6/26/25 University Confirms They Are Not Serious About Bargaining Before Contract Expiry

Last night, after another round of frustrating back-and-forth emails in which Columbia continued to stall bargaining over spurious, illegal, and just plain pointless excuses, we once again invited their Bargaining Team to a morning Zoom call in the hopes that we could move forward with productive discussions about our contract. We selected a time at which we knew they were available, and hoped they would be willing to join us on equal footing on Zoom, a digital medium that had previously worked for our face-to-face bargaining sessions during negotiations for our first contract.

You’re never going to believe this, but they didn’t show up.

We genuinely wish we had more to update you about in this edition of the Bargaining Blog. Over the summer, our unit has been putting in a lot of work toward a successor contract, advancing our contract articles and demands to get them ready for the bargaining table. We’re proud of how our proposed contract is shaping up. We are ready to come to the bargaining table to win standard-setting health and safety protections, guarantees of free academic inquiry and expression, AI regulation and job security, better protections for all workers—particularly our disabled coworkers—and a pay increase that will ensure our salaries keep pace with New York City’s extraordinary cost of living, among many more urgent and vital demands.

The University’s refusal to show up isn’t surprising. They would prefer our unit accept a successor contract which includes such “generous” and “competitive” offers as a single extra personal day (if you work on the medical campus), a raise below the rate of inflation, and pay parity for some, but not all, workers. All bargained over email, where they don’t have to answer difficult questions about their proposals and the University’s increasing abandonment of it’s academic mission in favor of appeasing the Trump administration.

But while it isn’t surprising, it is insulting. This is a group of people paid well into the six figures to write evasive emails and dodge meetings. Let’s be serious. Columbia isn’t just wasting our Bargaining Committee’s time, they’re communicating that they don’t care about meeting the needs of their own workers, or even sincerely hearing out their concerns. If they won’t meet their legal obligation to bargain with us, it’s on us to be prepared to show them that we mean business, and we won’t give up on the contract our members deserve.

While we don’t have much of an update today, we are excited about tonight’s General Body Meeting, where we will finalize our initial demands for fair pay, and discuss our response and reactions to the University’s miserly compensation offer. We plan to present some research from our Cost of Living Working Group, which is summarized in this report - make sure to give it a look before the meeting, if you can! If you haven’t already, you can RSVP here. We hope to see all of you there!

In solidarity,

Your Bargaining Committee