As members of the Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers shifted in-person picketing efforts to the Columbia Irving Medical Center on Wednesday and to the Manhattanville campus on Thursday, the protests have become a stage for contenders in New York City’s upcoming Democratic mayoral primary on June 22 to take a stance on labor rights issues.
Two Law School alumni are among a crowded field of candidates vying to be the next Democratic nominee for New York City’s mayor: Maya Wiley, Law ’89, and Andrew Yang, Law ’99. Between the two candidates, only Wiley has publicly supported the GWC-UAW’s strike. Her platform is built upon a fight to secure and expand the city’s progressive policies. In addition to Wiley, Manhattan district aAttorney candidates Eliza Orlins and Tahanie Aboushi, comptroller candidate and current city council member Brad Lander, and numerous city council candidates have lent their support to the ongoing strike.
Wiley, who marched with the student workers on Wednesday, views the demands of the GWC-UAW as endemic to all workers in the city.
“We have had an affordability crisis in this city even before COVID. And health care, and child care, along with housing, are the top three costs of living,” Wiley said. “Part of what we have to do is say how are we making it better, not just returning back to January 2020 [pre-COVID-19]. That’s what this crisis has called our attention to. … It has fast-tracked and deepened and made worse so much of what people were suffering before, but in such a devastating way.”
The GWC-UAW platform highlights the rising costs of life in New York City amid a pandemic. A year of child care costs more to the average American household than a year of either state college tuition or rent, an issue that has risen during this week’s negotiations. Strengthening workers’ health plans and access to dental coverage has also come under the spotlight. The University has offered a graduate student emergency medical fund of around $200,000 to cover 3,500 workers.
“The University has given us a fund, with not very much money … that would come out to maybe about $50 per student-worker which is very little. It’s nothing at all,” Lilian Coie, GSAS ’21, said. “If we don’t have any dental insurance at all, that emergency fund could very quickly be eaten up with dental emergencies alone. But the University, of course, says that they can’t afford it when we know that there is money to be pushed around.”
Wiley’s picketing this week is not the first time she has been at odds with the Columbia administration. When she was a student at the Law School, she participated in the nation’s first AIDS legal aid clinic, which offered legal services to LGBTQ individuals and AIDS victims suffering housing and health care discrimination. Eventually, the University suspended the free legal services.
“When the University decided it was going to end the clinic, we all started doing this,” Wiley said, gesturing to the picket line. “I was one of the student-organizers that organized the protest. We boycotted classes, we sat in, we stormed the dean’s office. I mean, the reality is our students are so often the folks calling our attention to what our values are and what our mission should be, and I’m just gratified that that has not changed, and in fact, if anything, it’s gotten more active.”
Inter-union solidarity is not solely an issue of public image but also of survival for student-workers and faculty members, especially for unions not tied to private institutions: The Public Employees Fair Employment Act, also known as the Taylor Law, bars public employees from striking. The GWC-UAW struggle comes amid a series of labor disputes that have shaken New York.
Even though the GWC-UAW succeeded in building a coalition of politicians, undergraduate students, other universities’ unions, and community members, some supporters feel slightly uneasy about such far-reaching alliances. In January, the Teamsters local union in the Hunts Point Produce Market in the Bronx—a central hub that by some accounts processes more than half of the city’s food supply chain—halted work to press for its largest pay raise in more than three decades. The effort drew attention from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose backing was a turning point in the strike.
“Some of them support organized labor, and the bureaucracy of unions tend to support them in return,for rank-and-file workers. I don’t think that’s a good thing,” a member of City University of New York’s adjunct faculty union who declined to be identified by name, said. “I think we saw this at the Hunts Point strike when the union bureaucracy tempered the militancy [that stopped] the trucks going into Hunts Point. That’s when they got the politicians coming right after that, after it was tempered.”
Currently, the University and the union are at a standstill. Whether the support of local politicians will have any impact on the stasis of bargaining has yet to be seen. However, Wiley claims that all solidarity, from politicians or not, is important in the fight for labor rights.
“It’s all hands on deck. There is just no one in this city and no institution in this city that can decide they’re not at the table rebuilding, recovering, and doing it in a way that makes us stronger, more fair, and more just,” Wiley said. “And that doesn’t matter what the institution is, but it certainly should not be an educational institution whose mission is about being a place that develops future leaders, folks who are contributing to community, to society.”
Deputy News Editor Abby Melbourne can be contacted at abby.melbourne@columbiaspectator.com. Follow her on Twitter @abby_melbourne.
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