Student Radicals are Hijacking the Labor Movement

Last spring, Columbia students terrorized blue-collar union workers. They held custodians hostage, menaced security officers, and left staff to “scrub off swastikas spray-painted on campus.” Ironically, some of the most disruptive protests were organized by Columbia University Apartheid Divest—a coalition of groups that includes Student Workers of Columbia (SWC), the local United Auto Workers graduate student union.

At Columbia and elsewhere, students now make up a growing share of the organized-labor movement. Unionized graduate students, for example, account for more than 25 percent of the UAW’s national membership. But as these white-collar newcomers infiltrate organized labor, tensions are growing with the blue-collar rank-and-file—and the two factions show little sign of reconciling.

Columbia’s anti-Israel protests revealed the depth of the divide. After students rioted, the university’s custodians, security officers, and electricians, represented by the Transport Workers Union, were left to pick up the pieces and maintain order. When demonstrators stormed Hamilton Hall last April, two custodians in the building had to fight their way out. The custodians, according to TWU international president John Samuelsen, “were informed by at least one smarmy, sanctimonious, elitist, shite occupier, in a direct reference to the Gaza protests and subsequent occupation of Hamilton Hall, that there was no chance of leaving because ‘this moment is bigger than you.’”

Samuelson has little regard for his professional-class union opponents. After students occupied a building in February, attacking a TWU member in the process, the union president blasted them: “In the eyes of some of these trust-fund baby ideologues,” he said, “harming the blue-collar TWU workforce at Barnard is seen as acceptable collateral damage in their quest to advance their political cause.” Instead of siding with “self-important elitists who summer in the Hamptons,” Samuelsen demanded prosecutions.

The TWU president could have been referring to fellow union leader Grant Miner, president of SWC. Columbia recently expelled Miner, who was arrested during the April 2024 occupation of Hamilton Hall, participated in the illegal encampment, and was identified as a CUAD member.

Though a union leader, Miner is hardly cut from the working-class cloth: before his expulsion, he was a student in Columbia’s Department of English and Comparative Literature, and his father is a former aide to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Miner’s arrest puts the UAW—SWC’s parent union—in a bind. Following the Hamilton Hall riot, UAW president Shawn Fain issued a statement reaffirming the union’s call for a ceasefire and its opposition to the arrests of students and employees. But if the UAW challenges Miner’s expulsion—which it has tied to “contract negotiations”—the union would be defending a participant in events that saw TWU members abused, threatened, and detained.

Columbia is not the only place where blue-collar workers are clashing with their white-collar comrades. Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), the reform caucus that helped elect UAW president Fain, informed its members of a forthcoming vote to dissolve the caucus. The group cited irreconcilable differences between members from higher education/legal services and those from traditional industries.

According to UAWD leadership, white-collar members imported a “toxic culture” into the caucus, driving away many of their blue-collar counterparts. UAWD leadership also accused members from academia and legal services of dominating lengthy meetings and overturning decisions made by the steering committee that represents blue-collar members.

Organized labor does not want to talk about its internal class war. Neither UAW assistant regional director Vail Kohnert-Yount, a prominent UAWD member and major Fain caucus donor, nor UAWD chairman Scott Houldieson responded to requests for comment. We asked multiple SWC members about TWU international president Samuelsen’s statements. None responded.

Graduate students are increasingly hijacking the labor movement. Most union members want fair pay, good benefits, and job security. They do not want the culture of elite higher education in their unions—a culture that, as UAWD illustrates, dooms them to failure.

Photos by Alex Kent/Getty Images News via Getty Images