Cornell Has Driven Up Local Cost of Living. Workers Had No Choice But to Strike.

After two weeks on strike at Cornell University, the United Auto Workers (UAW) members who comprise the university’s service and maintenance staff have returned to work after Labor Day weekend. The school semester has already started amid the strike, with students receiving occasionally frozen box lunches, faculty being asked to bring their own food, and the university asking for volunteer labor from other staff, faculty and retirees to fill in for its striking workers.

This was the first strike at this Ivy League institution since the 1980s, and while bargaining may have ended, deeper and lasting questions were raised in the process. These are questions about the pocketbook issues of working-class Americans, relevant far beyond this specific upstate New York town. Should a person be able to afford to raise a family in the city they work in, despite not having a higher degree? For those who have seen how this institution affects its workers and surrounding community, this labor fight also raised loftier questions about whether the professed values of the university — and the exclusive, nonprofit higher ed model — remain valid.

Cornell University sits on a hill in Ithaca, New York. If you’re in the town, you can look up and see the iconic Cornell clock tower, now encased by scaffolding. Its position on a hill is an apt visual metaphor: Cornell is the biggest employer in Ithaca, and while one in three Ithacans live below the poverty line, the university is able to pay its administrators six- and seven-figure salaries.

“I’m starting to see the greedy side of Cornell,” said Jim Joseph, a striking worker. “Like the tower here,” he said, pointing to it from a hundred yards away. He was referring to Cornell’s decision to spend millions on its restoration of the iconic McGraw Tower and other expensive building renovations, as well as capital-intensive research, while neglecting the things that benefit workers and students.

Joseph was on the picket line the day that a tentative agreement between the university and the union was announced. The striking workers were more subdued than on prior days as they awaited the full details of the agreement. They would soon vote to either keep striking for a better deal, or take the gains and get back to doing the work that keeps the campus pristine and students, staff, faculty and visitors fed.

Ultimately, the union membership voted to ratify a contract, ending the strike and re-commencing regular work beginning at 10 p.m. on Labor Day. The new contract included significant wage increases of between 21 percent and 25.4 percent, on average, over the four years of the contract, depending on the position. Among other things, it also includes better training pay, improved safety, and a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) provision to help protect against inflation.

The specific COLA provision kicks in to catch wages up to inflation if costs of living exceed annual raises; it does not increase wages on top of cost of living, as it does in the UAW contract with the Big Three auto plants. Another significant pain point not addressed by this contract was free parking for workers.

“We are not where we want to be, entirely,” said UAW Local 2300 president Christine Johnson after the ratification of the contract, addressing that some have mixed feelings about the deal. “But I think Cornell probably feels the same way at this point.” Johnson made clear that contract bargaining was an iterative process, and that the wins of this contract, while not perfect, can be built upon in future negotiations.

“It’s a series of steps forward, said Johnson. “But, incremental steps, and you have to prepare for that.” The contract and its key highlights can be seen here.

“I’m ready to go back to work,” said Joseph, echoing a sentiment repeated by many of the strikers. “I think anything that our bargaining unit decided [on], I think good enough for me,” he went on, expressing a level of trust and respect for the bargaining team that seemed common among striking workers.

“We hate seeing the students suffer through all of this,” said Michelle Bump, a striking building care worker at Cornell who has been with the university for a decade and whose family has been in the area for three generations. “So we were kind of hoping that Cornell would not let it get this far. The students shouldn’t have to pay for them to put off paying us a fair contract.”

The union’s bargaining team may have spent its leverage a little too early, for reasons that come down to values. Even before the strike was called on the night of August 18, the union’s bargaining team had lowered its total demand for a general wage increase from 46 percent to 25 percent (compounded, over four years). Before the strike, the Cornell bargaining team had offered 17 percent. The final numbers, between 21 percent and 25.4 percent, wound up being closer to the university’s starting position than the union’s.

“The thing that we all realized through this is that … they don’t really care about the students,” said Mike Bebee, about Cornell’s bargaining committee and the administration. Bebee works as a landscaper in Cornell’s grounds department, and his wife is a Ph.D. candidate at the university. As Bebee saw it, the union bargaining committee tried to build leverage using what they cared deeply about — the quality of student experiences — by timing the strike with the start of the semester. But that leverage wasn’t as effective with the Cornell bargaining team because, as Bebee sees it, they are “so removed from what’s going on in the dorms, in the classrooms, in the cafeterias … it truly is just a corporate bargaining situation where they’re focused exclusively on, you know, their bottom line and trying to save money.”

“It just causes more work for all of us,” he said in a phone call about the strike potentially lasting longer. “And it won’t affect [them] … how do you hit them where it hurts? That’s the question, and I think we had a hard time answering with this movement.”

“I find high fault with the way that they deal with their bargaining unit,” said Johnson, about Cornell’s conduct during the months-long process. “I find that there is a very distinct difference between what they project outwardly and what they have in their own house.”

“A lot of the people who are bargaining for the university side maybe don’t realize how hard it is for people who don’t make as much money as some of them are making,” said Georgina Jones, a dining worker who was on strike. “I had to move out of Ithaca because it became so unaffordable.”

