In a move that marks a stark shift in the union’s political priorities, the 3,000-strong Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers (SWC-UAW) has voted to withdraw its landmark demand that Columbia University divest all financial ties linked to Israel, during a collective bargaining session this week. The decision to pull the controversial contract proposal, formally titled “Obligations Under International Law,” came out of a general body vote held Monday by the union, which represents both undergraduate and graduate student workers at the Ivy League institution.
The withdrawn proposal had carried far-reaching demands beyond divestment. It sought to force the university to cut financial ties with any companies and state actors the United Nations or International Criminal Court deemed to violate international law, require Columbia to publish full details of all its direct and indirect investments twice every fiscal year, and grant the union the right to submit a formal list of entities the university must divest from, complete with the union’s own documentation of alleged international law violations. The union had long justified the proposal on the grounds that its members, who generate core academic and operational value for Columbia, deserve a formal say in how the institution invests its endowment and institutional funds.
This withdrawal represents a major strategic reversal for the union, which has been a central institutional backer of Columbia’s pro-Palestinian student movement since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war in October 2023. The conflict, which began after Hamas carried out cross-border attacks on southern Israel that killed approximately 1,200 people and took 240 hostages, has left more than 73,000 people dead in Gaza according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, sparking widespread protests across college campuses in the United States and around the world. For Columbia’s pro-Palestinian movement, financial divestment from Israel has remained the top policy demand, after activists set up the high-profile “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” and occupied the university’s Hamilton Hall in April 2024. Those actions drew national attention, prompting two NYPD sweeps to clear the encampment and re-take the occupied building.
In the months following the 2024 campus protests, SWC-UAW cemented its alignment with the pro-Palestinian movement: it passed a June 2024 resolution endorsing the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, called on Columbia to end its dual degree program with Tel Aviv University, and pushed to scrap plans for a new Columbia global center in Tel Aviv. The union also passed a separate “Cops off Campus” resolution the same month, calling for a permanent ban on NYPD officers from the university’s Morningside Heights campus.
The divestment demand withdrawal comes as SWC-UAW and Columbia administration have remained deadlocked in negotiations over a new collective bargaining contract, which the union originally expected to finalize by June 2025, when its first contract was set to expire. Talks have stalled over a fundamental disagreement: what counts as a permissible “workplace issue” for collective bargaining under the existing 2018 framework that governs negotiations between the two parties.
To date, the union has put forward 34 separate contract articles covering everything from wage increases and healthcare benefits to job security protections amid growing adoption of artificial intelligence in academic work. But Columbia administration has refused to negotiate on the majority of these proposals, arguing they fall outside the bounds of the 2018 bargaining framework, which restricts negotiations to narrow workplace issues rather than academic or operational institutional policy. Under the U.S. National Labor Relations Act, both parties are only legally required to bargain over mandatory subjects such as wages and working conditions, leaving policy-focused proposals like divestment outside of mandatory bargaining requirements.
As negotiations continue, Columbia is still on track to open its long-planned Tel Aviv global center this coming summer, a milestone that pro-Palestinian activists have repeatedly sought to block.