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Tag: William A. Herbert

  • Rutgers’ President Threatened to Take Striking Instructors to Court. Then He Walked It Back.

    Rutgers’ President Threatened to Take Striking Instructors to Court. Then He Walked It Back.

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    Thousands of instructors at Rutgers University joined a national surge in union activity on Monday, becoming the fifth currently active strike on a college campus.

    Three unions representing roughly 9,000 educators, researchers, and clinicians announced the strike on Sunday after nearly a year of contract negotiations. The strike will disrupt classes for Rutgers’ nearly 70,000 students across three campuses.

    Union leadership is asking its members to join the picket line and refuse to conduct teaching, research, and other business at Rutgers, according to the largest of the three unions on strike. Strikers are still permitted to complete certain responsibilities, like writing letters of recommendation for students.

    “By exercising our right to withhold our labor, we will prove to the administration that WE are the university,” the union, Rutgers American Association of University Professionals-American Federation of Teachers, wrote in a letter to its members.

    The standoff has put a harsh spotlight on Jonathan Holloway, the Rutgers president. Holloway drew pushback for initially suggesting that his administration would seek a court order to stop the strike and force a “return to normal activities.”

    The Rutgers administration walked back that threat on Monday after a meeting with New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, according to Rutgers spokesperson Dory Devlin.

    Murphy “asked us to delay taking legal action asking the courts to order strikers back to work so that no further irreparable harm is caused to our students and to their continued academic progress,” Devlin wrote in an email. “We agreed to his request to refrain from seeking an injunction while it appears that progress can be made.”

    A labor expert said turning to the courts amid a strike might make the situation worse. “One thing that injunctions can cause is it can actually exacerbate the conflict as opposed to hoping to resolve the conflict,” said William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College in the City University of New York.

    Holloway is a scholar of African American studies and history. An open letter from over 40 prominent historians of labor and African American history — including Ibram X. Kendi, a professor at Boston University and the founder of the Center for Antiracist Research — had called on Holloway to rescind his threat of an injunction. The letter also voiced support for the striking workers.

    “We know that as an expert in African American history, you have thought deeply about how struggles for racial justice have consistently been aligned with the demands for jobs, labor rights, and democracy in the workplace,” the letter stated.

    Holloway expressed his frustration with the strike in a letter to the campus community on Sunday. “To say that this is deeply disappointing would be an understatement, especially given that just two days ago, both sides agreed in good faith to the appointment of a mediator to help us reach agreements,” Holloway wrote.

    Rutgers is facing financial woes, and Holloway said in February that the university would have to remedy a $125-million shortfall over the next three years.

    In a message to students and faculty about the strike, Rutgers wrote that it was “committed to ensuring that our more than 67,000 students are unaffected by the strike and may continue their academic progress.” Rutgers plans to continue classes and distribute grades and expects employees to report to work. The issue is a pressing one as the end of the semester looms, with finals and grades coming soon.

    Rutgers officials wrote that employees who engage in the strike “are subject to a loss of pay and/or benefits, and other sanctions as they may apply or as the court deems appropriate.”

    There is no state law that prohibits public-sector workers from striking in New Jersey, Herbert said, adding that Holloway’s argument relied on common law, or legal precedent from the courts, which have intervened in strikes from public workers in the past.

    “Although there is no state statute that bars strikes, in some instances, courts in New Jersey have issued injunctions against walkouts by public employees,” the Rutgers AAUP-AFT wrote on its website. “An injunction may require public employees to end a strike and return to work. The University administration would have to petition a court for an injunction.”

    The strike comes after 94 percent of members of two of the unions — representing primarily full- and part-time faculty and graduate workers — voted to authorize a strike in March.

    We’ve been bargaining for 10, 11 months — got virtually no response to any of our proposals, and when we did, they were paltry. They were insulting.

    The unions’ bargaining demands include increased pay to keep up with inflation for graduate workers, better job security for part-time lecturers, and more affordable housing for university community members.

    Rutgers officials have offered salary increases for faculty, postdocs, and graduate employees, but union leaders say the raises aren’t good enough.

    The university’s proposal would provide across-the-board 12-percent pay increases for full-time faculty by July 1, 2025; 3 percent in lump-sum payments to all the faculty unions to be paid out over the first two years of the new contract; a 20-percent increase in the per-credit salary rate for part-time lecturers over the four years of the contract; a 20-percent increase in the minimum salary for postdocs in four years; and higher wages for graduate assistants and teaching assistants.

    “The offers that they’re presenting still aren’t enough to guarantee a living wage for the people who are most essential, one could argue, to the successful operation of the university,” said Manu Chander, an associate professor of English at Rutgers’ Newark campus and the president of the Newark chapter of Rutgers AAUP-AFT.