Housing and Affordability

“I had to move to Groton because it was cheaper,” said Joseph, who was born and raised in Ithaca and has worked at Cornell for 33 years. “And then I moved to Cortland because, you know, I can’t pay over $1,000 [in rent].” Joseph is a driver for CULift, which provides mobility services for students with disabilities, and formerly worked as a cook in one of the halls.

Like most workers interviewed for this piece, cost of living — especially housing — was central to his concerns. “Collegetown isn’t really what it used to be,” said Joseph. “It used to be houses and this and that. Now I see they tore down all the buildings on one side, put [up] all apartments.”

For Davarian Baldwin, Trinity College professor and author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities, it is common to see universities displacing working class people who live close to campuses. “As universities and colleges expand their physical footprint throughout communities, property values go up many times beyond the means of long term [residents],” said Baldwin in an interview. Baldwin is also the founding director of the Smart Cities Research Lab, which looks into how universities can help localities develop equitably, and without displacing residents.

“We witness a process some call studentification,” said Baldwin on housing college towns, referencing a process like the one Joseph witnessed over the years. “What might have been a working class, single family neighborhood for single family homes gets converted into what’s been called mini-dorms, or basically cutting up single family homes into multiunit dwellings for students who can pay more per unit.”

Taxes and Infrastructure

Like many places around the country, skyrocketing costs of living have caused Ithacans to become activated easily and often when it comes to decisions about taxes, wages and housing.

Last fall, students and locals united to demand that Cornell pay more to the City of Ithaca. Cornell holds a significant portion of the land and real estate in the city, but due to the university’s tax-exempt status, it pays only a small fraction of what it would owe in taxes into the coffers that pay for local road maintenance, city worker wages, snow removal and public schools. Estimates vary, but if the university were to be required to pay taxes, it would likely pay somewhere between $30 and $45 million each year. After a couple months of debate, the university paid only slightly more than it had initially offered, $4 million a year, adjusted for inflation, for the next two decades.

Baldwin spoke about how as universities expand, municipalities calculate their mill rate by “taking all of the taxpaying properties and taking into consideration the costs needed to supply services and things like schools [and] operating costs of public facilities.”

“They calculate that and then divide it up amongst all of the tax paying properties,” he said. “What does this mean if more and more of your properties are being controlled and owned by a university or other large nonprofits like their medical centers? That means that that burden is being divided up amongst fewer and fewer people, and the burden is higher.”

This year, locals saw the effects of the university’s increased footprint and smaller payment to the city as it hit their paychecks. Property tax assessments for residents jumped significantly, and shortly after that, locals rejected a larger school budget, demanding a smaller budget that would lower increases on local taxes instead.

Restricted Endowment and Funding

One talking point often brought up in last year’s fight — and this year by union representatives in this contract bargaining and strike — is that Cornell has a $10 billion endowment. With that much wealth, the argument goes, the university should be able to pay blue collar workers a living wage.

Cornell responded to those claims with a statement that read, “The vast majority of Cornell’s endowment is restricted by agreements with donors and can only be used for purposes specified in the agreement.” The university’s statement also said, “The University does draw from the endowment each year, at amounts restricted by New York State law, for expenses such as financial aid and other student support, facilities maintenance and upgrades, academic programs, and research activities.”

The university declined multiple requests for an interview or comment regarding the nature of these restrictions, and why the endowment cannot be restructured to pay wages that match costs of living for university employees.

When asked about this, Baldwin — who has looked into the issue of university endowments across different universities — said that universities always use this excuse. “That’s the first response. This is the reason why the current Gaza/Palestine claim of disclose and divest could have ripple effects,” he said, since the demand to disclose, if followed, would increase transparency in how endowments are invested and restricted.

Cornell’s last academic year ended with pro-Palestine protests and an encampment, with calls for the university to divest from the weapons industries profiting from the genocide against the Palestinian people. As this academic year began, the protests kicked into gear immediately, with one act of vandalism and property destruction escalating the matter before the first day of classes.

And so, the students continue to demand disclosure and divestment, as the labor fight is fresh in residents’ minds. “If we have endowment transparency, then we can evaluate these claims of restriction,” explained Baldwin. “Restrictions are governed by the institution themselves.… Not all of the endowments are restricted, but even the politics of restricted endowments can be altered if you call for community benefits agreements as a part of your capital campaign.”

A mile down the hill from the university, at the end of the first week of the strike, the Southside Community Center hosted its first Black Town Hall on the topic of reparations. Southside is a historically Black neighborhood, but over the decades, many Black residents have been pushed out. Conversation centered around how to prevent further displacement and how to bring those who had been pushed out back into the area.

Cornell was not a topic on the agenda for that town hall, but Cornell came up often nonetheless. Ithaca Common Council member Phoebe Brown asserted that in last year’s agreement over Cornell’s payment to the city, Cornell agreed to fund research that would benefit the city’s goals. The alderperson said she had requested funding for Cornell professors to work on reparations research, but the university had turned that proposal down.

“The thing I noticed at Cornell, and I worked there for 27 years,” said one participant at the reparations discussion, “is they have money for things. They don’t have money for people.”