Academic Workers at Rutgers University in New Jersey Are Poised to Strike
Unions representing grad workers, postdocs, and faculty at Rutgers University have been without a contract for almost nine months; earlier in March, they voted by 94% to authorize a strike. We talked to two workers about their contract fight.
A Rutgers AAUP-AFT demonstration. (Rutgers AAUP-AFT / Facebook)
At Rutgers University in New Jersey, graduate student workers, postdocs, and faculty have been working without a contract since June 30 of last year. Workers say that the university is refusing to budge on their unions’ core demands, which include living wages, greater job security for adjuncts, and better health care coverage for adjuncts and certain categories of grad workers. On March 10, Rutgers American Association of University Professors–American Federation of Teachers (AAUP-AFT), representing grad workers, postdoctoral fellows, full-time faculty, and Educational Opportunity Fund counselors, and the Part-Time Lecturer Faculty Chapter (PTLFC) AAUP-AFT, representing adjuncts, announced that their members had voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike, with 80 percent of members turning out to vote, and 94 percent of them voting in favor. Jacobin’s Sara Wexler spoke to worker-organizers from each union about their contract demands and why they say workers are ready to go on strike.
Sara Wexler
Can you tell me what led to this strike vote?
Bryan Sacks
My unit is the adjuncts’ union at Rutgers, the PTLFC. What led to the vote was a fairly long campaign that we undertook going back at least a couple of years. To be fair, we didn’t know it would lead to a strike authorization vote — but it did because of, broadly speaking, management’s intransigence, its delay tactics, and its unwillingness to seriously consider the core demands that we’re making as we negotiate a contract.
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