I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about the background of the union and the history of bargaining leading up to the strike.

Our union was certified in January 2024, and we started bargaining in May 2024. We’ve been bargaining now for about eleven months, and we’ve had nearly one hundred hours of bargaining. We have 121 members, made up of non-tenure-track faculty who are lecturers, visiting lecturers, senior lecturers, postdocs, and instructors of laboratory science.

And why are you on strike?

We are on strike for many reasons, one of which is that the college’s unlawful practices are really preventing movement at the bargaining table. We’ve been bargaining for quite a while with them, and many of their proposals are going to make our jobs drastically different and make the conditions worse than what they are now.

We want the college to come to the bargaining table with real proposals that could be feasible to our unit. They’re currently coming with things that our unit would never vote to ratify. We’re here trying to fight for our jobs, and we unionized because we were unhappy with our working conditions — so we’re not going to accept working conditions that are worse than what we currently have.

Can you tell me more about those working conditions?

Our sticking points have really come down to compensation, which was a huge motivator for unionizing. In 2008, following the financial crisis, the college froze the starting salary at $55,000 for a full-time lecturer for twelve years. We tried to address this with the college in 2019, and they did make a salary adjustment that year of about 9 percent. But this has not rectified that situation — if our salaries had grown according to inflation, they would be somewhere around $83,000 today. And we’re at $64,500 for our current salary.

Compensation was a big motivator, but so was job security. Right now, the college can eliminate our positions without any recourse. It’s good for us and good for the students for us to have stability in our roles, so we’re fighting for just cause.

One of the elements that has been maybe the biggest sticking point is that the college proposed to increase our teaching load by 25 percent without a meaningful adjustment to our compensation, and they’ve now tied our compensation to that extra work. It’s made it harder to make progress at the bargaining table because we can’t bargain over those issues separately.

Ten months ago, they proposed a five-course workload, and we have continued to propose our four-course workload to maintain the status quo. Ever since the strike began, I think they have realized that the current bargaining unit will not accept a five-course workload. And so during our strike, in one of the bargaining sessions, they offered us the ability to be “grandmothered” into four courses. But if we do that, we would forfeit the extra compensation they would give us by accepting five courses.

They thought that would be a good idea — telling the current people, “You’ll get a little bit of a salary increase based on the implementation percentage, but you get to keep your same workload.” But we, as a unit, are not just fighting for ourselves. We’re fighting for this position and for future hires as well. There’s already been such a hierarchy in higher education. There’s already a tiering in our own system from people who were hired before 2008 and the people hired after. The last thing we want is to have another tiered system for the people hired before unionization and the people hired after, who have a higher workload for the same salary. It just doesn’t seem fair.

It seems like pitting people against each other down the line, asking you to sell out your future colleagues just to protect yourself in the current moment.

This is not an unknown tactic in bargaining. There have been other institutions that have been offered similar kinds of deals and have taken it. I think they were really expecting that we would accept it.

So just to clarify, you would still only get paid at the rate of four courses, though, right? So it’s not like they’re actually offering you the salary that future five-course teaching loads would command.

They’re offering as a minimum salary for a lecturer — not a visitor — $70,000. What they’re offering us is that we, upon ratification, can get a 2.75 percent raise to our salary. If we opt in to teaching the five courses, then over two years, they’ll give us a $10,000 pay bump. And then they’ll see if we fall on their current salary scale that starts at $72,000 for five courses. Even if we teach four courses, they’ll still get us onto that scale.

But most of us are already making above the scale that they’ve proposed. The only people who aren’t are the people who are visitors or who haven’t been here for more than five years. So their salary scale for four courses and five courses is still less than what we’re making now. Currently, the starting salary for a lecturer is $64,500, and our current contract with the college says that if you teach an extra course, you get $10,000. That would bring a person hired right now in a lecturer position to $74,500, but they’re offering $72,000 at the bargaining table.

How has the college reacted to the strike?

Right from the get-go, they had made plans for this to last a while — indicating that they were not intending to bargain in good faith and make progress at the table. They were spending their time figuring out how they could ride out the semester without us. On the day of the strike, they sent out a communication to students saying that classes taught by non-tenure-track faculty were now suspended — that students no longer needed to do the work for the class or listen to what their faculty member had told them before the strike and that they needed to reenroll in other classes in order to make up for a credit deficit that they might have. They asked tenured faculty to open up their classes or to offer independent studies.

We didn’t receive that communication. We found out from students on the picket line that that was going to happen.

Usually, when a strike is imminent, management tries to bargain more to avert it. And when a strike is ongoing in higher ed, there’s a lot of bargaining. We’ll bargain almost daily for many hours. When we first set our strike date, we signaled to the college that we are available essentially 24-7. And they really haven’t taken us up on that. They’ve added four extra hours of bargaining, and we’ve been on strike for two weeks. To me, that’s signaling that they’re trying to do the bare minimum to show good-faith bargaining.

