voices of students, faculty, and community members have brought to bear on Columbia’s institutional intransigence. By showing a willingness to accept Columbia’s terms on every other outstanding issue, our members have demonstrated a commitment to bringing an end to this conflict and moving forward together. Nonetheless, these wins will count for nothing for those of us whom Columbia is insisting on excluding from union representation, regardless of these members’ substantial efforts in getting us to where we currently stand.
On recognition, which refers to who is to be a member of the bargaining unit, Columbia’s proposal is beyond what is required and is extraordinarily broad by any fair standard. It includes not only all students on appointment, whether PhD, Master’s, or undergraduates, but also Master’s and undergraduate students on the casual payroll who provide instructional services, provided they work at least an average of 15 hours a week over the course of the semester or after providing 250 hours of instructional services. Anyone who doubts the breadth of that definition should compare it to the recognition provision in the NYU contract, which covers only graduate students who teach.
As mentioned above, Columbia’s Recognition proposal squarely falls short of our NLRB-certified unit. Aside from fundamentally disagreeing with the idea that any worker can join the union only on the basis of having performed 250 hours of labor, or when on the books for 15 hours per week (as though this were a loyalty or seniority scheme), we also hold serious concerns about the ways in which Columbia defines and tracks hourly work.
The maximum number of hours that any student-worker is reported to work is 20 hours per week, on average. By setting the minimum at 15 hours per week, Columbia is therefore excluding all members who work less than three-fourths of the maximum they are allowed to work. At the same time, as many workers can attest, the actual demands and duties of many student workers at Columbia routinely exceeds the 20 hour average over the course of a semester. We have also documented that many workers are forced to pre-fill time sheets with a specified number of hours and are not allowed to correct them if they work more. There is nothing in the University’s proposal that would prevent them from reclassifying workers to be on the books for below 15 hours per week, a phenomenon that has been occurring en masse in recent years as hundreds of appointed Teaching Assistant positions are converted to hourly-compensated Course Assistants. Agreeing to the University's language would all but guarantee that the University would restrict worker hours to exclude them from the unit.
Columbia’s recognition proposal is therefore neither “beyond what is required,” nor “extraordinarily broad.” It even falls short of the Recognition article based on the 2017 NLRB decision in Harvard’s contract (a popular comparison point in Provost Boyce’s previous messaging, due to the substantial differences in cost of living between Cambridge and NYC), which imposes no hourly cut-offs. In fact, such hourly cut-offs are a novelty in student worker collective bargaining agreements, and we refuse to normalize a scheme often used in other industries to undermine labor protections. We see Columbia’s intransigence on this zero-cost article as a move to accelerate the casualization of academic workers and refuse them essential workplace protections.
Columbia’s willingness to agree to more than was required by the NLRB on recognition was part of an overall package we put forth that included our concession on union security, which was a major ask by the Union – a concession that Harvard, which insisted on an “open shop,” refused to make to its union. SWC-UAW’s current campaign against our recognition position is an attempt to get the quid without the quo.
Again, Columbia’s recognition proposal excludes workers who are part of our NLRB-certified unit. In Columbia’s presentation of their proposal to SWC’s bargaining committee, no mention was made of this alleged “quid pro quo.” We do not believe that the ability to be recognized as a worker with access to basic protections is a chip to be bargained, and we are deeply disturbed by the implication that Columbia views the exclusion of employees from workplace protections as a sort of poison pill we need to swallow to get them to agree to the need for workplace protections in the first place.
While the Union has focused on “recognition” as a vehicle to expand union membership, we believe it is important to underscore who gets benefits and protections under the proposal we put forth, even for those who fall below the 15 hours. Our comprehensive offer includes a commitment to raise the hourly rate for all student employees who provide instructional or research services to a minimum of $21. That new rate will apply whether or not these students work sufficient hours to be considered members of the bargaining unit. On harassment and discrimination, the situation is the same. Throughout the negotiations, we have heard repeatedly that students need an opportunity to appeal EOAA decisions to an independent third party, lest the University be the judge in its own case. It’s an important and innovative feature of the current package that it provides for just that – an opportunity to appeal to an independent, external decision-maker. Columbia has committed to make that opportunity available to all students, whether or not they are members of the bargaining unit, upon ratification of the agreement.
Provost Boyce is highly misleading here. If SWC thought that the amended EOAA appeals process, unilaterally imposed by Columbia, sufficiently met the demands for student workers’ access to real recourse for harassment and discrimination, we would not have rejected this same inadequate process contained in the Spring Tentative Agreement, nor would we have been fighting so hard for access to arbitration for such complaints. The University’s amended EOAA appeals process absolutely fails to provide an “independent third party,” given that under the University’s proposal, the University has sole discretion in selecting the pool of Appellate Officers, with SWC and other stakeholders merely providing non-binding input. We cannot abide by a two-tier system for student workers at Columbia where only those who have met arbitrary seniority requirements have full access to real recourse for harassment and discrimination.
