One Big Union

Photos by Hank Kalet.

In retrospect, nothing had been easy. Organizing nine thousand academic workers across three separate bargaining units, getting them on the same page, and having them set the same priorities seemed a pipe dream. Getting them to agree to put aside old grievances, to work on behalf of the most vulnerable academic employees—the adjuncts and graduate student workers—had no precedent. Not at Rutgers University. Not anywhere in higher education.

Yet, that’s what we did at Rutgers when we walked out of classes in April 2023, in a demonstration of strength that ultimately made university negotiators take notice, forced the governor to intercede, and won significant gains for all categories of academic workers.

Three separate unions—Rutgers AAUP-AFT, the PTLFC-AAUP-AFT (Part-Time Lecturer Faculty Chapter), and AAUP-BHSNJ (Biomedical and Health Sciences of New Jersey), together representing tenured and tenure-track faculty, non-tenure-track instructors, librarians, adjuncts, graduate workers, postdoctoral students, researchers, and clinicians—struck from April 10 to April 16, 2023, part of a national wave of academic strikes that included walkouts by the adjunct faculty at the New School in New York, graduate student workers at Temple University, academic workers (though not full-time professors) in the University of California system, and numerous others.

The California strike was bigger. The New School strike was longer. But none of the major walkouts cut across job categories like ours, which came as close to a wall-to-wall effort as any in the academic world. This approach was central to the major successes we had from striking, and it will continue to inform our future efforts.

The 2023 Rutgers strike was rare, if not unprecedented, in that all classes of academic workers negotiated at the same table with management and marched together on the picket lines, according to Bryan Sacks, president of the Rutgers adjunct union.

It wasn’t “wall-to-wall unionism,” he said, which remains aspirational. “But there was a remarkable effort to unite across bargaining-unit lines, at least among academic workers.”

The story of the 2023 strike at Rutgers begins before the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, after our previous contract campaign. And the story continues beyond the settlement of the new contract, which has come under attack by a neoliberal university leadership that framed our wins as losses for students. Since the strike, the administration, with the support of the board of governors, has twice increased tuition, fees, and housing costs; has cut classes and increased class sizes; and, at every turn, has attempted to blame the unions for increased costs and manufactured budget deficits.

The unity we painstakingly worked to create as we entered negotiations has held and is allowing us to continue to fight and to pursue our mission of remaking Rutgers—and higher education—into a more equitable and inclusive institution that is not just about preparing students for the job market but also about offering a broad-based and expansive liberal education.

Toward Wall-to-Wall Unionism

The story of our efforts to build wall-to-wall unionism goes back to the previous contract campaign in 2018–19. Those negotiations occurred along parallel tracks, with each faculty union operating in concert with but ultimately independently of the others—with the full-time unit first voting to strike and then settling, throwing the adjunct union under the bus, participants recalled. The ratified contracts, while improvements over previous pacts, led to changes in leadership and focus, with a more radicalized rank-and-file caucus taking the helm of both unions.

“The two units were not well aligned” during the 2019 negotiations, said Rebecca Kolins Givan, who served as president of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT during the 2023 strike and now serves as vice president. The full-time unit was focused on getting strike-ready and using the threat of the strike to move the negotiations forward but did not offer much support to the adjunct unit. Givan said this split probably undermined how much the adjuncts were able to win in their negotiations.

“Most engaged adjuncts did not feel good about the full-time faculty union’s trajectory and their relationship,” she said. “There was no trust. There were people who felt like the full-time faculty could have done more to win a strong contract for adjuncts and chose not to.”

The 2019 adjunct contract included some wage gains and a path to advancement but fell well short of what many in the union thought necessary to elevate adjuncts from our precarious status. Adjuncts continued to lack job security, real wage parity, health care, and equal access to professional development. That spurred the change in leadership.

Amy Higer, who was elected president of the adjunct union as part of the rank-and-file takeover, said the previous adjunct leadership lacked interest in organizing members. Their belief was that “adjuncts could not be organized”—that their lack of office space and job security, along with their generally nomadic lives, meant they could not be reached. This left the union in a weaker position, operating as a junior partner to the full-timers.

New leadership meant a new commitment to organizing and building the union along what it saw as an industrial-union model, rather than the professional union or guild approach of the deposed leadership. Organizing efforts were made not only to increase membership but also to activate and radicalize it. Town halls, phone banks, and other efforts brought in new activists who proved to be more militant.

At the same time, the new full-time unit leadership demonstrated a more consistent commitment to working with the other units.

