Rutgers University faculty votes to strike, threatening to shut down classes

For the first time in its 256-year history, classes at the three campuses of Rutgers University may come to a halt for its 67,620 students as faculty members gave their union leaders the authority to call for a strike a week from now.

Faculty members at the New Brunswick, Newark and Camden campuses overwhelmingly voted yes to a strike in a secret ballot on Friday afternoon. 

Management was given a week – spring break – to meet the union's demands for fair contracts or signal a shift in its approach to negotiations over expired contracts that have dragged on since July. 

About 94% of Rutgers' educators, including tenured and non-tenured full-time faculty, graduate workers, and part-time or adjunct lecturers voted yes in a 10-day email ballot, the AAUP-AFT Union said Friday. 

On the ballot, the union leadership asked its members for permission to call a strike for new labor agreements. Overall, 80% of the combined membership of two unions, the AAUP-AFT and the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty union participated in the ballot vote.

The university is taking salary raises “seriously,” even “in a difficult budget,” said Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway in a public letter on March 6. He wrote that he had asked his central administrative units to trim their budgets by 9.5%, and said he was “grateful” that union leaders “do not want the situation to come to a strike.”

A fair contract would mean respect and job security for the first time in 23 years, said Adjunct Faculty Union President Amy Higer, also a  political science lecturer at New Brunswick’s Division of Global Affairs.

Adjuncts like her renew their contracts every semester and are paid less per course than full-time non-tenured faculty, Higer said.

The adjunct faculty are demanding equal pay based on what full-timers are paid, access to health care, and long-term contracts beyond a single semester.

“We are asking for what other universities have given their adjuncts, which is a way to plan their lives, and to tell their students what they'll be teaching. And we're asking them to provide us with access to the affordable health care plans that they provide all other workers,” Higer said.

The other big ask is to raise graduate workers' salaries and bring them closer to “a living wage,” said Liana Katz, a Ph.D. student in geography and vice president of the AAUP-AFT union that represents tenured, full-time and graduate faculty.

“We underfund our graduate students to an alarming degree,” said Tim Raphael, a tenured professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers-Newark. “We just don't pay a living wage to our doctoral students. We pay a very, very low rate compared to a lot of other schools and especially being a research university with graduate programs that are competing with the best,” he said.

Graduate and teaching assistants, said Katz, make about $30,000 a year, “which is just not enough for most of us to be able to support ourselves.” The unions are asking Rutgers to raise that to a minimum of about $37,000 a year, which they say is closer to but still not on par with Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State.

Adjunct lecturers possibly suffered the brunt of furloughs and faculty layoffs instituted by Rutgers during the early months of the pandemic in 2020. Nearly 3,000 part-time lecturers were affected by a hiring freeze in April 2020, according to a timeline on the adjunct faculty union website.

Union members were not satisfied with the raises offered last week, saying in a statement that the university's offer "of 2.5 to 3% raise each year for four years amounts to a salary cut" given the high rate of inflation. Holloway informed Rutgers students and faculty that his administration offered the union a "new" proposal for compensation that represented "an increase of 10.75% over four years."

But faculty members have criticized Rutgers for “taking advantage” of the pandemic’s pressures.   

“My feeling is that Rutgers has used the pandemic to practice a form of catastrophe capitalism that is trying to take advantage of that crisis by squeezing its labor force…and creating a larger contingent force that they can hire and fire at will,” said Raphael.

Part-time lecturer Higer has applied for a new contract every semester since she began teaching political science at Rutgers in 1998. The exception was a two-year contract in 2014. “It was the best job I ever had,” she said about those two years. “I finally had an office. I could tell my students I would be there and what I would be teaching.”

Rutgers did not renew the contract. Higer received a financial settlement from the university after she filed a grievance through her union, she said, but the university also immediately invited her back to teach the same courses “at a fraction of the cost.” She’s been applying for a new contract every term since.

Holloway has acknowledged the problem of “adjunctification” in higher education, Higer said, of hiring highly qualified part-timers to teach courses at lower wages and without longer contracts that end up saving costs for colleges but are unfair to the educators and their students.

Rutgers is “kind of unique in that it makes us reapply every semester. That's a really, really old system,” said Higer. Instead, the university should be “leading the way” she said.

“We did this reluctantly,” said Higer about authorizing a call to strike, “but we really couldn't see any other way to pressure Rutgers. They’re just dragging their feet. They want to take this into the summer,” when students and faculty are not on campus.

“No one wants to disrupt students’ academic progress and we are committed to working as hard as we possibly can,” said a university spokesperson, adding that she was “hopeful” agreements would be reached quickly.

“Rutgers employees deserve a say in aspects of their employment,” said Christi Peace, deputy press secretary for Gov. Phil Murphy, commenting on Rutgers’ obligation as the state’s flagship university to its faculty. Open dialogue between both parties was key, but “the governor firmly believes the hardworking educators of Rutgers deserve a seat at the table,” she said.

Union members say there is more momentum and unity among faculty today compared to years before when they have come close to striking.

“I think it's finally reached the point where we have a strong enough union and where faculty at Rutgers have gotten disgusted enough with this particular form of non-negotiation,” said Raphael.