Prominent scholars blast Rutgers president for calling looming faculty strike ‘unlawful’

Dozens of prominent academics are criticizing the president of Rutgers University after he called a looming strike by faculty unions "unlawful" in a university-wide email last week.

On Thursday, union leaders made public a letter addressed to Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway, signed by more than 40 scholars of labor, social justice and African American history, asking Holloway to rescind his administration’s “threat to use the power of injunction to punish, fine, and arrest workers taking job actions.”

The letter was posted online, and union officials say they purchased digital ads to feature it on NJ.com, the New York Review of Books and the Rutgers-New Brunswick newspaper, the Daily Targum.

“It's really troubling, and we are all genuinely surprised that [the position is coming from] an African American historian whose first book was about Black labor intellectuals like Abram Harris and Oliver Cox – people that profoundly believed in unions – and that he would take a position of using injunctions and calling public-sector strikes illegal,” said Donna Murch, associate professor of history at Rutgers and president of the New Brunswick chapter of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, who organized the letter campaign. “I would expect to hear that in Florida, not in New Jersey.”

Holloway, a historian specializing in African American studies, is Rutgers’ first Black president. Rutgers spokesperson Dory Devlin didn’t specifically comment on the letter or the email Holloway sent last week, but said university leadership was doing “everything we can to avoid a strike.”

“We are in intensive negotiating sessions with our unions and are making significant progress,” Devlin said in an email. “We will continue to work together in good faith to negotiate contracts with our unions that are fair, reasonable, and responsible, and to avoid a disruptive strike.”

New Jersey’s flagship university is bracing for what could be the first strike by teaching staff in its 256-year-history. In March, three faculty unions authorized their leaders to call a strike after more than eight months of working without a contract.

Union leaders say the administration has failed to meet their demands for increased pay, better job security, and health benefits for part-time lecturers and graduate assistants. They’re also asking Rutgers to freeze rents on housing for students and staff, and extend graduate research funding for one year for students who were affected by the pandemic. The university says it's made just offers on compensation, which include pay increases over the next four years.

The members of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union and the Rutgers AAUP-Biomedical and Health Sciences of New Jersey overwhelmingly voted to let their leaders call a strike. They represent more than 9,000 faculty, part-time lecturers, graduate workers, postdoctoral associates and physicians. Union leaders haven’t said when or if a strike will happen, but have been conducting activities in preparation, including picket line training and a “strike back solidarity concert.”

Last week, the University Senate — a body representing faculty, student, staff, alumni and administrators that advises the president — passed a resolution calling on Holloway to issue a statement declaring there would be no retaliation for faculty or students who go on strike or participate in other labor actions. The resolution passed 70-11.

The resolution referenced the “chilling effect” of Holloway’s email to faculty and its “rhetorical attempts to criminalize honoring picket lines.” It asked all university faculty and administrators to sign a pledge agreeing to respect people’s decisions whether to strike, and to avoid retaliation.

Holloway’s email, of which a copy was obtained by Gothamist, updated faculty and staff on negotiations and said that though the unions had authorized a strike, “the courts have ruled that strikes by public employees are unlawful in New Jersey.”

“I am hopeful that an unlawful strike or job action will not be called. Regardless of my hopefulness and optimism, we are taking all appropriate steps to mitigate any possible disruptions that a work action would have for you and, most important, for our students,” he wrote.

Court injunctions have previously been used in K-12 education to stop striking teachers in New Jersey, but are much rarer in higher education. In 1987, a judge declared a strike by Rutgers non-teaching employees illegal, but did not order them to end their picketing. While New Jersey law is silent on whether higher education public employees can strike, Todd Wolfson, a faculty member in media studies and vice president of AAUP-AFT, said the unions believe workers have a right to withhold their labor.

“If the university chose to try to break the strike by going to court — and this would be something that President Holloway would have to choose to do, and given his scholarship, it seems like that would be in contradiction of everything he's written about and said he believes in — but if he chose to do that … the judge would listen to that and decide if they were going to issue an injunction,” Wolfson said. “It’s a paper that says, ‘Go back to work.’”

He said the university would have to then go back to court to make a case for penalties, such as fining the union or sending people to jail, which could be politically tricky in what Gov. Phil Murphy recently described as “the quintessential organized-labor state.”

The letter — which was signed by academics and is open to more signatures by the public — quotes a speech given by Martin Luther King Jr. in Tennessee on the eve of his assassination, in which he spoke in support of striking sanitation workers who were being threatened by court injunctions.

“We know that as an expert in African American history, you have thought deeply about how struggles for racial justice have consistently been aligned with the demands for jobs, labor rights, and democracy in the workplace,” the letter reads.

It includes signatures from academics, activists and writers, including Ibram X. Kendi, Marc Lamont Hill, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Elizabeth Hinton and Judith Butler.

The letter also asks Holloway to stop pursuing “punitive action” and reconsider his support for his lead negotiator, David Cohen, who worked as former Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s head of labor relations. The letter says Cohen was “integral” in Christie’s war against the teacher’s union, including his comment that the American Federation of Teachers “deserved a punch in the face.”

Rutgers’ labor fight comes amid a national spike in union efforts across private and public higher education institutions and a growing use of strikes as a form of action, said William Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College.

He added that actions like Holloway’s can backfire by exacerbating the situation and garnering more support for the unions.

“If you look at labor history in the 19th and the 20th centuries, when employers overreach in terms of responding to strike threats and strikes, things could get really very challenging, more challenging for the university than currently exist,” he said.