That’s when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, forcing classes online. University management acted unilaterally, declaring a fiscal emergency that included layoffs of adjuncts, administrative staff, and maintenance and cafeteria employees as well as a freeze on contractually agreed raises. Todd Wolfson was president of the full-time unit during the pandemic (he was vice president during the strike, and now serves again as president of the full-time unit as well as the recently elected national AAUP president). Wolfson said the pandemic “changed the dynamic.” About a half-dozen unions united as the Coalition of Rutgers Unions (CRU) and “held pretty tightly together, making demands around how the administration approached the pandemic,” he said.

About eighteen thousand Rutgers workers were represented by CRU. The goal was to save jobs and force the university to include workers in the discussions. Full-time faculty, in an unprecedented show of solidarity, made concessions—including work-share arrangements—in exchange for rehiring adjuncts and other staff and funding extensions for graduate student workers.

This unified effort, while not “wall-to-wall,” centered the needs of the most vulnerable workers and was key to rebuilding trust among the faculty units, leaders from both unions said.

“I think pushing back together to undo the adjunct [layoffs] was really pivotal to starting to get that relationship to a place of trust and laying the groundwork for working together in the future as we then did,” Givan said.

“We held together well,” said Bryan Sacks, who participated in the CRU bargaining with management. Not every union joined CRU—“there were some that just felt, incorrectly in my view, it might interfere with their advocacy for their own members”—but there were enough to demonstrate the advantages that a unified union front could offer.

The CRU coalition “really set the stage for some of the unity we saw develop during the last contract campaign and the strike,” Wolfson said.

The willingness to sacrifice for lower-paid colleagues and other university workers was “significant and meaningful to both adjunct faculty and staff,” Givan added. “We stood together and we said, ‘This is a package deal.’ We need all different kinds of precarious workers to be protected.”

One Faculty

The 2018–22 contracts expired on June 30, 2022, but management was slow to come to the table, likely expecting the usual, more traditional, approach to bargaining. In the past, each union would negotiate separately with management, relying on small bargaining teams to hammer out contracts before sending them to membership for a vote. In 2022, the unions decided to handle negotiations differently.

Several things happened. First, inspired by the national AAUP’s One Faculty campaign, we engaged in an effort in 2022 to legally merge the three academic worker unions. This proved to be the first in a series of stress tests. Both the PTLFC-AAUP-AFT and the AAUP-BHSNJ engaged in card campaigns resulting in an overwhelming majority of both units supporting a merger. The BHSNJ campaign was ultimately successful, but the adjunct union’s merger drive was abandoned because of potential legal obstacles. These efforts brought the three bargaining units into alignment and demonstrated to everyone that we would be stronger if we worked as if the mergers had been completed.

“Joining forces with the larger faculty/grad union was the goal from the beginning,” Higer said. “We conceived of the merger as a way to increase union power and also to demonstrate to the full-time unit how serious we were about organizing.” The merger campaign also created a joint-organizing structure that has continued to be effective. The adjunct union collected about 1,200 signatures during the campaign, names we would use for prestrike organizing. 

The Rutgers One Faculty campaign was a “predecessor campaign to the contract campaign,” Wolfson said. “It was a purposeful strategic move to do that work, to get us all aligned and moving in one direction for the next year.”

“It was the first test of adjunct-union strength,” Higer said, and it demonstrated that a unified approach to bargaining was possible. There would be several other “structure tests,” as the team learned to call them after completing the late labor educator Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts training, culminating in a spring 2023 strike vote. We held mass rallies outside meetings of the university senate and board of governors on multiple campuses, interrupted a budget presentation by the university administration, and held mini teach-ins in our classes to bring students along and to make sure they understood what was at stake. In December 2022, in the rain in New Brunswick, and again in February 2023 in Newark, more than eight hundred faculty members, staff, and students turned out to press demands for fair and equal pay, job security, health care, better housing for students, the creation of a community fund, and a rent freeze on Rutgers-owned properties. The last three demands were part of a “bargaining for the common good” platform that resulted in the creation of a nonprofit network of the same name. Union and community members serve on the nonprofit’s board, making it a potential model for wall-to-wall organizing.

Another key lesson that the three academic unions absorbed from the McAlevey training was to commit themselves to, and fight for, “open bargaining.” This meant that members helped write the contract proposals and often played carefully planned roles at the bargaining table. At times, fifty or more members were in the virtual Zoom bargaining room. The goal was transparency and an end to the kind of backroom trade-offs that had been common in union bargaining for decades.

“Open bargaining was key, not so much because of how it affected management’s behavior, but as an organizing tool,” Sacks said. “We knew early on that our key demands would not be won at the table—they had to be won away from it, where power is built.”

Allowing members to observe and participate gave them a sense of what was at stake and meant that they did not have to blindly trust union leadership. They had a firsthand view of management’s obstructionism and a solid basis for making up their own minds about what had to be done. “This made it easier to call on members to engage in collective action when management’s intransigence had to be confronted head-on,” Sacks said.