    Chander said he’s on strike to improve conditions for adjunct faculty and graduate employees, whom he described as the most vulnerable workers.

    Kyle Riismandel, an associate professor of history and American studies at Rutgers and the vice president of the Newark chapter of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, said the picket line drew a large crowd on Monday.

    “We’ve been bargaining for 10, 11 months — got virtually no response to any of our proposals, and when we did, they were paltry,” Riismandel said. “They were insulting.”

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    Julian Roberts-Grmela

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  • Work Stoppages Increased Last Year. Higher Ed Played a Key Role.

    Work Stoppages Increased Last Year. Higher Ed Played a Key Role.

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    The educational-services industry — a category that includes graduate students, faculty members, and undergraduates as well as K-12 staff — accounted for the majority of workers involved in labor stoppages in 2022, according to the Worker Institute at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

    According to the 2022 Cornell-ILR Labor Action Tracker Annual Report, 60.4 percent of all workers who went on strike last year were part of the educational-services industry. This resulted in a total of more than 2.5 million strike days, the most of any industry.

    A significant factor in education workers’ large showing can be attributed to one strike: the work stoppage at the University of California’s 10 campuses last fall, said Eli Friedman, associate professor and chair of international and comparative labor at Cornell’s ILR school, and an author of the report. That strike included roughly 48,000 workers, most of them graduate students, and lasted for almost six weeks. Its organizing union described it as the largest work stoppage at any higher-education institution in history.

    Friedman said the UC strike certainly skewed the 2022 data, but it still represents what’s happening in labor movements nationally.

    “The scale [of the UC strike] skews the numbers a little bit, but in terms of looking at the underlying dynamics, I don’t think we’re getting a misread of the labor movement or of labor conditions specifically in higher education by including what’s happening in California, because I think it actually does reflect these broader trends,” he said.

    The Cornell analysis is based on a variety of public sources and collects data on both work stoppages and other labor actions. It groups K-12 and higher-ed workers under the category of “educational services industry.” Friedman said that without the UC strike, K-12 movements would likely make up the majority of labor activity in the educational-services industry because K-12 employs more people than higher education does.

    Overall, education and health care are driving labor activity in the U.S. Friedman said this is because they are two industries that have had success with forming unions, which are losing ground in the private sector.

    “The public sector has become the core of the labor movement,” he said.

    Friedman predicts that higher education will see much more labor activity in the coming year, similar to what Starbucks experienced in 2022. As more graduate students unionize, like employees of the popular coffee giant did, they will form collective-bargaining units and begin to negotiate contracts. Strikes typically occur once contract negotiations have stalled.

    Since December, graduate students at Yale University, Boston University, Northwestern University, the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Southern California have voted to unionize.

    And at Temple University, striking graduate students recently voted overwhelmingly to reject a tentative agreement to end their three-week-old walkout on the Philadelphia campus.

    Last year’s labor activity included a 52-percent increase in work stoppages relative to 2021, though the report’s authors noted this activity was still lower than earlier periods, like the 1970s, and falls short of recent increases documented by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2018 and 2019.

    Risa L. Lieberwitz, professor of labor and employment law at Cornell’s ILR school and academic director of the Worker Institute, said labor activity on college campuses in the past year has been notable because of the large numbers of people participating in work stoppages and the wide range of workers involved.

    Lieberwitz, who also serves as general counsel for the American Association of University Professors, said the Covid-19 pandemic brought attention to job security and working conditions in higher education, which spurred labor-organizing efforts. Another, and somewhat less recent, factor she pointed to was the 2016 National Labor Relations Board ruling that allowed graduate students at a private institution, Columbia University, to unionize. And longer-term changes, like the widespread decrease in tenure-track faculty, also set the conditions that unionization efforts responded to, she said.

    Generational shifts in opinion about organized labor are another factor in the recent uptick in unionizing activity, said William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, in New York City.

    “People are now seeing unionization as the best mechanism for improving their working conditions, whether they are on campus or off campus,” he said.

    In a 2021 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 69 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 said unions have a positive effect on the country. Herbert said this generational shift has increased unionization efforts across many industries, and that the pandemic also helped drive that growth in organizing across higher education.

    Herbert said that unlike private companies, most universities have abstained from union-prevention activities in recent years. Some institutions, including the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, have neutrality policies regarding their position on unionization efforts.

    According to data from the National Center at Hunter, the number of graduate assistants represented by a union went up by over 10,000 people in 2022.

    Herbert attributed some of the rapid growth in higher-education labor movements to undergraduates, namely resident assistants and dining staff, who chose to unionize.

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    Kate Marijolovic

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