As an alum, I’m receiving a bunch of emails from the college, portraying their side of the strike and the bargaining process. Is this common in higher education strike situations or union negotiations, to draw in the rest of the community in that way?

Our understanding is that this tactic to ask students to reenroll in classes is incredibly unusual — there isn’t a comparable example we can point to. This divisive rhetoric, this plan to ask tenure-track faculty to step in, feels unusual. On the other hand, I do think that many institutions want people to feel the discomfort of a strike. It’s part of the tactic to weaken the strike, to wear people down, and to create confusion and chaos. But we’re not seeing that. We’re seeing commitment, holding the line, people being incredibly supportive.

How has the rest of the college community responded to the strike?

I feel like, overwhelmingly, the majority of students have seen through the college’s emails and are very supportive of our cause. I see that with alums as well and even with the parents of current and admitted students. It seems like they’re unhappy with how the college has been handling this. It does feel like people are supportive of our asks and are understanding of our reason for striking rather than blaming us for the strike.

And we have a lot of support from our tenure-track colleagues. I think many of them feel frustrated by being put in the middle of this, and they are continuing not to open up their classes or to scab or to cross picket lines. They are talking about the communications coming out of the provost’s office and how misleading and divisive and obfuscating they are. Some tenured faculty are coming to the picket lines, giving us snacks, standing with us, having conversations. But it’s also true that there are people who have a hard time parsing all the different narratives coming out of the college’s rhetoric.

What is the relationship like between tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty in terms of working conditions, workload, compensation structure, and how the college treats those positions?

For the most part, we work really closely together. Some of us team teach with one another. Lab instructors are closely connected to their tenure-track faculty. We share a lot of similar service roles, like sitting on committees and mentoring and advising students. Many of us advise thesis projects. And so in some ways, because we are a teaching-focused faculty, our roles look very similar, but, of course, there are distinctions.

The college has been trying to put out this narrative that we’re trying to collapse the distinction and be just like the tenure-track faculty. That’s not at all the case. We are simply working to improve our own conditions. It’s true that our tenure-track colleagues have research expectations and sometimes service expectations that are different than ours. Many of them will serve as department chairs — although, again, we have many people who are non-tenure-track who serve as department chairs and program directors. We’re a close-knit community, and we work together very closely and do very similar work in a lot of cases.

One of the things we’ve seen over time is the move away from the tenure-track model in higher education, which people associate with greater job security, and toward the non-tenure-track model. I was wondering if you could comment on that and how you’ve seen that playing out at Wellesley.

I would say it’s a move not necessarily away from the tenure track but more an expansion of the non-tenure track, and the non-tenure-track faculty are just so underpaid for the work they do. Colleges and universities can see that and exploit that to save on the bottom line. At Wellesley, there has been a drastic increase in non-tenure-track faculty because of the hiring freeze for tenure-track lines. They’re not expanding the tenure-track faculty anymore; they have a set number that they can have. When someone retires, they can replace them. But with ever-increasing enrollments and student demand, they’ve had to rely now on non-tenure-track faculty because we are cheap labor.

I don’t agree that we should be cheap labor. I feel like we should be fairly compensated for the work we do, which is why we’re here fighting for a better contract. We want to help Wellesley do the right thing and not further societal standards of undervaluing traditional women’s work like teaching.

I think that’s a great point. So what’s next for the union?

We’re hoping that we have made our positions clear about our unwillingness to accept this increase in workload. We have made substantial movement in a lot of ways, especially with our compensation proposals, and we would like to see them show up at our next bargaining session with the goal of moving forward and finding a way to resolve the sticking points so that we can get back to the classroom. The clock is ticking because classes end on May 1.

The change in workload they’re proposing would dramatically affect the educational experience of Wellesley students. Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions. Wellesley students know that part of what is amazing about learning in this environment is getting to work closely with faculty members. They get to know you, and that relationship continues beyond the time you’re learning together in class. Their proposal would seriously compromise the educational experience of Wellesley students.

And their proposal is changing what’s been the workload for twenty years. This has been the status quo for decades. So it not only would dramatically affect the students, but it’s also a dramatic shift in the working environment for us.

We have just tentatively agreed on an article for protections against discrimination and harassment. We were fighting over citizenship status, and the college was pushing back on that. We ended up winning that as well as bullying — so we’ll be the first union contract of academic workers to have bullying in that protection against discrimination and harassment, which means that those issues are grievable. If we experience bullying or if someone feels they’ve experienced discrimination based on their citizenship status or immigration status, that’s something they can grieve in the union.

The perception from the college communications is that we’re making no progress. But the truth is that behind the scenes, there is movement. The strike is working. The things they said they wouldn’t back down from, they are.