Columbia’s recognition language adheres to a stipulation in the NLRB proceeding, signed by both parties in November 2016 and filed with the NLRB, that determined who would be eligible to vote on whether there should be a union. That stipulation stated that students on the casual payroll would be eligible to vote only if they average 15 hours of work per week.
The main issue resolved by the stipulation referenced by Provost Boyce had nothing to do with a 15 hour threshold, but instead the question of whether or not those not employed at the time of our Union’s certification election but employed in the previous year have a “continuing interest” in the working conditions of the bargaining unit and are therefore eligible to vote, as evidenced by the briefs filed by both the University’s and Union’s counsels. You will notice that the University’s counsel at no point suggests that any 15 hour threshold is relevant to either the unit’s scope, or the voting eligibility formula. In fact, at footnote 1 of page 21, the University’s counsel even suggests that Course Assistants are appointed positions and so should fall under whatever eligibility formulae determine whether or not Teaching Assistants, etc. are permitted to vote. The very fact that a special formula needed to be arrived at is an obvious indication that those eligible to vote in an NLRB-supervised election are not coextensive with the scope of the bargaining unit as a whole. In fact, the “Supplemental Decision and Direction of Election” that first announced the voting eligibility formula on October 31st, 2016 clearly distinguishes between “the unit of employees” and “unit employees [...] eligible to vote” (page 5) – regarding the former category, the NLRB Director reproduced the same exact text cited by our Recognition proposal. The reason why the matter of casually-compensated student workers working less than 15 hours per week was not clarified is that in the subsequent election, the number of challenged ballots cast (including casually-compensated student workers working less than 15 hours per week) stood at 647 ballots, a figure that could not have possibly altered the outcome of the election (with 1602 unchallenged ballots for certification and 623 unchallenged ballots against certification). The NLRB affirmed the exact language cited by our Recognition proposal on December 16th, 2017, over a year after the determination of the eligibility formula for participation in our Union’s certification election. Furthermore, Columbia itself explicitly acceded to the NLRB’s decision in the November 19th, 2018 Framework Agreement signed by Columbia and SWC. Nowhere in these legally-binding documents is any mention made of arbitrary inclusion criteria for bargaining unit membership on the basis of hours worked.
From the outset, SWC-UAW’s strike has sought to disrupt the education of students whose Columbia experience is not directly affected by the contract being negotiated. Now, the Union maintains the strike must continue for the principle that casual workers, who had no choice because they were not allowed by the NLRB to vote on whether there was to be a union, must be part of the bargaining unit. That position flies in the face of the democratic principles that underlie our labor laws.
On the contrary, we contend that the fight for the improved lives, healths, and livelihoods of student workers who perform instructional and research services to Columbia’s students has a direct effect on the success of its educational mission. It is obvious that basic workplace protections for student workers, like the right to a safe and healthy working environment, the right to be paid on time, the right to real recourse for discrimination and harassment, the right to take personal and sick leave, and more, can only serve to improve the educational outcomes of students under the tutelage of such workers. It is precisely for this reason that both the hourly student workers Columbia is attempting to exclude, as well as undergraduates whose education has been affected by this strike, have continuously registered support for our demands throughout this year. In fact, under Columbia’s proposal, at least one duly-elected member of our Bargaining Committee would be left disenfranchised and excluded from the protections she helped to negotiate.
We have been on strike for 8 weeks now to win just compensation and workplace protections for all student workers, and despite our immense hardship we remain on strike because we are committed to leaving no worker behind. We fail to understand how any position but this can be founded on the “democratic principles that underlie our labor law.”
With the proposal on the table, the University is now a leader in higher education on the issues that have been the core of our dialogue with SWC-UAW for years, importantly on economics and on non-economic issues like arbitration. It is time for SWC-UAW to acknowledge the tremendous gains we have made together, to reach agreement, and to end the strike.
Sincerely,
Mary C. Boyce
Provost
Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Provost Mary C. Boyce, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has not engaged in a dialogue with student workers at Columbia in any capacity during her tenure as Provost. Despite repeated invitations, Provost Boyce has failed to attend a single bargaining session, and based on the content of these repeated blasts to the Columbia community, it is clear that she has chosen not to understand the importance of these issues not only to student workers, but to Columbia’s larger educational mission. It is time for Columbia to acknowledge how crucial the extension of basic contractual protections to everyone already in our unit is for student workers at Columbia, to respect the decision of the NLRB, and to end the strike.
In solidarity,
Student Workers of Columbia
