New York University reached a tentative agreement with the union representing approximately 950 non-tenure track faculty on raises, better job security and more, the union and the university announced Wednesday morning, putting an end to a strike that began on Monday as students returned to campus from spring break.
Striking faculty returned to work Wednesday having won “the highest minimum salaries of any unionized full-time, non-tenure track faculty in the country,” Brendan Hogan, a philosophy professor and spokesperson for Contract Faculty United-UAW, said in a statement.
“We fought, and won,” said Hogan.
Under the terms of the deal, which is pending approval by union members, 95% of union members will make more than $100,000 annually, and the lowest-ranked faculty will make $91,000. “Everyone in our union will get a minimum raise of $14,000 by the start of the next academic year,” Hogan said. The immediate raises will be more substantial for long-time faculty, in order to address the issue of salary compression, according to the university.
The five-year contract is retroactive to September 2025, the beginning of the current academic year, and includes 3.5% yearly raises for each year of the contract.
Before the strike began at 11 a.m. Monday, the two sides had already made agreements on several of the most burning issues in academia today, including guardrails on the use of artificial intelligence and academic freedom.
“The university has worked in good faith to recognize the important contributions these faculty members make to our community, and to ensure a sustainable and fair agreement,” Wiley Norvell, a spokesperson for the university, said in a statement. “This deal provides meaningful raises and comprehensive benefits that will improve the lives of every member.”
“We look forward to coming together as a community to fulfill our shared commitment to our students,” he added.
The agreement comes on the 115th anniversary of the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which propelled the modern American labor movement. The Greenwich Village building where 143 garment workers lost their lives, most of them immigrant girls and young women, remains standing on NYU’s campus. The site of the tragedy is now a sprawling laboratory for postdoctoral students studying brain development.
Hogan said that faculty would celebrate their contract at the annual commemoration of the fire outside the Washington Place building late Wednesday morning.
This is the first contract at NYU for CFU-UAW, which was created in Feb. 2024 when faculty voted to join the United Auto Workers. Members voted last month to authorize a strike by a margin of 90% after more than a year of contract negotiations.
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 18 of 47 issues. By Monday morning, the number of agreements had grown to 30.
CFU-UAW members teach about a quarter of all classes at NYU, according to the university. As the strike began, the administration reached out to employees not represented by the union and others to ask them to fill in for striking faculty. An NYU spokesperson declined to say on Monday how many people had signed up to cross the picket line, or how many substitute instructors it had hired. But at least one CFU-UAW member reported that a tenured professor not on strike had crossed the picket line to teach their class.
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