3 Rutgers University Unions, Teachers, Strike Monday Morning

At Rutgers University, 3 unions representing about 9,000 faculty and staff members are striking in a historic move over contract talks.

After nearly a year of deadlocked contract negotiations, 3 unions representing about 9,000 faculty and staff members at Rutgers University will walk out on Monday. This will be the first teacher strike in the university’s nearly 257-year history.

According to union representatives, members of the unions will set up picket lines on the university’s three main campuses in New Brunswick, Newark, and Camden, New Jersey, to call for a variety of demands, including pay raises, improved job security for adjunct faculty, and funding guarantees for graduate students.

Michelle O’Malley, a master’s student at Rutgers, said during a virtual town hall on Sunday night that “those closest to our learning and to the university’s mission to teaching, research, and service deserve more than to merely be surviving and scraping by.”

At Rutgers University, 3 unions representing about 9,000 faculty and staff members are striking in a historic move over contract talks.

The 3 unions are the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, which represents part-time lecturers, the Rutgers AAUP-AFT, which represents full-time faculty, graduate workers, postdoctoral researchers, and counselors, and the AAUP-BHSNJ, which represents faculty who teach at the university’s medical and public health facilities.

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Although union leaders anticipate that the strike will stop most classes and “non-critical research,” the university is adamant that it won’t. 

“will continue to perform patient care duties and important research while curtailing voluntary work”- physicians in university health facilities said this in the statement.

The university advised students to continue attending classes and completing assignments as usual in the guidelines posted in the event of a strike.

In a letter to the public, Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway said, “To say that this is deeply disappointing would be an understatement. Just two days before the strike was announced, the two parties, according to Holloway, agreed to name a mediator.

The president stated that negotiations had been ongoing for several weeks. “As I have noted, there has been significant progress, and I believe that there are only a few outstanding issues. Naturally, we will negotiate until agreements are reached and refrain from making personal remarks or spreading false information.

However, union representatives insist that the university has disregarded their main demands.

“After sitting at the bargaining table for 10 months trying to win what we believe to be fair and reasonable things, like fair pay, job security, and access to affordable health care, and getting virtually nowhere on these core demands, we had no choice but to vote to strike.”- A part-time lecturer at Rutgers and president named Amy Higer of the Adjunct Faculty Union, said this in his statement. 

“We’ve heard management say that a strike will hurt students,” she continued. But what harms students, do you know? the high turnover brought on by underpaying teachers and requiring them to reapply for jobs each semester.”

In a statement, Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey pleaded with members of the union and university bargaining committees to come to his office on Monday “to have a productive dialogue.”

According to the unions’ release, nine additional unions are requesting new contracts with the university in addition to the three groups that announced the strike.