New School administrators are stepping up their threats to bring in replacements after striking adjunct professors overwhelmingly rejected the private New York University’s ‘last, best and final’ offer. Nearly 2,000 part-time faculty members of United Auto Workers Local 7902 have been on strike since Nov. 16 to fight for decent wages, better health care coverage and safety employment.
Last Thursday, strikers rejected the insulting deal, which included a massive reduction in real wages and higher insurance premiums, by 95%, with 1,821 workers voting ‘no’ and only 88 ‘yes’. Part-time teachers, who make up 87% of The New School’s faculty, have not received a pay raise for four years.
Although there was broad support from students, faculty and other sections of workers inside and outside the university to broaden the struggle, the United Auto Workers union isolated the strike, kept the students on starvation-level strike pay and signaled his willingness to lower his salary and other demands. Following the rejection of the contract, UAW Local 7902 immediately accepted the New School administration’s longstanding request for federal mediation.
This only emboldened university administrators. Over the weekend, a group of students released a leaked email from The New Schools Talent Engagement Coordinator, which clearly stated that the university was looking to hire “additional assessors” from the outside the school to rate the students if the strike continued.
The email stated that potential candidates could be assigned “a student in the Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) program in Fashion Design”, but “do not need to have experience in the tools used. to design garment patterns or in the draping and sewing of fabrics, but will review the stated learning outcomes and the student’s submitted work to determine sufficient progress towards those outcomes.” There were similar descriptions for other majors saying scabs didn’t need any special knowledge to grade students.
The release of the email sparked widespread anger among strikers and students. As of this writing, nearly 3,000 students, parents and others have signed a change.org petition denouncing the plan, saying, “We came to the new school and paid a lot of money to be taught and graded. by legitimate professionals, and putting our grades in the hands of untrained and unvetted temps is a complete betrayal of The New School’s duty to us as students and could result in serious damage to our academic transcripts . Plus, it’s a huge waste of our tuition to hire hundreds of temp workers when that money could be better spent just paying the teachers we already have, who are desperate for a contract that will bring them back to class !
The petition signatories declined to be graded by scabs or to meet with anyone other than their own teachers for grading purposes.
New School officials attempted to distance themselves from the leaked email, tweeting that it was an “unfinished and unapproved draft that should not have been sent.” Nonetheless, Tokumbo Shobowale, Executive Vice President for Business and Operations, warned: “[I]In the event that the union decides to continue its strike for an extended period – something we are working to resolve with a fair and financially responsible new contract – we must consider a range of potential options to secure the academic future of our students.
Shobowale, who earns nearly half a million a year, suggested the university had no choice but to make these strike-breaking plans as it needed to meet regulatory student grading requirements in order to maintain the university’s accreditation standards. In a thinly veiled threat to students, he added: “Our plans must protect our students from the very real risks associated with incomplete teaching or ungraded grades, including the risks of not meeting the terms of their visas. , jeopardizing the ability of students. to graduate on time, and potentially change financial aid eligibility.
Students at the new school largely supported their teachers and were active on the picket line. On Wednesday, a rally was held where students who had joined the pickets spoke out.
A fourth-grade student told the crowd, “It’s ironic for a school that claims progressive values that staff have to strike for fair pay. As students, we fully support our teachers and if we all stick together, they can’t stop us.
Another student, Milo, said, “We pay a lot of money to go to school here! It should go to our teachers. They are the ones who supply us. The administration, on the other hand, does nothing and they don’t care about us.
A student working on her masters in fine arts told the crowd that her wife was previously an assistant at the New School for five years and it was ‘brutal’. “I support this strike because it is not just on behalf of current staff but for everyone who wants to teach in the future.”
A graduate student who works at the New School told strikers, “It’s inspiring to see students and teachers coming together like this.” He added that since the graduate students’ contract was also coming to an end, the university had started threatening international students that their visas could be revoked if they went on strike. He concluded, “It is absurd that we are paying so much and the administration is making millions of dollars while pretending there is no money for teachers.”
In response to strike-breaking threats, the full-time faculty also released a statement in support of their part-time counterparts: “The faculty of the new School of Social Research stands in solidarity with all the part-time faculty of the new school and won’t. cross a picket line while their union is on strike. Part-time faculty have a fundamental right to fair and equitable working conditions; it is essential for social justice that no individual have working conditions imposed on him without his consent. Our confidence in the administration depends on its willingness to bargain in good faith with the union.
The three-week struggle at The New School is at a turning point. Using a third-party mediator in contract negotiations has been a tried-and-true tactic by unions and employers to sell concession deals to workers and bully them into thinking something better isn’t “affordable.” nor “practical”. That’s exactly what the UAW did last year when Columbia student workers struck for their first contract. Mediation provides the union bureaucracy with cover to accept demands that would otherwise be rejected outright by the rank and file.
The UAW and administration negotiating teams held their first mediation session Thursday, with Commissioner Bill Domini of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service serving as mediator. Domini has more than three decades of service as a union bureaucrat for the Teamsters, Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) and United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), serving in various roles as Local President, Secretary-Treasurer , commercial agent and Vice-president of the departmental council. He earned $154,047 in 2010 with UFCW, according to unionfacts.com, and $138,397 in 2021 as a mediator, according to govsalaries.com.
In response to Domini, the university said, “We have worked with Commissioner Domini before, in another round of union negotiations, and we look forward to working with him again.”
If the New School’s part-time faculty struggle is to succeed, it must be taken out of the hands of the UAW, which has refused to broaden or publicize the strike or tie it to the strong University of California. of 48,000 ( UC) university workers on strike over similar demands – and in the hands of the rank and file.
The UC strike is currently at a critical juncture, with UAW Local 5810 leadership reaching tentative agreements for 11,000 postdocs and scholars, which contain inadequate pay increases and dropped a primary demand Workers for Cost of Living Increase (COLA) provisions.
In the founding statement of the rank and file strike committee of the UC, it is said: “The task of this committee is to formulate the fundamental requirements for any contract that we will accept. It will unite all striking workers against efforts to divide and weaken our strike and reach out to the broadest layers of the working class for a coordinated struggle,” including dockworkers, autoworkers and railway workers, health workers, educators and other sections of the working class.
Striking workers in New York, which also includes 250 UAW HarperCollins workers, should turn to this independent initiative of striking university workers in California and form rank-and-file committees to fight attempts to betray their strikes, by taking direct control of their struggles while uniting with workers across the city, across the United States and around the world in a unified working class offensive to fight for what workers really need.
