Tentative wins for Rutgers' part-time faculty could inspire unions nationwide

The job security and higher wages three Rutgers University faculty unions tentatively won for some of their lowest-paid members during last week’s five-day strike could inspire educators in labor fights at other colleges and universities amid the highest surge of higher education labor action in decades, experts say.

Negotiations are continuing to transition from a framework deal to a contract. And the unions say they’re ready to go back on strike if Rutgers doesn’t follow through on its promises, or if they can’t work out certain key sticking points, particularly for the union that represents 1,300 medical professionals and biomedical researchers. The unions are seeking paid family leave for those workers, and due process protections for tenured staff.

But after five days of marathon negotiating sessions at the State House under Gov. Phil Murphy’s supervision last week, Rutgers administrators agreed to concessions that union leaders say were only possible because of an unprecedented display of unity among the teaching ranks, from tenured professors to part-time lecturers and graduate researchers.

“It helps to embolden other unions to say, ‘Look, we can ask for these things. We can demand these things, and we can fight to get them,’” said Tim Cain, associate professor of higher education at the University of Georgia.

The framework agreement gives Rutgers’ adjuncts a 44% wage increase and increases graduate researchers’ 10-month salaries from $30,000 to $40,000 by 2025. It also offers adjuncts one-year and two-year appointments, rather than making them reapply for their jobs every semester.

“We've always been ignored and invisible, kind of the secret of the university,” said Amy Higer, president of the Adjuncts Faculty Union. “We have all these poorly paid professors teaching a lot of the courses that nobody wanted to really acknowledge. But we kind of came out of the closet and said, ‘you know what, we should tell everybody.’”

The unions have estimated the adjuncts – part-time lecturers paid per course – teach about 30% of all classes at Rutgers. Universities nationwide are increasingly relying on adjuncts to teach core courses, experts say.

“What was won was an acknowledgement that we can't accept building universities on sub-living wages or the ongoing exploitation of adjunct faculty, and this is not the way to elevate higher education or sustain higher education. There’s another way and it’s on all of us to move us in that direction,” said Rebecca Givan, president of the AAUP-AFT union that represents professors and graduate workers.

Rutgers spokesperson Dory Devlin said in an email daily negotiations are continuing and “we believe that we are coming closer to agreements every day.”

‘Spillover effects’

Labor experts say the Rutgers’ faculty unions are at the forefront of national trends in unionizing, such as mobilizing staff across job titles.

“That's emblematic of the movement towards a wall-to-wall approach of unionization,” 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 said unions are resurrecting the type of collective bargaining in higher education common after World War II, when unions mobilized workers across occupations to secure stronger contracts.

Cain said the adjuncts’ victories will embolden other unions.

“Not that they're the first to get to those numbers, but they are helping to reinforce that these are realistic goals for unions,” he said. “There is an idea called spillover effects in unionization where a union contract in one place can affect the conditions in other places, both unionized and otherwise. So that if a union contract changes the marketplace, even non-union employers might be responsive to those new conditions if they still want to be competitive.”

Already, the Council of New Jersey State College Locals, which represents staff at nine public colleges in New Jersey, said it also wants to push for better pay and job security for adjuncts, according to NorthJersey.com.

Cain said there have been a dozen strikes in higher education this year, which is on pace to be the highest number since the mid-1980s.

Transforming the unions

Higer, who took over as president of the Rutgers adjuncts union in 2020, said part of what led to the strike was a transformation of how the adjunct union operated. She and the board wanted to open up bargaining sessions to members, rather than having only union lawyers, and allow more input from members.

They also began working with the full-time faculty union and winning broad support for their demands.

“Part of the zeitgeist of our times is pushing back and getting some kind of traction against income inequality,” Higher said. That’s why it wasn’t hard to get full-timers on board with supporting their part-time peers, she said.

Givan said working together definitely helped them achieve more worker protections.

“The pandemic really brought the whole larger coalition of Rutgers unions together to say we need to stand together, to fight for the Rutgers that all of us, all of us need, and that our students need and that our state needs,” she said.

But part of that vision also included demands for Rutgers to freeze rents for the housing it manages, forgive fines and fees levied on students for parking violations or late library books, and create a $1 million fund to help residents of the cities where Rutgers' campuses are located. The framework agreement only partly meets those demands – it creates a smaller recurring community fund of $600,000 and ends a practice of holding up transcripts for unpaid fines.

New Labor — which advocates for worker protections and, like Rutgers’ main campus, is based in New Brunswick — also supported the strike last week and helped shape those “common good” demands.

Yanel Franco, who works cleaning houses and is a member of New Labor, said she was at the picket lines three days last week. She woke up at 4 a.m. to finish her shift cleaning a restaurant early and show support for the strike.

She’s lived in New Brunswick for 22 years and pays $1,620 for a three-bedroom apartment that she has to share with another family of four. She said if Rutgers were to freeze the rent on their housing, it would incentivize other landlords in New Brunswick to stop raising rents.

Labor experts say common good demands are increasingly packaged into union proposals.

“Because of the broader economic conditions, because of the tremendous income inequality, because of the ravages of COVID and what it's revealed about larger society, the moment that we're in now, there's been a bigger push for these larger social goals,” Cain said.

“The idea isn't just ‘let's get the best wages for us,’ but ‘let's affect broader change,’” he added.