Union: Columbia University Failed to Deescalate Campus Protest
An aerial view of the Columbia encampment.
By Bob Hennelly
Four days before protestors took over Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall on April 30, trapping building service workers from TWU Local 241 inside for a harrowing half-hour to 45 minutes, their union wrote university officials to flag their concerns.
“The union is requesting information on what will be the duties of all TWU members during and after protestors on Morningside leave or are removed,” Alex Molina, president of TWU Local 241, wrote in an email to administration officials. “A timely response would be great[ly] appreciated.”
“We didn’t get an answer—the day came—they took over the building,” Molina told Work-Bites.
TWU Local 241 represents 700 workers at Columbia University and hundreds more at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Jewish Museum and the Juilliard School of Music.
Local 241 lost four members during the pandemic. “We deal with the homeless, the mentally ill, every walk of life. We don’t have the option to work remotely,” added Molina.
Mariano Torres, a union member and maintenance worker, told the New York Times the night of the occupation he was confronted by a half-dozen protestors who had broken into building and were wearing masks moving around chairs while he was working.
“I’m like, what the hell is going on? Put it back. What are you doing?” he recounted to the Times.
"He said he tried to block them and they tried to reason with him to get out of the way telling him, ‘This is bigger than you,’ the Times reported. One person, he recalled, told him he didn’t get paid enough to deal with this. Someone tried to offer him a “fistful of cash.”
“I don’t want your money, dude. Just get out of the building,” Torres told the newspaper.
A photograph of Torres squaring off with a male protestors went viral. Torres and his union co-workers were eventually released. The NYPD would not reclaim Hamilton Hall until 20 hours later. Days after the police action, the NYPD disclosed that an officer had inadvertently discharged his weapon inside Hamilton Hall.
“To have a group of people sneak up on you and you have to literally fight your way out—it’s not part of your day’s work anymore,” said Local 241 President Molina. “We had wanted to be able to communicate with our membership the proper guidance. One of the main questions we wanted answered was will our members lose their job if they are engaged in self-defense.”
Molina continued, “At one point we were being instructed to rip down flyers, take down posters and clean up graffiti—stuff like that. People were concerned that there would be a perception we were choosing sides.”
TWU International President John Samuelsen told Work-Bites he believed students had a right to protest but, “There’s not a snowball chance in hell that they even for a moment can believe they are entitled to drag blue collar workers into the pursuit of their ideology.”
Historically, going back to the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, and as recently as the most recent Columbia University protests, TWU members have refused to operate the MTA buses commandeered by the NYPD to take away protestors they’ve arrested.
“We refuse as a matter of principle to transport arrested protestors because we support the right of protestors to protest but that is never to be conflated with anybody effectively holding hostage custodians,” Samuelsen told Work-Bites.
Samuelsen continued, “It could be a hospital, it could be any workplace. This is an appalling affront to say this is okay—this cause is greater than you, Mr. Custodian than you getting home to your wife and children—and that’s what they did.”
The building takeover came just two days after the AFL-CIO released an alarming new report finding workers of color were dying on the job at increasingly higher rates — and fatalities for Black workers hit the highest level in nearly 15 years.
Each day, more than 340 workers are killed and more than 6,000 suffer injury and illness because of dangerous working conditions like workplace violence that are preventable.
In its 33rd annual report, Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, the national union also documents how Latino workers continue to face “the greatest risk of dying on the job than all other workers.” According to the AFL-CIO, the cost of workplace injuries and illness ranged from $174 billion to $348 billion a year.
Unions in the retail, healthcare, emergency services as well as transport sectors have reported workplace violence as a leading challenge for their rank and file.
“Columbia University put their workforce at risk,” Samuelsen said. “They had one female security officer at the front of the building in the middle of the night with no support and no back up and no chance of getting back up.”
The TWU International President said the union had a “whole list of practical workplace safety demands that they [Columbia University] will have to comply with.”
The Times reported a Columbia University spokeswoman saying, “Employees who were in Hamilton Hall are valued members of the Columbia community, and we appreciate their dedication and service.”
The administration blamed the protesters who “chose to escalate the situation by occupying Hamilton Hall, they committed egregious violations of both University policy and the law, which is why we made the decision to bring in the N.Y.P.D. We are committed to ongoing work to help our entire University community heal.”
Union officials counter that from the establishment of the first encampment on April 17, administrators did not take into account the risks posed to their workforce and failed to successfully deescalate the protest as was done at Brown University, Northwestern University, and the University of Minnesota.
“The president of Brown was involved in negotiations with students where I think they reached what appears to be a pretty good result,” Lawrence told Democracy Now. “Did the students get everything they wanted? Of course not. And did the university get everything they wanted? Of course not.”
Lawrence is the former president of Brandeis University and the CEO of Phi Betta Kappa Society.
He continued, “You know, one of the biggest mistakes here is when you start to think about the students as ‘they’ as opposed to ‘we.’ There’s only one constituency here, and that’s the university. The faculty, the students, the staff, the administration, the trustees all have to think of themselves as ‘we’ working together. As soon as it splinters into ‘they’—that’s when you start getting problems, and sometimes tragedies.”
Samuelsen told Work-Bites that it was his “personal position” that it was “a total abrogation of the country’s responsibilities to its own citizens that we continue to pump billions into these overseas wars and just leave these domestic crises to just fester and get worse and now they are gangrenous.”
Specifically, the TWU International president called out the all too common sight of “working parents” with small children who have to seek sanctuary in the city’s subway system “because they can’t afford housing.”
Roughly 35,000 Palestinian people have been killed in Gaza following the October 7, Hamas attack on Israel, which killed some 1,200. Meanwhile, roughly 100 journalists and media workers have also been killed covering the ongoing carnage, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.