DK

First, I must acknowledge that we were working in an environment that the victorious K-12 strikes have created from West Virginia to Los Angeles. They had shown that strikes work and that if you struggle you can win. So, what we accomplished wasn’t simply because of our work and organizing philosophy but because our approach fit in with the mood among educators across the country.

The teachers’ strikes were covered very positively by the media and supported by the public, and we found the same with our struggle. 81 percent of the public in a poll conducted by a New Jersey newspaper supported our right to go on strike. Our undergraduate students supported us by forming a group called RU Student Solidarity Committee.

We have long fought alongside students to make an education at Rutgers affordable. As a result, the New Brunswick campus newspaper was 100 percent on our side. All this solidarity made a huge difference in our fight.

We even started to draw support from across the country. Towards the end of our contract campaign, Bernie Sanders tweeted in support of us as well. Not be left out, New Jersey senator Cory Booker also tweeted in support.

Our union began preparations for this contract battle by resisting the attacks from the Trump administration. Our first efforts to abandon the “service” model of unionism and to adopt a social justice model were to stand in solidarity with vulnerable populations under attack by Trump. Because we have long-time relationships with student activists (who meet weekly in our union office), we were at the center of pushing back against Trump’s Muslim ban.

We stood arm in arm with Muslim student groups and other organizations of people of color. Our union fought against the rescinding of DACA and when one of our students had a deportation hearing we mobilized faculty to stand in solidarity with her. Hundreds came out to a rally outside her interview — she was not deported and instead became a union activist.

Such activism under the slogan, “an injury to one, is an injury to all,” also made our faculty see the union in new ways. We went from open rates for our emails in the 20-30 percent range to 75 percent or higher. People were paying attention. We became an openly social justice union and that made a difference.

Our philosophy around building for our contract fight was that we would look at everything that was wrong with the corporate university and lay out a vision of what we want to change.

Our faculty and grads spent two years doing research and writing various position papers. We also designed and conducted various surveys of our faculty members, including a climate survey. Our climate survey designed to determine work conditions for women and POCs had the highest participation of any survey the union had conducted in the last two decades. We then brought together a team of people to work on a gender and race equity report that informed our bargaining demands. We also worked on job security and contingency, academic freedom, and other issues. All this laid the basis for our agenda for radical change at the university, summarized in the slogan “Equity, Security, Dignity.”

We also adopted the “bargaining for the common good” approach and organized a conference with our labor department colleagues to learn from other unions that had success in such campaigns. We put this all together in a series of actions and panels putting forth our social justice demands that we shared in videos with our members and the broader university community.

Some labor experts told us that we were asking for “pie-in-the-sky” and that we were raising expectations too high. Indeed, we did raise expectations sky-high because we believed that the only way for unions to survive in the post-Janus era was to go on the offensive. Rather than bargain a defensive contract which holds on to previously agreed upon contract language and over “bread-and-butter” issues, we went on the offensive and expanded the terms of our fight.

Right from the start we targeted the corporate university and its misplaced priorities. We did the research and held meetings to educate our faculty and grads that Rutgers was not a poor university. In fact, it has more than enough to meet our demands. As we got into strike mode, seventy distinguished professors threw their weight behind the union and signed on to a full-page union ad blasting the administration for its warped spending priorities.

For instance, since 2012 the university has spent $193 million on a mismanaged athletics program. And 244 managers earn more than $250,000 a year while our adjunct faculty, who teach more than 30 percent of our classes, are less than 1 percent of the budget. We raged against a corporate university that does not prioritize teaching, research, and service.

However, all our great videos, educational meetings, and rallies were not enough to get us where we wanted. In the fall of 2018, we organized several informational pickets, which were very well attended. Hundreds of faculty and grads who had never before attended a union action came to these actions. However, we saw little progress at bargaining. Management had dug in its heels and all the good media coverage and rallies and pickets weren’t going to move them.