OPINION: Which side are you on? SIPA’s shameful strikebreaking shows unsurprising lack of spine

By: Steven Lazickas

In a disappointing but not unexpected act of moral cowardice, SIPA administrators have threatened to remove striking student workers from their spring semester appointments.  This brazen attempt to coerce student workers to stop exercising their labor rights demonstrates SIPA administrators’ self-serving disregard for rights and economic justice when it affects their bottom line.  

I wrote in March, during another student-worker strike, that Columbia doesn’t care about your labor rights. I write today to say that is still eminently true, and it is clear that SIPA doesn’t care about your rights either. This time around SIPA administrators aren’t just silent in a moment of injustice (as they so often are), they now have chosen to spit in the face of justice. This week, they have chosen the side of oppression. 

Teaching Assistants, Course Readers, and Research Assistants are the foundation of SIPA’s academic and educational success. TAs make course materials accessible and facilitate the academic excellence on which SIPA so publicly prides itself. Readers provide critical logistical support for courses to function. RAs contribute invaluable research to the vast number of projects and papers often attributed to SIPA’s esteemed professors. Without these workers, SIPA would not be among the top international policy schools in the world.

The striking workers are fighting for a living wage, better protections against discrimination and harassment, and more robust healthcare for student workers across Columbia. These asks are paltry in comparison to the university’s immense financial resources. Instead of supporting this worthy cause, SIPA is intimidating its own student workers. 

It appears that SIPA’s leadership would rather see striking workers go without their duly earned positions next semester than support their student employees in any meaningful way. It’s a thinly veiled threat: “We will punish you for exercising your rights.”  

It seems that it’s all well and good to pay lip service to rights when such rhetoric bolsters SIPA’s image as a proud liberal institution but when the time comes to live those values, the image collapses -- it is an illusion, deviously crafted and intentionally hollow. 

I graduated from SIPA in April of this year. While in school, I had the honor of serving SIPA’s student-workers as a member of the Bargaining Committee for SWC-UAW Local 2110. I also served on SIPASA and worked as an editor for The Morningside Post. This is all to say, I have a fair amount of experience with SIPA administrators and their attempts to abdicate their moral (and material) responsibility. 

When SIPA’s students have tried to hold administrators accountable, excuses were plenty and cheap: “Our hands are tied, the Dean’s office made a decision,” or “We cannot go against the University’s directives.” Another common tactic only required SIPA’s leadership to remain silent and let the storm pass, and wait for the agitating student advocates to graduate. 

As an institution, SIPA has been no friend to labor. SIPA boasts its connections to consulting firms like McKinsey, which offer union-busting tips and tricks to employers around the world.  Time and time again, we’ve seen Career Services advertise relationships with corporate employers whose track records with labor are disconcerting, to say the least: BlackRock, Google, Facebook... The list goes on. These examples demonstrate a larger trend in which SIPA tacitly endorses the eradication of workers’ rights around the world. 

This latest strikebreaking email is perhaps the most obvious indication that SIPA administrators see labor rights as inconvenient (if not optional) and view workers as subjects to be coerced, rather than human beings who need to eat or pay bills. SIPA already cut student worker pay by 40%, now they’re threatening the workers who seek to improve working conditions at SIPA. 

This pattern of behavior shows that SIPA supports and even encourages the policies and practices that have led to record levels of inequality, a steep decline in labor rights, and the climate crisis itself (as these problems are intricately connected). Though they’d love for you to believe they want to solve these problems. 

You might wonder why I link systemic crises with SIPA’s refusal to stand behind their student workers, but the connection is easy to see: If SIPA truly cared to solve problems of global inequality and support a rights-based international system, the administration would start at home by supporting student workers and their rights. 

Shame on the administrators who have chosen to intimidate brave student workers who are sacrificing their income for better conditions for workers across campus. In this unconscionable act, you’ve shown that you do not care about student workers or their rights. I’d encourage you to resign, but we all know what happens when SIPA is asked to hold itself accountable. Nothing.

If you’d like to support the SIPA workers who are exercising their rights, you can sign a petition here.

Steven Lazickas (MPA '21) studied Human Rights and Humanitarian Policy. He is a writer, policy professional, and organizer dedicated to environmental justice, racial reconciliation, and worker's rights.