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Another Rutgers union mulls a strike, but faculty 'feel good' about talks
By
Louis C. Hochman
Published Apr 12, 2023
Modified Apr 12, 2023
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Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
By
Louis C. Hochman
Published Apr 12, 2023
Modified Apr 12, 2023
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A union representing 2,500 administrative staff at Rutgers University says it’ll institute a strike pledge — a way of gauging interest in a strike — even as three other unions representing 9,000 faculty say they’re making progress in negotiations that could end their own historic walkout.
The Union of Rutgers Administrators Local 1766, also known as the URA-AFT, said the strike pledge would occur “soon.” That would be a potential precursor to a strike authorization vote.
“The URA has been bargaining for the past 10 months, but has not made much progress on many of our key priorities, including fair salary increases, telework, career pathways and equity for our essential workers,” the administrative union wrote in a statement late Tuesday. “Our members’ commitment towards a strike pledge is representative of our willingness to escalate to win a fair contract.”
But representatives of the three faculty unions that have been striking since Monday said late Tuesday that they “feel good” about the status of marathon negotiating sessions. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy had called union representatives and university negotiatiors to Trenton to work out a deal with the aid of state mediators on Monday, and those talks were continuing.
“We expect a late night tonight,” Rebecca Givan, president of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT Academic Worker Union, said from Trenton in a Zoom call with striking faculty just after 8 p.m. on Tuesday. “We don’t think we’ll have a contract tonight but we’ll be back in the morning, and we feel good.”
Givan and other negotiators had just listened to WNYC’s monthly call-in show, “Ask Governor Murphy,” where the governor described New Jersey as one of the “quintessential American organized labor states.”
Dory Devlin, a university spokesperson, said those negotiations would pick up at 10 a.m. Wednesday. She said university administrators were encouraged by the progress, with the help of the governor's office.
"We will keep working until we have fair contracts for all of our employees," she said.
Among unions’ core demands are better pay and job security for adjunct faculty members — part-time lecturers who get paid significantly less than their full-time and sometimes tenured peers for teaching classes, and who have to reapply for jobs each semester.
On the show, Murphy acknowledged Rutgers and other universities have been increasingly relying on such staffers to teach classes. He also answered a question about whether the state might be able to provide budget support to Rutgers to help reach a deal by saying “As a general matter, yes. I don’t want to get into the details.”
Rutgers' unions have estimated it would cost $20 million to pay adjunct professors at the same rate, per credit hour, as nontenure-track faculty making the minimum salary. Murphy proposed his $53 billion state budget in February, but negotiations with the Legislature over a final version are ongoing.
On Tuesday night, Murphy said he wanted a solution "that exudes, that reeks fairness to all of the categories that we’re talking about."
He didn’t directly address a caller’s question about whether he had concerns that David Cohen, a former head of employee relations under Republican Gov. Chris Christie, was among Rutgers’ lead negotiators. Christie had a notoriously contentious relationship with public worker unions, particularly the state’s largest teaching union, the New Jersey Education Association.
Whitney Strub, an associate professor of history at Rutgers-Newark, said on the Zoom call he was happy to hear Murphy “affirm a commitment to diversity and equity.” And he said he was encouraged by progress in negotiations.
Hundreds of Rutgers faculty members and students have demonstrated on the school's three campuses each day this week, as unions representing 9,000 faculty members remain on strike.
Aristide Economopoulos for Gothamist
“We think we’re going to get there,” Strub said.
Catherine Monteleone, president of the American Association of University Professors-Biomedical and Health Sciences, said the unions had a “better day today,” and are getting further in discussing their issues with negotiators.
“We’ll see what happens, but at least our issues are in the room,” she said.
Monday night, Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway said he’s put aside a threat to seek an injunction to force faculty members back to work, so long as it seems like progress is being made in talks. But he stressed the option remains open in the event of an impasse. Rutgers administrators have cited past court decisions to argue public worker strikes are illegal under common law, but union members stress no New Jersey statute outlaws them.
As of late Tuesday evening, Holloway hadn’t issued a new statement to the Rutgers community or press.
Union members have pledged to keep up picket lines and demonstrations every weekday until they reach a contract. Monday and Tuesday, they gathered across Rutgers’ campuses in Camden and New Brunswick. Rallies were held on the College Avenue Campus in New Brunswick both days, as students and faculty members joined in song and marches.
In one, captured by a union member on video, they sang: “Hey, Holloway: I want to know … will you raise my wage?”
Union demands
Three unions are striking: AAUP-AFT represents 5,000 full-time faculty, graduate workers, postdoctoral associates and Educational Opportunity Fund counselors. The Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, which represents 2,700 part-time lecturers, and the Rutgers AAUP-Biomedical and Health Sciences of New Jersey, which represents about 1,300 physicians, researchers and health science faculty, are also on strike.
The unions said their key demands are focused on their most vulnerable members. They’re looking for adjunct faculty members to get proportionate pay to full-time professors for teaching classes.
Under a contract that expired last summer, adjunct faculty got a base rate $5,799 per three-credit course at the end of the last contract, though some could earn up to $7,234 per course. A part-time lecturer teaching seven three-credit courses at the rates under the last contract would make a base of about $40,600, or about half of what a full-time associate professor earns in a full year.
The unions are also seeking to increase graduate students’ pay from about $30,000 per year to $37,000.
The unions also said they want multiyear contracts for part-time lecturers, a campuswide minimum wage of $15 that would also apply to students, for Rutgers to end a practice of withholding transcripts when students owe certain fees and for Rutgers to freeze rent on all the housing it manages.
Holloway said over the weekend that the school had offered to increase salaries across-the-board for full-time faculty by 12% by July 1, 2025, and for 3% lump-sum payments to be paid out to all the faculty unions over the first two years of a new contract. The school has also offered a 20% increase in per-credit salaries for part-time lecturers and winter or summer instructors, and an increase of more than 20% in the minimum salary for postdoctoral fellows and associates in the faculty union.
Rutgers is offering “similar enhancements” and “multiyear university support” for teaching assistants and graduate assistants, he said.
This story has been updated to include comment from a Rutgers spokesperson and additional comment from Gov. Phil Murphy.
Tagged
education
new jersey
Politics
Louis C. Hochman
After about two decades in (mostly) New Jersey-focused commercial print, digital and digital-but-radio-adjacent news, Lou stumbled into member-supported news in early 2021, as the editor and CEO of Montclair Local. There, he (hopes he) expanded enterprise, brought more sophistication to digital storytelling and moved the nonprofit newsroom closer to long-term financial sustainability. He helped lead the Local to its fourth consecutive General Excellence award from the New Jersey Press Association — the NJPA's highest honor with judges noting the paper's work to strip away layers of government opacity, to hold power to account, to make news accessible for more members of the community, to share the stories and concerns of more facets of the community and to tell compelling stories across multiple media. He's excited to continue the same ethic — news as a public service — at NYPR as the New Jersey and suburbs editor, drawing on the extraordinary talents of reporters including Karen Yi and Nancy Solomon. Lou lives in Philly (that commute!) with his partner and their two cats, about whom and about which he speaks incessantly.
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