N+1: What were the conditions you were facing at Columbia?

ROSENSTEIN: First of all, people were very low paid. People were making eight, nine, ten thousand dollars a year for a full-time job — people making fifteen thousand had a very good salary. And the other thing is that the conditions were very inequitable between departments. One of the things we found when we organized and went to negotiate our first contract was that there was a tremendous pay inequity between whites and minorities in the bargaining unit, and between men and women. It was one of the things we actually went on strike over, in our first contract.

I think the other thing is that it was a unit of over a thousand workers, mainly women, and a lot of us were influenced by the women’s movement, and one of the things we saw was that women workers were not organized. We worked on a campus where maintenance and security workers were unionized and had been unionized since the ’40s, and they were making good money and had much better benefits than we did as office workers. And so it became obvious that we needed to do something about our labor conditions and take our jobs seriously. We weren’t working for pocket money. We were workers who had full-time jobs, some of us supporting families, and we needed to do something serious about our jobs, and unionizing was getting serious about the job. We met tremendous opposition from the university. The university delayed our election by legally contesting our bargaining unit for years; they ran a vicious anti-union campaign. Even after we voted in the unit, they challenged ballots and delayed things for years. It was not a benevolent or an easy fight, and we had to go on strike for our first contract. So it was a very tough fight. But I still think I’m lucky that I came into the labor movement in that way, because we won a tremendous fight, and I realized it could be done even with a difficult employer.

N+1: Did it feel unusual at the time to be organizing as white-collar workers?

ROSENSTEIN: There weren’t a lot of precedents. But we felt that we were part of a movement because there were a lot of university office workers who were organizing at the time. We were very optimistic that we were breaking boundaries, and that we were going to be able to go on to organize tens of thousands of university workers, women workers, office workers, white-collar workers — that this was going to be something that other people would pick up. And it was very exciting.

There were other precedents. There were some other university workers and college workers who were organized in our own union, District 65. Publishing workers had organized originally into an independent association in the ’40s at HarperCollins — it was then called Harper & Row. And that unit survives to this day as part of Local 2110. Workers at the Museum of Modern Art organized in the late ’70s, and they too organized as an independent association. And you know it was all for the white-collar workers. So there was stuff that was happening.