Paula Chakravartty and Zachary Samalin are members of NYU’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
NYU’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors stands in solidarity with our nearly 1,000 Contract Faculty United colleagues, as they continue to negotiate with NYU for their first contract. Living wages, academic freedom and humane benefits for all faculty are in the best interests of our students, since, as we know, faculty working conditions are our students’ learning conditions.
Since November 2024, CFU has been bargaining for better pay, improved benefits and critical academic freedoms. Unfortunately, after more than 14 months of negotiations, NYU has refused to present the union with a contract that meets their demands. As a result, CFU voted decisively last month to authorize its bargaining team to call for a strike — 75% of all contract faculty participated in the vote, with 90% electing to authorize a strike. The deadline for the strike has been set for March 23.
A strike is one of the most powerful tools a labor union has to exert pressure on its employer. AAUP-NYU recognizes our colleagues’ lawful right to strike as part of their efforts to secure a contract. We applaud their extraordinary organizing efforts, as well as the democratic process that has enabled them to take this momentous step. The call for a strike derives its power from its democratic, collective nature — at a time when political and institutional leaders have recklessly abandoned commitments to democratic process, our AAUP chapter honors CFU’s overwhelming vote to strike, should they have to.
The university’s response to the strike authorization vote is unethical and deeply concerning. Rather than return to the bargaining table with an adequate proposal, NYU is seeking to undermine the strike by conscripting tenure-track and adjunct faculty, as well as advanced graduate students, to do the work of striking contract faculty. They have asked department chairs to identify faculty who will be amenable to doing the work of their colleagues — not just teaching their classes and tutoring their students, but also monitoring their classrooms to see if they are on strike, reporting on them to their chairs, filling in for them on committees and so on.
These are cynical, dubiously legal responses to CFU’s democratic strike authorization. Rather than bargain in good faith, the administration seeks to pit faculty against faculty. Rather than bargain, they seek to use tenure-track and adjunct faculty to mitigate the force of the strike and interfere in the negotiation process. Rather than bargain, they have shredded the rules of faculty governance, pressuring chairs to make faculty cross the picket line to do struck work.
These are divisive tactics that flout the university’s own rules, while playing fast and loose with the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act. NYU must resolve its negotiations with CFU solely at the bargaining table — not through clandestine manipulations of its other faculty. AAUP-NYU calls upon administrators to refrain from asking faculty to do the work of striking colleagues and to bargain in good faith.
Similarly, we urge faculty members not to do any form of struck work and to respect the democratic process our CFU colleagues have followed in authorizing a strike. If faculty are asked to do struck work, we urge colleagues to decline. If department chairs are asked to identify colleagues to do struck work, we urge chairs and program directors to decline.
It is worth a reminder that NYU administrators cannot pressure anyone, in any position or rank, to do the work of striking colleagues. If your department chair or program director suggests that you must or should do struck work, or you have concerns about retaliation for declining to do struck work — especially as an untenured tenure-track faculty member — please contact AAUP-NYU. If you are a graduate student worker or adjunct faculty member, reach out to your union representative as well.
In their email to university employees on Feb. 25, President Linda Mills and Provost Gigi Dopico wrote that “faculty who are not in the CFU-UAW bargaining unit are required to continue carrying out their responsibilities.” In the midst of a paragraph about the university’s contingency plans to hire substitutes, this sentence sounds like an admonition to faculty to cooperate with the administration. We remind NYU that it is a violation of the NLRA to threaten an employee — any employee — with adverse consequences for supporting a union, or for engaging in “other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.”
The point of a strike is for a collective of workers to gauge and exert their power, in order to put pressure on the negotiation process. For the sake of our contract faculty colleagues, other faculty should not intervene in that process. For our own sake, too, we should not set a dangerous precedent by voluntarily acquiescing to NYU’s capricious demands for our additional labor. Rather than peering through their classroom windows to check if they are on the picket line, we ought to stand by our CFU colleagues as one united faculty.
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