After nearly a decade of organizing, contract faculty ratified their first unionized agreement with administration.
On April 6, Contract Faculty United, which represents around 950 full-time faculty at NYU, announced that its members voted 756-13 to approve the tentative contract it had reached with university negotiators, guaranteeing salary increases, benefits and academic freedom protections.
Contract faculty began discussing unionization in 2017 and officially formed a union three years later. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the union didn’t publicize its demands until February 2023 — when it delivered a letter demanding recognition from then-President Andrew Hamilton at a rally in Bobst Library and later picketed on campus.
“The initial journey is one of building a community when there isn’t a safety net,” CFU bargaining committee member Richard Dorritie, who joined the union around 2022, told WSN. “That means sticking your neck out for advocacy and exposing yourself potentially to firing, discipline and ostracizing, which never happened, but you have no idea.”