Rutgers faculty begin strike

Some 9,000 full- and part-time faculty have gone on strike at Rutgers University, blocking classes in the first walkout in the 256 years of New Jersey’s main public university.

The strike follows a year of contract talks at Rutgers, and is part of an escalating series of labour confrontations in the US, both in higher education and across the nation’s wider labour market.

The walkout involves the main faculty union at the three-campus institution, organised by the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors. They were joined by two other unions representing part-time lecturers and faculty at Rutgers’ medical and public health facilities.

Union leaders said that 94 per cent of their members voted in favour of the strike, with demands that include higher salaries, improved job security for adjunct faculty, and guaranteed funding for graduate students.

The impact of the strike was not immediately clear for the 67,000 students at the Rutgers campuses in New Brunswick, Newark and Camden. Union leaders said that the strike would halt classroom instruction while sparing patient care and critical research. University leaders, however, said classes would go on as planned.

The sides also disagreed over the legal right to strike, with university leaders saying such job actions are prohibited in New Jersey and the union calling that position “delusional.”

Either way, university leaders agreed, at the request of the state’s Democratic governor and political ally of organised labour, Phil Murphy, to refrain from any attempts in court to block the strike so that he could continue his own efforts to bring the sides together.

The situation is part of a notable expansion in the scale and intensity of labour action at US universities. Last semester workers at the University of California system staged the largest-ever strike in US higher education, covering 48,000 workers at 10 campuses.

And the first black president of Temple University resigned last month after a tenure marked by an especially bitter labour dispute in which the university adopted a tactic of cutting off health care benefits for its striking workers.

Duke University is also in the process of asking the federal government’s National Labour Relations Board to reject the right of its graduate students to form a labour union. That is a move typically done during Republican administrations, as the NLRB under Democratic party control predictably rejects such a request, suggesting to some experts that Duke is bracing for the possibility of a prolonged confrontation in an area of growing importance to US higher education.

Rutgers has its first black president, Jonathan Holloway, and he has proposed contract improvements that include a salary increase for full-time staff of 12 per cent over two years. His administration has also offered a 20 per cent increase in per-credit salary rate for part-time lecturers, and a 20 per cent increase in the minimum salary for postdoctoral fellows and associates.

The unions say it’s not enough. For the regular faculty and those in the medical unit, they want a salary increase “that keeps up with inflation,” along with improvements in areas that include childcare, housing assistance and greater protections for immigrant and international workers.

For the adjunct faculty, the union demands include health care coverage for members who teach 50 per cent of the full-time equivalent, longer-term contracts, limits on the size of writing-intensive classes, and promotions based on years of service.

“We intend for this new contract to be transformative, especially for our lowest-paid and most vulnerable members,” said Rebecca Givan, president of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT union.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com