Approximately 950 non-tenure track faculty at New York University walked off the job on Monday, after their union and the university failed to reach agreement on raises and better job security.
Contract Faculty United-UAW began their strike at 11 a.m. Monday, as students were just returning from spring break. The union had agreed to extend their strike deadline by three hours to allow further discussions after a marathon bargaining session over the weekend. By the time faculty walked off the job at 11am, the two sides had been bargaining for 26 straight hours, sources told THE CITY.
While the two sides have already made agreements on several points — including on guardrails on the use of artificial intelligence, benefits and academic freedom — the two sides remain apart on the issue of compensation. But bargaining is ongoing, said Brendan Hogan, a CFU-UAW spokesperson and philosophy professor, even as hundreds of faculty picketed throughout the day.
“We will win the strong contract that we need and deserve,” Jacob Remes, a member of the CFU-UAW bargaining committee and labor historian, told the crowd of about 200 gathered outside of the John A. Paulson Center late Monday afternoon. “But more importantly, we can win the university we need and deserve.”
An NYU spokesperson said the university had offered a “generous and comprehensive” package including “significant raises.”
“We respect our unionized contract faculty, but this strike is fundamentally unnecessary,” the spokesperson, Wiley Norvell, said in a statement. “We have a collective responsibility to our students, and the union owed it to them to pursue every option at the negotiating table before disrupting their education. They haven’t.”
The faculty on strike teach about a quarter of the classes taught at NYU, according to the university. The administration has been reaching out to non-union faculty and others to ask them to fill in for faculty on strike and pick up additional courses. An NYU spokesperson declined to say how many faculty have signed up to cross the picket line or how many substitute instructors it had hired.
The union has pushed for better compensation for its members, including by demanding either a housing supplement or stipend, a perk enjoyed by tenure-track and tenured faculty, in addition to raises, Hogan said.
Hogan also said they want the administration to address the issue of compression, which the union describes as wages for long-standing faculty lagging behind the salaries of recent hires, whose starting salaries are often higher, even within the same title or department.
“It essentially penalizes people for staying in the job and for showing loyalty with the university, to their students and wanting to have a secure position” said Emily Bauman, a liberal studies professor at NYU since 2005.
Contract faculty at NYU on strike, with congressional candidate Jack Schlossberg. Credit: Claudia Irizarry Aponte/THE CITY
The university has offered the union a $90,000 wage floor for assistant professors, the lowest-ranked professors, which the union said is an improvement over prior offers but not enough to address the high cost of living in New York City. (The union has demanded a $120,000 floor for those titles, Hogan said.)
The agreements piled up over the weekend as the strike deadline loomed. On Friday, the university and the union had come to an agreement on only 18 issues. By Monday morning, the list of agreements had grown to 30.
“I can’t speak to that, whether it was a lack of organization or underestimating us, but they didn’t get their act together until,” after the strike vote, Bauman said of the administration.
By Sunday evening, more than 1,600 students and alumni had signed on to a letter pleading with university leadership to reach a deal with the union: “Should a strike be necessary, we will stand in solidarity with contract faculty.”
Teamsters Local 804, which represents UPS drivers, sent out a notice to its members reminding them of their right to not cross the faculty picket line.
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