Initially, bargaining for each unit was scheduled for separate slots. It became clear, however, that management was less concerned with the adjunct and the BHSNJ clinical units, providing them with fewer sessions and avoiding more difficult issues like pay and job security. After months of fruitless back and forth, the unions seized the initiative and set the schedule. They began attending each other’s sessions and crafted joint packages that made it clear we were in the fight together. Givan said she was “really proud” that the unions stayed focused and “didn’t let management define the bargaining table.”

None of this was easy. There was President Jonathan Holloway’s threat of an injunction, issued in an email to students and employees, and the unions had to navigate conflicting interests and analyses within our coalition. Graduate student workers generally “do not expect to be around for another contract after the one we’re currently negotiating,” Givan said, so they “are focused on wins in the current contract period.” There are full-time faculty who “are entirely dependent on grant funding,” she said, which pays the salaries of grad workers and postdocs, and who are concerned that “significant wage increases would impact their grants.” And adjuncts and non-tenure-track instructors (NTTs) had their own needs.

“We have all kinds of divergent interests,” Givan said. “And, as leadership, it’s on you to have an inclusive decision-making process that hopefully brings people together, but it’s deeply imperfect and there are certainly tensions and things can explode.”

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy’s office intervened April 9, the morning before the strike began, and cloistered negotiators from both sides in the statehouse. The governor ultimately put serious state money on the table to cover raises, but the money had strings attached. The unions were forced to vote to suspend the strike, which exacerbated the underlying cracks. Graduate student workers thought we should stay out and fight for greater wins, while many adjuncts and other non-tenure-track faculty were concerned that the major gains on the table would evaporate if we did not agree to a suspension. But it was near the end of the academic year, and union leaders feared that interest would wane over the summer, and that we would lose support from students and the public if the strike disrupted final exams and graduation.

There were hurt feelings, but the coalition held, and the unions voted for classes to resume April 17. We continued to rally publicly, including a boisterous march from campus to an office in downtown New Brunswick where negotiations continued the week after the strike was suspended.

Contracts were ratified in early May and included unprecedented salary increases for adjuncts and graduate workers, presumptive renewal for NTTs, and other major gains. We achieved these wins because we were able to create a kind of wall-to-wall union for faculty—though that will not be enough if the goal is to change the culture and political economy of America’s colleges and universities.

Shifting the Balance of Power

Since the strike, Rutgers has pushed back against the unions, laying off more than twenty writing program adjuncts (the writing program was a locus of union support) and increasing class sizes for the NTTs who remain. Across the university, we are witnessing cancelation of classes for newly defined “low enrollment” (especially in the humanities and foreign languages).

“Given the significant gains we made at the bargaining table this time, we fully expected management to push back in whatever ways they could, to try to mitigate our wins,” said Higer.

This is part of a structural shift in higher education beyond Rutgers in which schools are prioritizing big-time sports, returns on investments, and real estate while crying poverty. Rutgers is not unusual in this regard, and these cuts to academics—which are happening despite the university’s having raised tuition, room and board, and fees in each of the last two years—show the limitations of the old models of organizing.

At Rutgers, we have attempted to shift the power balance to workers, but a lot more needs to be done—both to address the shortcomings of the current contract and to refocus the institution on its dual teaching and research missions.

“If we leave management to its own devices,” Sacks said, “they will gut academic experience in favor of imposing an ‘efficiency’ model borrowed from places like the airline industry. Departments are being told to try to pack as many students into a class as possible. They want to fill every seat, which incentivizes offering fewer subjects and keeping lecturers on a ‘just-in-time’ labor model that can maximize managerial flexibility, but at the cost of injuring students and instructors.”

Unity across job categories is critical, but expanding it will be difficult. The ideal is wall-to-wall unionism. Givan, an expert in labor-management studies, describes wall-to-wall unionism as every worker being represented by a union, potentially in a single bargaining unit. We don’t have that yet, but we have taken the huge step of working in unison.

That means putting aside differences and placing at the center of the fight the needs of the “most vulnerable, in this case, contingent workers,” Wolfson said. The creation of a precarious class of faculty, a separate, lower-paid and disrespected class, is one of the “core contradictions” of higher education.

“If we’re going to win, we have to take those core contradictions on,” he said, “because they affect all of us and no other sector gets away with this.”

Hank Kalet teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writes for numerous publications. He is the New Brunswick campus vice president for the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union (PTLFC-AAUP-AFT). Howard Swerdloff teaches US labor history and nonfiction writing at Rutgers University and is secretary of the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union (PTLFC-AAUP-AFT).