Our response to EVP Hungerford’s email to the community on March 25
On March 25, 2026, Executive Vice President Amy Hungerford sent a message to the university community about her perspectives on ongoing contract negotiations. We are disappointed to see the University administration yet again misrepresent events at the bargaining table while refusing to respond to mandatory subjects according to legal obligations. Below is our response to EVP Hungerfords’s message.
We are heartened to hear from Dean Hungerford that Columbia’s bargaining team is intent on working with the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC) bargaining committee to reach a successor agreement. This is also our intention, which is why the bargaining committee has raised in the past two sessions our desire to meet more frequently with the Columbia bargaining team. The bargaining committee has offered, and will continue to offer, more dates for bargaining, in smaller rooms, between now and the next scheduled session on April 8. We hope Columbia will respond favorably.
We acknowledge that the committees have different understandings of the framework agreement. However, there are myriad issues that both parties agree are within the framework agreement, for which Columbia has not produced substantive counterproposals. These include:
Compensation
Appointments
Discipline and discharge
Union dues and security
These are in addition to issues that we believe should fall under a collective bargaining agreement (CBA), but which Columbia repeatedly maintains should be excluded from it. These include:
Protections against replacing instructional and research labor of bargaining unit employees with AI, drafted with reference to other labor agreements that have provisions for the use of new technologies in the workplace.
Academic freedom protections that allow instructors and researchers to exercise professional latitude in their work, drafted with reference to guidelines established by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
University guarantees not to facilitate ICE access to campus beyond what is legally mandated, and obligations to notify the union about ICE presence on campus, which are workplace benefits found in the contracts of the University of California and Wesleyan student workers’ unions.
Safeguards against the unilateral erosion of student worker labor, as experienced this year with the elimination of instructor of record positions. We believe the damage of this erosion would be compounded by the expansion of undergraduate class sizes.
The University has previously bargained over issues that may be viewed as permissive subjects of bargaining and outside the framework agreement. This was the basis on which the University previously bargained over international student rights, summer stipends for workers on nine-month appointments, the stipends of PhD students on fellowship who have no teaching or research duties, the procedures of the Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action (now the Office of Institutional Equity) available to all students, and more. The University has demonstrated in our last round of bargaining an understanding that for student-workers, academic issues are often workplace issues as well. This mutual understanding led to the ratification of our first contract with overwhelming support from student workers. We hope the University will continue to exhibit this understanding in good-faith engagements at the bargaining table.
Workers voted to authorize a strike despite unfavorable conditions where the threat of illegal University discipline and retaliation from the Trump administration is at an all time high. This is not a decision that student workers took lightly. Strikes would not be a recurring feature of our union if Columbia voluntarily paid us a living wage on par with peer institutions. It would not be a looming prospect if Columbia had not allowed the abduction and deportation of our coworkers by ICE, reduced our professional opportunities by unilaterally eliminating available Instructor of Record (IOR) positions, or unfairly punished student workers for exercising their academic freedom in their research and teaching.
We look forward to working with Columbia’s bargaining team to develop a strong successor contract that addresses these issues.