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

The Rutgers University faculty will strike Monday morning, marking the first teacher work stoppage since New Jersey’s flagship public university opened its doors 256 years ago.

The historic move, announced at a union "town hall" meeting Sunday night, will virtually shutter the university’s campuses in New Brunswick, Newark and Camden, which collectively serve nearly 70,000 students. The three striking faculty unions said they plan to picket Monday starting at 9 a.m. at all three campuses in Newark, New Brunswick and Camden.

The announcement prompted Gov. Phil Murphy to call both sides to his office “to have a productive dialog” Monday.

Rebecca Givan, president of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT Academic Worker Union, said during the town hall that there would be "family-friendly, sunny picket lines” Monday.

"We bargained and bargained and bargained and bargained and bargained and we’re not getting anywhere, and we need to do something more," Givan said.

In a statement Sunday night, Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway didn’t address if or when the university would take legal action to block a strike — but linked to materials on the school’s website saying it could do so.

It’s a possibility union leaders told members during the town hall they were prepared for. They said a court could order a strike to be halted, but it would need to separately find the members in contempt in a second hearing before there would be legal consequences.

“We have planned for this moment,” Givan said. “We understand the legal steps, we will keep you safe and we will keep you well informed.”

Holloway said Sunday the two sides had made significant progress, and that he believes only a few outstanding issues remained.

“To say that this is deeply disappointing would be an understatement, especially given that just two days ago, both sides agreed in good faith to the appointment of a mediator to help us reach agreements,” he said.

In announcing the strike, the unions — representing 9,000 educators — advised members to cancel all in-person and online classes and halt any grading, office hours and pre planned events.

Murphy’s office previously told Gothamist it’s not a party to the contract negotiations and that the Governor’s Office of Employee Relations hadn’t found any legal authority for Murphy to intervene. But Sunday night, the governor said all involved would “have my word that these parties will negotiate in good faith to reach an agreement that is fair for all parties.”

Sticking points in negotiations

At the heart of the unions’ demands are increased pay and better job security for their most vulnerable members, including graduate workers who earn $30,000 per academic year, and part-time lecturers who have to reapply for their jobs every semester, regardless of how long they’ve taught on campus.

The unions are asking for part-time lecturers to get proportionate pay to full-time faculty, and for adjunct faculty teaching two or more courses per semester to be given access to affordable health care plans — even if some of those courses are at other New Jersey schools.

They’re also demanding a $15 minimum wage for all campus workers, for Rutgers to end a practice of withholding transcripts when students owe certain fees and for Rutgers to freeze rent on all the housing it manages.

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Rutgers University faculty strike

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Three unions representing Rutgers faculty are on strike.

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At a glance:

• About 9,000 faculty members are walking off the job.
• The strike affects 67,000 students, across all Rutgers’ campuses – in New Brunswick, Newark and Camden.
• Rutgers’ president has threatened to take legal action to stop a strike.
• It's the first faculty strike in Rutgers’ 256-year-history.
• It's not yet clear how grades, graduation and other student activities may be affected.

Unions say they want:

• Job security for all faculty.
• Longer contracts for professors without tenure.
• Pay parity for adjunct faculty.
• $15 campus minimum wage, including for students.
• Rutgers to stop holding up transcripts when students owe fees.

Holloway said the school had offered to increase salaries across-the-board for full-time faculty by 12% by July 1, 2025, and for 3% lump-sum payments to be paid out to all the faculty unions over the first two years of a new contract.

The school had also offered a 20% increase in per-credit salaries for part-time lecturers and winter or summer instructors, and an increase of more than 20% in the minimum salary for postdoctoral fellows and associates in the faculty union, he said.

And he said the school offered “similar enhancements” and commitments to “multi-year university support for our TAs and GAs [teaching assistants and graduate assistants].”

Union leaders said the two sides had made some progress in recent days, but remained far apart on core issues.

“I think the administration didn’t think we would come to this point,” Todd Wolfson, general vice president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, said in a joint statement from the unions.

Pushback over threat of legal action

The work stoppage won’t affect clinical services or essential laboratory work, and professors will still continue to write letters of recommendations for students who ask, according to the unions.

Faculty strikes at universities don’t usually last more than a few days and union leaders have said they’re hopeful they’ll reach a deal before end-of-year grades are due.

The university also issued an FAQ for students navigating the strike last week, recommending students check in with their instructors on how to handle class assignments and clarifying that libraries, computer labs and student services remain open. It said “many classes will continue to meet in the event a strike is called,” but didn’t elaborate on which ones might.

The strike comes after 11 months of negotiations with university administrators and rising tensions between both sides.

“We hope that the courts would not have to be called upon to halt to [sic] an unlawful strike. No one wants that, nor does anyone want faculty or others to go without pay during an illegal strike,” Holloway wrote in an email to students on March 21.

That prompted the University Senate, an independent advisory board composed of alumni, students, faculty and staff, to overwhelmingly issue a resolution calling on Holloway to declare there would be no retaliation for striking teachers. On Friday, during an emergency meeting, the University Senate passed another resolution asking Holloway to avoid using legal action to block a strike and declare the right of public employees to strike.

More than 40 well-known scholars and historians, including Ibram X. Kendi and Marc Lamont Hill, also signed an open letter to Holloway last month, asking him to rescind his legal threat and avoid punitive actions that went against his own scholarship.

Holloway is Rutgers’ first Black president and an African-American historian. Holloway, who took over the university in 2020, has written about Black labor intellectuals, Donna Murch, an associate professor of history and president of the New Brunswick chapter of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, previously said.

“This kind of stance in the moment and the climate that we're in, with the attack on critical race theory and on unions and on academic freedom and tenure — this is extremely dangerous for the whole country, because it lays down a precedent for this kind of oppression, and I would never have thought this would be possible,” Murch said last month.

New Jersey has no legislation outlawing public employee strikes, but in the materials Holloway’s statement linked to Sunday night, the school cited past judicial rulings it said had “consistently and expressly” held such strikes are illegal.

And the school wrote that “any assertion that this principle does not apply to Rutgers employees, or that it is any less significant because it is established by the judiciary as the common law in the State of New Jersey, and not by the legislature as statutory law, is simply wrong.”

While state law is silent on whether public employees can strike, injunctions have previously been used to stop picketing K-12 teachers. Court orders are rare in higher education work actions, but Rutgers did get an injunction against non-teaching staff in 1987. In that case, the judge still did not order workers to end their picketing.

Labor historian Joshua Freeman, a professor at Queens College, said there’s been an uptick in union activity across the country — and that can be contagious. Last year, more than 40,000 graduate workers and other teaching staff at the University of California walked off the job in the nation’s largest academic worker strike. They won major wage concessions and improved working conditions after a six-week strike.

“Faculty activism nationally is contagious. People look at California and they go 40,000 people on strike and they won. [Faculty members think] ‘You know, maybe we should do that,’” Freeman said.

He stressed that the Rutgers unions are looking to better compensate and protect “essential workers in the university, the lowest-ranked members of the faculty union.

“Without them the whole thing would grind to a halt right away,” he said.

AAUP-AFT represents 5,000 full-time faculty, graduate workers, postdoctoral associates and Educational Opportunity Fund counselors. The Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, which represents 2,700 part-time lecturers, and the Rutgers AAUP-Biomedical and Health Sciences of New Jersey, which represents about 1,300 physicians, researchers and health science faculty are also on strike.

Rutgers is also in contract negotiations with unions representing administrative staff and resident physicians, though they’re not part of the strike.

This story has been updated further to include comments from Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway and Gov. Phil Murphy, and additional comment from participants in a union town hall.