Worker-Student Unity Battles Columbia U.’s Billionaire Board

NEW YORK CITY, March 8 — Today several hundred chanting students joined workers in another militant solidarity march on Columbia University’s (CU) campus. The 35 Faculty Club workers are fighting for a decent wage, for pay during school breaks and against all their tips being stolen. Many students and workers, a faculty member and community supporters spoke about the millions of dollars CU spends to pay and renovate the home of President Bollinger and to take over West Harlem while refusing to pay a living wage to workers.
Many speakers mentioned the humanistic, liberal pretenses of CU. If you scratch a liberal, you find a capitalist. Liberals are capitalists who try to put a nice veneer on their hunger for profit. CU has an endowment of billions and large real estate holdings. Seventy-five percent of CU’s Board members are bankers. Their role is to train new capitalist leaders and money managers while simultaneously teaching students to set themselves apart from workers.
The growing Student Worker Solidarity (SWS) group sees clearly how oppressed these workers are and how their working conditions contradict the university’s avowed goals. The chants reflect the power of, and need for, worker-student unity. More and more students are joining the struggle.
Marchers took over 70 CHALLENGES and May Day flyers. PL’ers can win these militant students and workers to see themselves as lifelong fighters for a society based on equality and production for need — a communist society.
Rely on Rank-and-File Workers,Not Union Mis-leaders
We need mass support from workers in other unions on campus. As reflected in labor struggles worldwide, union leaders neither seek support from other unions nor offer it when other unions are striking. Although most campus workers seem supportive, the union leaders refuse to organize it. This mirrors the recent school bus workers’ strike, which had widespread support, but whose leaders stopped it dead to please local politicians. Pro-capitalist union misleaders today are invested in winning favor with politicians and favors for themselves. It will take mass action from all rank-and-file campus workers to fight this and future struggles. We cannot rely on any bosses but only on the power of the working class.