The members of GWC-UAW Local 2110 ended a week-long strike at midnight on Monday. Their employer still has not recognized their union, which is demanding, among other things, “livable wages,” “adequate benefits,” and “clear workload expectations.” The employer here isn’t Nissan or Tesla, or some other industrial giant; it’s Columbia University, and the workers in question are research and teaching assistants who are enrolled in the school. Most are graduate students, though some are undergraduates with campus jobs. The university insists that they are not workers at all.

The National Labor Relations Board disagrees, though this reflects a relatively recent turn of events. In 2004, under President George W. Bush, the NLRB ruled that student workers at private universities did not have the right to collectively bargain. In 2016, thanks to the efforts of Columbia’s would-be unionizers, the NLRB overturned that decision, and restored collective bargaining rights to resident assistants and teaching assistants on private campuses. Columbia, meanwhile, has fought the union for the last four years. “We seek review by the federal courts to decide this still-unsettled question without regard to shifting political winds,” it says on a website it has dedicated to the purpose of fighting the union.

Columbia tells the public that it wants a decision unaffected by political winds, but that’s inaccurate. By refusing to bargain with the union, it has abandoned student workers to those very winds. As Alex Press recently noted at Jewish Currents, the university intends to force student workers to file an unfair labor practices complaint with the NLRB—which is currently dominated by Trump administration appointees. The NLRB could overturn its last ruling, restore the older status quo, and quash unionization efforts at private universities nationwide.

Catherine Fisk, who teaches labor and employment law at the University of California, Berkeley, told me that Columbia’s tactic is known as a “technical refusal.” “The way that the statute and the regulatory agency are structured means that the NLRB’s decision as to who can form a union and bargain is not immediately reviewable by a federal court,” she explained.

Columbia’s decision could have far-reaching consequences. Even if the NLRB rules in the union’s favor, Columbia could appeal and take the matter to a district federal court. Either party could then appeal a ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. That would be a particularly risky move for the union. A federal court ruling would only establish precedent in the region under its remit. But a Supreme Court ruling would establish nationwide precedent. Chances are good, with a conservative-leaning Court, that the ruling would be in Columbia’s favor.