Bargaining Update

Columbia students are among the most talented and promising in the world, and we are dedicated to providing them with the support they need to realize their full potential. We recognize that student employees are essential to our vibrant academic community, and the University has been attempting since February to advance negotiations on a timely, fair, competitive, and responsible successor agreement with the Student Workers of Columbia union (SWC) that meets the needs of our student employees and the Columbia community as a whole.

That is why the University remains all the more disappointed and concerned that the SWC is still refusing to engage in substantive contract negotiations. The union failed to attend a third consecutive scheduled in-person bargaining session on May 9, 2025, after the union failed to attend a scheduled meeting on April 25 and cancelled the bargaining session planned for April 14. Although the University previously provided the union with a set of non-economic contract proposals, the union has offered no response to those proposals and has not provided any written proposals of its own to the University. Today, the University provided additional contract proposals to the union on the topics of student employee and child care benefits.

The SWC has stated that it only will negotiate at an off-campus location where its president, a former student expelled by the University following the conclusion of all prescribed disciplinary processes who is now consequently banned from campus, can participate in person. Prior to today’s session, the parties agreed to meet in the Studebaker Building, where the University has successfully negotiated contracts with all of its other employee unions and has conducted constructive bargaining sessions with the SWC in the past. Moreover, there is no legal requirement that the University meet with a particular union representative when that individual’s past conduct makes good faith bargaining impossible.

In spite of this, the University is making every effort to advance substantive negotiations, while the union continues to demonstrate that it is not interested in negotiating a contract in earnest. SWC members have spoken publicly about planning a strike for next fall before the union has put forward a single contract proposal, even as the union has claimed on social media that it has proposals ready to offer. Moreover, the union has provided no response in the more than two weeks it has had the University’s proposals. The SWC has no reasonable excuse for not responding to the University’s offers or not providing the proposals it says it has prepared. The University has offered additional dates to meet this month that the union also has ignored.

The SWC has now established a pattern of refusing to engage on substantive issues that prompts serious concern that the union is not genuinely interested in negotiating but is engaging in a strategy to “run out the clock” and prevent the parties from reaching a successor agreement before the current contract expires on June 30.

The University remains eager to advance negotiations toward a successor contract quickly and before the existing agreement expires. The more than 3,000 student employees the SWC represents, who are rightly concerned about pay, benefits, and other terms of employment, deserve no less. The University has proposed multiple additional dates for in-person negotiations at Studebaker in May, and we hope the union will engage productively as soon as possible.