5/12/2026 bargaining session: Surveillance, Non-Discrimination and Harassment, and more
At the bargaining session on May 12th, 2026, the Union brought counterproposals for the University on 1) Surveillance and Monitoring; 2) Discipline and Discharge; and 3) Professional Development. The University brought counterproposals for SWC on 1) Union Management Committee and 2) Non-discrimination and Harassment.
For all these articles, the Bargaining Committee and relevant working groups will plan to meet to discuss what the the next steps should be. If you have any thoughts, please reach out in the WhatsApp community.
The high-level summary is:
We are very close to a tentative agreement on Professional Development, Union Management Committee, and Holidays.
The discussions today on surveillance and discipline elucidated exactly where the points of disagreement lie but also areas where there is broad agreement. The Union can use the conversation during this session to prepare an updated counterproposal that clarifies some of our demands for each.
The University continues to move towards our non-discrimination and harassment position very slowly and continues to show reluctance to acknowledge power-based harassment as a serious issue at Columbia.
The University strongly implied, but stopped short of saying explicitly, that they would not bring counters to most of our economic proposals (including compensation) until we had come to agreement with them on many more non-economic articles.
Surveillance
SWC is bringing a Surveillance and Monitoring article (which did not exist in the previous contract) to this round of negotiations to try to understand and limit the ways in which Columbia is able to surveil their student employees in the workplace. The primary demands of the article are:
That Columbia not install new workplace surveillance;
That Columbia inform the Union about existing surveillance practices;
That individual workers are able to request to see data that the University has on them;
That Columbia only use surveillance data in disciplinary hearings to complement other corroborating evidence.
You can read the full text of the article SWC brought to the table here. The University and the Union had an extended back and forth on the article. The main point of disagreement was about the latitude that Columbia should have in using surveillance on its campus. Columbia insisted that they should not be limited in any way when determining campus surveillance, citing student safety. Furthermore, Columbia’s team said that we should not expect a counter from them on this article at all.
Professional Development
The Union and the University are close to a tentative agreement on this article. The Union’s counterproposal discussed today would strengthen the article in the current contract by explicitly listing professional membership fees and licensure fees among the expenses that the University can reimburse in a timely manner, with department or school approval. Once the University understood the proposed change, they did not seem to have any major objections.
Union Management Committee
The Union and the University are very close to a tentative agreement on this article as well. The University’s counterproposal allows for two subject matter experts to attend a given UMC meeting. The Union asked about increasing this number from two to four, which the University dismissed as ridiculous. The bargaining committee and the members who drafted our proposal for this article will meet to discuss whether we should continue negotiating on this or whether the University’s counter should be brought to a membership-wide vote.
Non-discrimination and Harassment
The University delivered a counterproposal on NDH. There were no significant changes to their previous proposals except to add a commitment not to tolerate abusive or intimidating behavior and adding a link to the current working definition of bullying. Since this is a definition that is currently under revision, the Union attempted to get the University to explicitly provide a definition in the contract rather than a link to a website, which the University does not seem interested in doing. The explicit commitment not to tolerate abusive or intimidating behavior is a step in the right direction and the Union hopes this is a sign that the University will recognize power-based harassment and protections against it explicitly in the contract.
You can read both the University’s and the Union’s most recent counterproposals on the SWC Bargaining Tracker.
Finally, the University told the Union that we would not be receiving another counter from them on Holidays. The SWC bargaining committee indicated they would take the University’s most recent proposal to a full membership-wide vote to see if we can tentatively agree on that article.
The next bargaining session will likely be on June 3rd.