A tumultuous semester is ending. I taught my final spring class on May 1, am engaged in final projects and grading, and much of Rutgers is about to enter exams. Graduation looms. Summer classes are scheduled. All is normal or seems so.
A month ago today, all of this was in doubt. The three unions representing 9,000 Rutgers faculty members on three campuses had authorized a strike and were planning a walk out. That would happen on April 10, despite Gov. Phil Murphy’s intervention, despite University President Jonathan Holloway’s threat of an injunction. Class were canceled. Hundreds hit the picket lines.
It was one of the largest academic strikes we have witnessed during the recent wave of academic strikes, with only the University of California graduate student strike exceeding it in size. None, however, exceeded our scope. And this is what makes it historic.
Three academic unions worked together to shut down Rutgers’ three main campuses, working together at the bargaining table and on the picket lines to force a recalcitrant university management to take our demands seriously. We did not get everything we sought out to win, but we changed the status quo, boosting adjunct and graduate student pay dramatically, providing job guarantees for most contingent faculty members, and set the tone for what is likely to be an altered academic landscape across the state of New Jersey.
“What was most remarkable, and admirable, was how the more privileged members of the “beloved community” showed up for the least privileged,” said Howie Swerdloff, an executive board member of the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union and a member of our negotiating team. “This was as true on the picket line as it was at the bargaining table, where FT faculty gave up real money to provide dollars to enhance the raises for GAs, TAs, adjuncts and EOF counselors. That’s real solidarity.”
I was privileged to have a front-row seat to all of this, serving as the campus vice president for New Brunswick for the adjunct union and a member of both the organizing and media teams. What I saw was a remarkable spectacle of joy and pointed anger, of unity and the occasional disagreement. And what I understand at this moment is that the wins and losses from this strike and contract campaign cannot be divorced from the long struggle that has been taking place both at Rutgers and across the country, a fight to beat back the corporate forces that have come to control higher ed in recent decades while we make colleges and universities more equitable.
Let’s start with what we won: Significant raises, especially for the most vulnerable faculty. Adjuncts will be paid between $8,500 and about $12,000 per course by 2025, while graduate and teaching assistants will earn $40,000 a year in the final year of the contract.
Job security: Many adjuncts will soon be appointed on an annual or biennial, rather than semester basis, while grad students will be eligible for five years of funding and COVID funding extensions if their research was interrupted by the pandemic, and contract faculty (non-tenure-track full-timers) will get longer appointments and their contracts will be “presumptively renewed,” meaning they can only be let go with cause.
The contracts also call for parental leave and care subsidies for full-timers and grads, stronger grievance procedures for adjuncts, stronger academic freedom language, more input from faculty in class scheduling, and a state-funded community fund to help those living in the cities where Rutgers is located.
These are historic gains, but far from what we set out to do. The university refused to participate in the community fund, or recognize efforts to merge the three faculty unions into a single bargaining unit. Job security provisions for adjuncts, while stronger than almost anywhere else in the country, could be even stronger. And our efforts to end “adjunctification” or “casualization” of the academic workforce were incomplete.
But these failures pale in comparison to what we accomplished, and they have to be viewed within the corporate takeover of higher ed, which has driven the shift to contingent labor over the last 40 years. Contingent labor — adjuncts, grad students, non-tenure-track or contract faculty — now teach between 65% and 70% of all classes across the country; 40 years ago, the figure was nearly reverse, with tenured and tenure-track faculty teaching as much as three quarters of all classes During this same time period, we have witnessed historic growth in university endowments and investments, growing real estate portfolios, and corporate-style management that seeks “efficiency” and “flexibility” even if it compromises what should be higher ed’s core missions of education and research.
This history — along with some quirks in New Jersey law — is important in understanding what happened at Rutgers during the 2022-2023 academic year. The strike was the focus, but we began putting pressure on the administration in September, holding rallies and demanding that Holloway acknowledge the problems that were plaguing the university. Holloway, who came to Rutgers with great fanfare, responded by not responding. He called the notion of “equal pay for equal work” complicated, and he attempted to stay above the fray. This hands-off approach contributed to the many delays and management’s stubborn refusal to do much more than strike language from our demands in an attempt to defend the status quo.
Management would disagree, but I felt as early as December, nearly six months after our contracts expired, that a strike was inevitable — and that university administrators were goading us to walk. On March 10, we announced the results of a strike authorization vote — more than 70% of our members voted with 94% voting to strike. We walked a month later, despite efforts by Holloway and Murphy to delay. A week of almost continuous negotiations followed, overseen by the governor’s office, as we protested and marched in New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, causing an estimated 70% of classes to be canceled and essentially shutting down one of America’s largest universities.
Murphy may try to take credit for what happened next. Holloway may praise the outcome. But the contracts that go to union members for ratification starting tomorrow were made possible by the work we did as fighting unionists in concert with students and community members. They will mean a better, fairer Rutgers, and will be used by other fighting faculty unions as a model of what can be accomplished.
“We wouldn’t have this contract without out members’ willingness to do the hard work of organizing a strike,” said Rebecca Givan, president of the AAUP-AFT, which represented full-time faculty, graduate workers, post docs and counselors.
That is the lesson. Some might say that a strike signals the failure of collective bargaining. I disagree. The strike is the best weapon workers have in their arsenal, the one way of demonstrating to management that they do not hold all the cards. Our labor is our power, as the saying goes, and workers — whether on an assembly line, in front of a classroom, or at a desk — must not be afraid to use their labor, their power, to change their workplaces and the American economy.
The strike at Rutgers lasted a week. Negotiations continued another two weeks. We won significant gains, but this is not over. Contingency remains an issue. Universities continue to act as bad neighbors. Continue to operate as part of the corporate economy. We will take a moment, catch our breath, and then get back in the trenches. The fight continues.
Hank Kalet is a journalist and poet. He teaches journalism as an adjunct at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, and teaches writing at two community colleges.
From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2023
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