Rutgers Strike!

[downer]

The much anticipated Rutgers strike has started.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/10/us/rutgers-university-unions-strike-monday/index.html

Solidarity to our striking colleagues!

[Langue_doc]

From the NYT:

Rutgers University Faculty Members Strike, Halting Classes and Research
The walkout is the first in the public university's 257-year history and follows nearly a year of bargaining.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/10/nyregion/rutgers-strike.html

And from The Gothamist:

Rutgers faculty strikes: 9,000 educators to walk off job, affecting 67,000 students

https://gothamist.com/news/rutgers-faculty-strikes-9000-educators-to-walk-off-job-affecting-67000-students

[Wahoo Redux]

Solidarity, Rutgers.

[ergative]

Heh. A very distant family member worked for the Rutgers legal team some years ago, specifically on union-related issues. Absolutive called him the in-house union buster. He's no longer working there.

I'm not saying he would have prevented this, but I'm not not saying it either. Either way, solidarity to them! ✊

[downer]

Remarkably the Rutgers strike is over after 5 days. I haven't seen the terms of the agreements yet. I hope the administration caved and the university president will soon leave.

[Parasaurolophus]

Remarkably the Rutgers strike is over after 5 days. I haven't seen the terms of the agreements yet. I hope the administration caved and the university president will soon leave.

Wow, that was quick.

[Hibush]

Remarkably the Rutgers strike is over after 5 days. I haven't seen the terms of the agreements yet. I hope the administration caved and the university president will soon leave.

Wow, that was quick.

Some tidbits from the NYT

...reaching a consensus with the university on critical provisions, including a significant pay raise for adjunct professors...a four-year contract would provide a 43 percent pay increase for adjunct professors and a 33 percent pay increase for graduate workers. The contract would be retroactive to July 2022.

graduate students would see their 10-month salaries increase to $40,000 over the course of the contract. The minimum salary for postdoctoral fellows and associates would rise by 27.9 percent

I don't know where the salaries started, but the percentages suggest they were below market by a substantial margin.
For grad students, this puts them in a reasonable range for living in NNJ with some potential for summer stipend for those who do summer research.  This is the level where Rutgers' competition for grad students is in bio anyway.

[Parasaurolophus]

Wow, that's fantastic!

[AmLitHist]

Good for the strikers!

We're unionized, but state law denies us the right to strike, which leaves the union pretty toothless.

[downer]

I see on Reddit that the Rutgers grad students are saying that the union didn't get them a good deal. I don't know the details, but $40,000 pay sounds good to me for a grad student.  NJ.com reports that the NJ governor came up with more funds for the university. I wonder where that money came from. A 44% pay increase for adjunct faculty is impressive.  Hopefully there will be some domino effect on adjunct pay in the area.

[dismalist]

The agreement generally raises wages with past and expected inflation over the life of the contract, a tad more for some. In that sense it's nothing the market would not have delivered without a union acting at all. So it's indeed not whelming.

The agreement, he [the governor] said, would:

    Increase salaries across-the-board for full-time faculty and counselors by at least 14% by July 1, 2025.
    Provide a 43.8% increase in the per-credit salary rate for part-time lecturers over four years and "at the same time significantly strengthen their job security."
    Increase the minimum salary for postdoctoral fellows and associates by 27.9% over four years.
    Provide "substantial enhancements in wages as well as a commitment to multi-year university support for our teaching assistants and graduate assistants." They would receive health care coverage and free tuition and fees, as well as seeing their 10-month salaries increase to $40,000 over the course of the contract.

Looks like the lower paid do better than the higher paid. The 40K is up from 30K, but 33% over a number of years -- past plus future expected inflation-- is hardly whelming. Looks like the adjuncts do best of all. Adjunctifiaction has reversed over the last 12 years, so this, too, may be emulating the market. My heart goes out to them, but not my wallet.

"This contract campaign has centered on raising up adjunct faculty, who are paid per class, and graduate workers, who make just over $30,000 a year. Those are the salaries we're most concerned with raising," Maass wrote in an email.

Most Rutgers adjunct professors earn between $5,799 and $7,234 per course each semester, depending on how long they have taught at the university, according to their previous contract.

My guess is that there will still be a fight over where the extra money is coming from.

Facts and quotes are from here

https://www.nj.com/education/2023/04/rutgers-and-unions-reach-deal-to-end-historic-faculty-strike.html

[Parasaurolophus]

I see on Reddit that the Rutgers grad students are saying that the union didn't get them a good deal. I don't know the details, but $40,000 pay sounds good to me for a grad student. 

Me too. I was still a grad student six years ago, and my stipend was about 36% of that (nominally; we had to pay ~3k tuition out of it). It was enough to scrape by in that city, which was quite cheap. Students at the R1 down the road here make slightly more than I did, but they're still in the 36-40% range of that figure, and the cost of living here is astronomically high.

Even if it's not as good a deal as they might have liked--or even expected--however, I think it's worth the sacrifice for the improvement for adjuncts. As bad as grad students have it, adjuncts are in a worse position, and it makes sense to me to prioritize their wellbeing--especially if helping them doesn't preclude helping grad students, too.

[bio-nonymous]

I see on Reddit that the Rutgers grad students are saying that the union didn't get them a good deal. I don't know the details, but $40,000 pay sounds good to me for a grad student. 

Me too. I was still a grad student six years ago, and my stipend was about 36% of that (nominally; we had to pay ~3k tuition out of it). It was enough to scrape by in that city, which was quite cheap. Students at the R1 down the road here make slightly more than I did, but they're still in the 36-40% range of that figure, and the cost of living here is astronomically high.

Even if it's not as good a deal as they might have liked--or even expected--however, I think it's worth the sacrifice for the improvement for adjuncts. As bad as grad students have it, adjuncts are in a worse position, and it makes sense to me to prioritize their wellbeing--especially if helping them doesn't preclude helping grad students, too.

Not mentioned are postdocs--did they get any raises out of the strike? I made around $40K as a year 0 postdoc back in 2015.  The current NIH rate for grad students is $27,144. $40k for a grad student is a lot, considering in sciences most 1st year PhD students are pretty much not trained to do anything and spend so much time in class. It would make more sense to have an graduated scale from 1 year up to 4th year (and then stay at 4th year rate for subsequent years). BUT, good for Rutgers, it is great to see that the strike accomplished something positive--especially the huge raise for adjuncts.

[mythbuster]

The current starting NIH postdoc salary is $58.4k, so still a decent jump from the grad student rate. It would all depend on if the post-docs are part of the union or not.

[kaysixteen]

If a grad student on stipend is paid $40k per an plus free tuition for courses, how much work is he expected to do, to earn all this, if he is still taking a full class load as a student?   This is much much more than adjunct professors, PhD in hand, get paid.