4/28/2026 Bargaining session: Academic Freedom, Non-Citizen Protection, Non-Discrimination and Harassment, and more
During this bargaining session, we reached a tentative agreement on both Employment Files and Training, bringing us closer to a successor contract. Despite this, the University stated a total unwillingness to bargain over some key issues important to our unit. These included:
Academic Freedom. The university insists that this is not appropriate for a collective bargaining agreement. This is a strange position given that many collective bargaining agreements in the country include articles on academic freedom. Columbia is unwilling to dilute their “management right” (a legal term for the authority and discretion employers reserve to operate their business) to unilaterally control the scope of academic freedom at Columbia.
Research Integrity and Copyright. The University believes that our existing contract language on intellectual property is adequate.
Housing Access. The University maintains that this is a student issue that contravenes the management rights article of the last collective bargaining agreement.
Relocation Assistance. Columbia insists that unit members come here as students not as employees, and that this is inappropriate to bargain over.
Retirement. The University believes this is not an appropriate benefit for student employees, referring to PhDs as having “20-hour part-time, time-limited engagement[s]”, thus making unit members undeserving of more robust retirement benefits.
Travel. Columbia believes our existing language in our previous contract is sufficient.
Health and Safety. The University believes that our concerns about workplace safety, including violence towards workers from law enforcement, is a student issue that goes beyond health and safety in an employee context.
Transportation. The University believes that the existing language we have in our previous contract is sufficient.
The University’s refusal to bargain over these issues, even when they have been bargained over at other Universities, demonstrates that we will need to put more pressure on Columbia with concerted organizing and action if we want to win at the bargaining table.
We had extended discussions over the following issues:
Non-citizen worker rights. We presented a new proposal to the University. The University continues to reject bargaining over protections from ICE and federal agents. We maintain our position that these protections are becoming standard in student-worker collective bargaining agreements, and remain extremely important to workers in our unit.
Non-discrimination and harassment. The University made a significant improvement in their counter, by offering a 75-business-day time limit to resolve complaints starting at the intake meeting. This is up from the 60 day timeline we won in our last contract, and the specificity of when the timeline begins is an important win. We are also continuing to demand protections for power-based harassment and other accommodations in the contract. We continued to discuss this at the table.
Artificial Intelligence. The University continues to insist that our language is too broad, and that they would like to reserve the University’s management right to replace our jobs with AI as they see fit. The University claimed that this was to protect faculty autonomy. We believe that faculty share our interest in developing University protections against replacing our teaching and research labor with AI. This is a repeated discussion that we have had with the University, and we will continue to evaluate how to pressure Columbia to codify protections against replacing our labor with AI.
Union Dues and Security. We presented a new counter that allows workers to pay agency fees instead of dues should they choose not to join the union. The language we offered is similar to other unions on campus. Columbia insists that workers will have to opt-in to Union Dues and fees, rather than automatically contribute.
Union Leave. The University continues to insist that this is outside the scope of bargaining because it implicates academic advancement issues, despite the fact that participation would be completely voluntary.
Professional Development. The University insists on maintaining our existing language in the previous contract for professional development. While the existing language states student workers will be reimbursed for such costs in a timely manner, in practice, many student workers do not receive sufficient funding from their department for conferences and other professional development opportunities. The University refuses to allocate more funds for this issue. We continue to discuss how we want to move forward with this article.
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