The AFT-AAUP local at Rutgers University represents more than eight thousand faculty and graduate workers at the New Jersey school. Those thousands of workers just won an unprecedented victory in a recent contract fight with their administration. It took several years of organizing and a threat of a strike for the union to force their bosses to settle. The tentative agreement, which awaits ratification in votes by the membership over the next week, grants faculty and graduate students groundbreaking gains on economic as well as gender and race demands.

Rutgers instructors were confident in leveraging a strike threat in part because of the teachers’ strike wave that began in 2018. “They had shown that strikes work and if you struggle you can win,” explained union president Deepa Kumar. “What we accomplished wasn’t simply because of our work and organizing philosophy but because our approach fit in with the mood among educators across the country.”

And that mood isn’t just about being ready to strike. Rutgers instructors were also inspired by models of “bargaining for the common good”: going beyond traditional contract demands to bring everything that affects workers and their communities to the table. This empowered the union to forcefully campaign on issues of racial justice, sexual harassment, and immigrant rights, rejecting the constriction of “appropriate” bargaining topics from above. This “everybody in, nobody out” approach pulled in broader layers of members to build a much more credible strike threat.