Rutgers University avoided a potentially disruptive strike from its faculty this week, settling a "historic contract" late Tuesday night that will close the gender pay gap and give teaching assistants raises, among other notable agreements.

“We made history today," said Deepa Kumar, president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT. "For the first time in the union’s nearly 50-year history, we won equal pay for equal work for female faculty, faculty of color, and for faculty in the Newark and Camden campuses."

The union plans to hold a press conference at 10 a.m. Wednesday in front of its office on Stone Street in New Brunswick. The tentative contract will next be put up for a vote by union members.

A Rutgers spokeswoman confirmed that a settlement had been reached and said the university would issue a statement Wednesday.

The settlement avoided what would have been the first faculty strike in Rutgers' 253-year history.

For the last week, faculty union representatives have spent more than 35 hours negotiating with the university in marathon sessions that went into midnight several times. The union threatened to strike if the university didn't agree on key issues, such as closing the gender pay gaps and increasing salaries for 1,700 graduate and teaching assistants.

Under the new contract, there will be a guarantee of a workplace free of harassment and stalking, enforced with binding arbitration, Kumar said. Professors' "academic freedom now applies to social media,” she added.

There were also wins for non-tenure-track faculty, who will be granted terms up to seven years, said David Hughes, vice president of the union.

"Furthermore, in this climate of insecurity for immigrants, the union worked hard to revise the university’s ‘no-green-card’ policy," Hughes said. "Rutgers may now sponsor [non-tenure-track] faculty for permanent residency."

Despite Tuesday's settlement, the labor union representing 3,000 part-time lecturers, and about 16 other labor unions at the university, are still working under expired contracts. The part-time lecturers want health care coverage and higher pay. The unions planned to hold "solidarity actions" on all three campuses Wednesday in support of their efforts.

Faculty union representatives had been saying that Monday would be the last day of negotiations and a decision to strike would be made soon after.

But Monday's negotiations continued until 2 a.m. Tuesday, and after a break, talks resumed later on Tuesday. A deal was reached shortly before 10 p.m.

About 1,700 graduate and teaching assistants, 1,000 non-tenure-track faculty members and 2,100 tenure-track and tenured faculty make up the union's 4,800 members.

For more than a year, the union had been negotiating a new contract with the university.

Contracts expired for 24 labor unions at the school in July. Rutgers ratified contracts with six of the unions. Generally, those contracts call for 3 percent raises in each of the first three years and a 2.5 percent raise in the final year.

But Rutgers AAUP-AFT wanted more than raises from the university.

The union demanded, and won, pay equity for female faculty and faculty based in Newark and Camden, the university’s two other campuses. Research by union members showed the two groups are paid less than their male and New Brunswick counterparts.

It also demanded salary increases ahead of cost-of-living, particularly for teaching and graduate assistants who make about $25,000, union leaders said. The new agreement will raise their pay to $30,162 over the course of the contract, Kumar said.

The union's non-tenure-track faculty makes about $60,000 a year and tenure-track or tenured faculty make on average $80,000, union leaders said.

The union's demands also included more full-time faculty hires and they wanted Rutgers to increase the student minimum wage from $11 to $15 per hour. Under the state's law recently signed by Gov. Phil Murphy, the minimum wage won't reach $15 until 2024.

A press release announcing the new agreement did not state if these two points were addressed in the new contract.

Rutgers President Robert Barchi announced earlier this month that he would add $20 million to an initiative to hire and retain more faculty from diverse backgrounds, which the union claimed was a win for them as they were also fighting for that.

Now that the union representatives and university management bargaining teams have come to a new agreement, the contract will next be put to a vote by union members. The contracts are usually in place for four years. Once the contract term expires, it can be renegotiated by the two teams and workers can continue doing their jobs and get paid under expired contracts.

Email: carrera@northjersey.com