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Rutgers: We won't take striking faculty to court — for now
By
Karen Yi
and
Louis C. Hochman
Published Apr 10, 2023
Modified Apr 10, 2023
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Aristide Economopoulos for Gothamist
By
Karen Yi
and
Louis C. Hochman
Published Apr 10, 2023
Modified Apr 10, 2023
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Rutgers University administrators have agreed not to seek a court injunction to stop striking faculty members, so long as they are making progress on negotiations with educators’ unions, a school spokeswoman said.
As of early Monday evening, union and administration negotiators remained in Trenton, meeting since noon with representatives of Gov. Phil Murphy’s office and mediators from the Public Employment Relations Commission.
Dory Devlin, a Rutgers spokeswoman, said the administration agreed not to use the courts to stop the strike “while it appears that progress can be made.” Devlin said Murphy asked the university to delay seeking an injunction to not cause “further irreparable harm.”
"Obviously, if there is no movement towards an agreement, we will have no choice but to take legal action to assure the continued academic progress of our students and prevent irreparable harm," university President Jonathan Holloway said in an email later Monday. "This is especially important for the thousands of students who are finishing their academic careers at Rutgers and are only a few weeks away from earning their degrees."
He also said the school had received reports of protesters interfering with classes, and asked union leaders to join him "in urging their members to be respectful of our students and supportive of their academic progress."
Alan Maass, a spokesperson for the faculty unions, said he expected the negotiation session to continue late into the night, with Murphy and his team taking part.
Three faculty unions representing about 9,000 members began picketing Monday in the school’s first-ever teacher strike — canceling classes for many of the flagship New Jersey public university’s 67,000 students. As negotiators were sitting down together, faculty members and student supporters assembled mid-day for a rally on the College Avenue Campus in New Brunswick.
The Rutgers administration says prior court cases have established public worker strikes are illegal as a matter of common law. No New Jersey statute, however, makes public worker strikes illegal, and union heads have told their members they won’t face legal consequences unless the university both convinces a court to order an end to the strike, then subsequently finds striking faculty in contempt.
Holloway has been raising the specter of court action for weeks, describing a public worker strike as “illegal” and “unlawful” in messages to the university community — prompting pushback both from a group of prominent scholars and from Rutgers’ own University Senate.
Union members have said they’re prepared for the possibility of a legal challenge — but the statement from Rutgers Monday seems to make the threat of one less immediate.
A rally on Voorhees Mall on Rutgers University's College Avenue campus marked the first day of the school's first-ever teaching strike.
Aristide Economopoulos for Gothamist
Here’s some of what we know as the strike closes out its first day:
How many teachers are striking – and are any classes running?
There isn’t an exact headcount, and the unions say they’re not sure how many classes were canceled on the first day of the strike.
But the unions representing faculty members say 94% of their members authorized union leadership to call a strike several weeks ago — suggesting high support among members. Several students on campus Monday said they showed up to classrooms with no teachers, or that half or more of their classes were called off.
And several students said they were refusing to go to class, in solidarity with striking faculty.
Evie Shockley is a tenured full-time literature professor. who canceled her class and office hours. She said her students have been supportive.
“When I told them, you know, ‘You won't see me here, I'll be on the picket lines,’ they burst into spontaneous applause — “which was really, uh, encouraging and affirming,” she said.
What’s going to happen with graduation?
Commencement ceremonies are just a few weeks away, beginning May 14.
“Students have worked hard to earn their degrees and the university fully intends to recognize and celebrate their accomplishments,” the school says in a FAQ on its website. “Commencement and convocation ceremonies will continue to be held on all Rutgers campuses.”
The school also says “every effort will be made to ensure” the strike doesn’t prevent students’ progress toward graduation, but it hasn’t yet said what provisions might be made if the strike continues for many days or weeks.
Most higher education strikes don’t go that long. According to data from the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, from 2012 through 2018, faculty strikes at higher education institutions lasted an average of 2.9 days. A faculty strike in 2019 at Wright State University in Ohio lasted for 20 days, making it one of the longest such strikes in U.S. history.
Are faculty members being paid while on strike?
The school says in its FAQ that any striking employee could be “subject to a loss of pay and/or benefits, and other sanctions as they may apply or as the court deems appropriate.” Devlin didn’t answer a question by email Monday, however, asking if pay was in fact being withheld.
Union leaders, however, also asked fellow Rutgers staffers not to report which workers are on strike, saying the school might ask department chairs and others to do so.
“The only plausible reason for this would be to try to withhold pay, cancel our health insurance, hold us in contempt of a possible court order, or otherwise retaliate against us,” they wrote in a message to members Sunday night. “The goal of such action would be to divide us and create hostility among members, breaking down our solidarity and undermining the strike.”
What will happen on Tuesday?
Until or unless a deal is struck, expect to see picketers remaining at Rutgers’ campuses in New Brunswick, Newark and Campden. Unions are signing up picketers for shifts from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every weekday this week. They plan to close out each day with a live streamed update to members.
Striking Rutgers faculty members say they're seeking better protections and compensation for adjunct workers and graduate students.
Aristide Economopoulos for Gothamist
Who exactly is striking, and why?
There are three unions 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 say their core demands are those focused on protecting the most vulnerable among them — graduate students and adjunct faculty members who have to reapply for their jobs every semester. They say the adjunct faculty members — also called part-time lecturers — deserve pay that’s proportionate to full-time professors.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average professor at Rutgers made about $161,000 in 2021, the average assistant professor made about $84,000 and the average associate professor made $106,000. Faculty members classified as lecturers made an average of $65,000 and instructors made $61,000.
But adjunct faculty members are paid by credit. Under a contract that expired last summer, they 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.
The unions are also seeking increases for graduate students, who make about $30,000 per year. Mitchell Edwards, a teaching assistant, said his pay would go up to $37,000 under the union demands.
“The proposed salary increase would impact me immediately and … get me closer to a living wage in Middlesex County, but not quite there, as we know.]
Researchers at MIT calculate a living wage for a single person with no children in Middlesex County at a bit over $41,000.
The unions also say they want multi-year contracts for part-time lecturers, a campus-wide 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 in a statement Sunday 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 “multi-year university support” for teaching assistant and graduate assistants, he said.
What is Murphy’s role in all of this?
Last Month, Murphy’s office previously told Gothamist it’s not a party to the contract negotiations and that the Governor’s Office of Employee Relations hadn’t found any legal authority for Murphy to intervene.
But the governor has also repeatedly voiced frustration that Rutgers was on the precipice of — and now immersed in – a strike. He’s stressed Rutgers’ role as a premiere state institution, and the support for labor in the state.
"I am hopeful that we can come to a resolution that meets both sides’ needs fairly, and come to that resolution ASAP," Murphy said during an unrelated event Monday.
Murphy will be on WNYC Tuesday evening, for the monthly "Ask Governor Murphy” call-in show, hosted by Nancy Solomon. You can listen live on WNYC.org or 93.9 FM.
This story has been updated with additional comment from Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway.
Tagged
education
new jersey
Politics
Karen Yi
Karen Yi covers homelessness and poverty. She joined the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom in 2020. Before that, Karen covered Newark for the Star-Ledger and spent almost a decade working for newspapers in New Jersey and Florida. She grew up in Miami and has a dog named Cashew. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal 917-589-1460.
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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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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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