ITHACA, N.Y. — Members of the United Auto Workers Local 2300 approved a new contract with Cornell University that will deliver major wage increases to workers and officially end a strike that heavily disrupted the Ivy League school’s building maintenance and dining services for over two weeks.
The tentative agreement won the backing of 77% of the members that voted, according to a statement from the union on Monday. Some workers will begin to return to work Monday night, and all workers are scheduled to return to work on Tuesday.
The negotiations were a stark departure from bargaining between the union and Cornell in terms of what the UAW won in this new contract, and its approach. The UAW had signed agreements to not discuss what was happening at the bargaining table with its membership or the public.
This time, Cornell workers and local union leadership said the international and regional UAW came in with heavy support during negotiations, and union leadership declined to keep negotiations quiet. Workers came out in droves to rally in support of a record contract in the weeks before they overwhelmingly authorized a strike in August.
The strike lasted a total of 15 days and appears to be the longest in Cornell’s history, according to Corey Ryan Earle, who works in Cornell’s alumni affairs and development office and teaches a course on the history of the university.
Cornell did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
Before she voted on the tentative agreement, Jackie Aarne, a custodian who has worked at Cornell for three years, said it was hard for her to watch Cornell students start the semester with dining and custodial services in disarray. But she felt the strike was necessary in order to get Cornell to take the union seriously.
“I’m ready for a good contract and I want to get back to work,” Aarne said.
Among the highlights of the new contract, workers will see an average wage increase of between 21% and 25.4% over the four-year life of the contract, depending on their position and pay grade.
In 2022, UAW Local 2300 agreed to simply extend its previous labor contract with Cornell, adding a 2.2% wage increase for all the workers in the bargaining unit. It was only approved by members after multiple failed ratification votes.
UAW Local 2300 Christine Johnson said this year of bargaining with the university shifted the framework around wages.
“Cornell had dominated in past negotiations,” Johnson said. Negotiations with the university around wage increases had focused on what was considered competitive in the labor market, Johnson said, as opposed to “what our members need to maintain a basic sustainable life.”
The UAW represents about 1,200 workers at Cornell, mostly custodians, food service workers, and cooks. Under the previous contract, UAW-represented workers made $22 an hour.
The UAW’s bargaining team had publicly voiced that it was fighting to have Cornell pay its workers $24.64, the living wage in Tompkins County according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Living Wage Calculator.
Despite the historic pay increases in the tentative agreement, most workers represented by the UAW will not see their wages increase past $24.64 until 2026, by which time the living wage threshold will likely have increased as well.
Originally, UAW Local 2300 was telling members it was seeking wage increases above 40%, which would have brought most of the lowest-paid workers in the bargaining unit up to the MIT-calculated living wage.
“We shot for Pluto and we got the moon,” said Dale Lisenby, a custodian who has worked at Cornell for 23 years and served on the UAW’s bargaining team.
Lisenby said he thought the contract gave the union “a lot of room for future improvement.”
According to the UAW, Cornell agreed to over 40 of the union’s demands in the contract, including removing a tier system and a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA).
The tier system prevented workers from reaching the highest wages offered for their positions based on the date they started working at Cornell. A food service worker who began to work at Cornell before the tier system’s cut-off date of June 30, 1997, could earn a wage of $24.41, while a worker in the same pay grade whostarted after that date could only earn up to $20.85.
COLA increases workers’ wages with inflation. The COLA provision states the UAW and Cornell agreed to increase employee compensation if normal wage growth is exceeded by inflation.
Jules Ginenthal, who has worked in the Cornell Botanic Gardens for 17 years and was on the UAW’s bargaining team, said refusing to sign “gag orders” as a part of the ground rules of negotiating with Cornell was critical to the results of the contract negotiations.
Ginenthal said it allowed the union to increase transparency with UAW members, and resulted in a negotiating process that was “like night and day” compared to previous years of bargaining with Cornell.