UAW 2322 — with almost 3,500 academic and student worker members at UMass Amherst and Goddard College — is in proud, unwavering solidarity with the hundreds of student workers at Columbia University currently on strike for rent waivers, job security, and international student protections in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Corporations and major institutions, like Columbia and UMass, receive millions in assistance from the federal CARES Act on top of their reserves and endowments. Administrators and coaches continue to receive their bloated salaries while the pandemic and spectre of uncertainty are deployed to impose austerity measures that harm the workers that were already the most vulnerable and precarious. This is today’s labor fight and the strike is the most powerful tool that workers have to fight against austerity and fight for our lives.  In the public sector we dream of being able to go on strike and we rely on our fellow workers at private institutions to use their strike power to set precedents for the rest of us. In the leadership of this local, you will only ever find solidarity with the rank and file and unwavering support for collective action.

We know it’s the graduate and undergraduate student workers, adjuncts, postdocs, food service, housing and custodial and professional staffers who actually run the university, its research, instruction and prestige. We know that the University’s funds, investments, and real estate holdings have found their “rainy day” and that the University has a responsibility to continue to pay their workers and stop collecting rent from them.  Not only is it morally incumbent upon the administration to do the right thing, it is the only way to ensure the existence of a future University that may flourish. 

Finally, we call on the UAW leadership to throw their support behind this legal strike at Columbia, and to help us all build our coalitional efforts in this unprecedented time, rather than undermining rank and file power, undermining solidarity across workplaces, sowing division and isolation and suppressing direct action. We are fighting for our lives and if the Union bureaucracy fails to act, decisively, and renders workers more vulnerable to starvation, homelessness and death, this will mean an existential crisis for the union as well. We hereby renew our demand that the region take leadership in coordinating efforts between all of the locals with student workers around our common issues, including housing, in this time of crisis and support us in carrying out a comprehensive regional and national strategy.  Not only is it morally incumbent upon the administration to do the right thing, it is the only way to ensure the existence of a future Union that may flourish. 

Click here to read more about the strike, and here to read the graduate worker demands and co-sign. 

-UAW2322 Executive Board