How Columbia University's Maintenance Workers Won Union Recognition Revisited

The administration of Columbia University, Inc. has been refusing in recent years to recognize that graduate student academic workers on Columbia's campus have a democratic right to unionize in the 21st century. Similarly, the Columbia University, Inc. administration, historically, also refused to recognize that maintenance workers on Columbia's campus had a democratic right to unionize until the middle of the 20th century. As Shirley Quill recalled in her 1985 book, Mike Quill--Himself: A Memoir:

"...Knowledgeable people in labor circles were surprised when the maintenance workers of Columbia University asked to join [the Transport Workers Union]. Several hundred employees of the university wanted to join a union,...TWU...They sorely needed a union; their wages were scandalously low, working conditions archaic, vacations, sick leave, pensions unheard-of...

"The university's board of trustees adamantly refused to recognize the union on the grounds that it was a not-for-profit institution and therefore not subject to laws covering collective bargaining...Within a week of [World War II] war's end, the exploited men and women--guards, elevator operators, laborers, maids, laundresses and maintenance personnel--struck for union recognition and a contract. It was the first picket line of Columbia employees in the two centuries since the university had opened its doors...

"...TWU was not recognized by the university until the union's legal department won a Landmark case in the New York State courts. The decision ripped away the hypocrisy of the claim that universities, heavily and continuously endowed, charging ever higher tuition fees, holding enormously profitable real estate investments, could claim the status of a not-for-profit institution. The court decision pulled the rug from under the Columbia trustees..."