Our team was back at the negotiating table with the administration Tuesday, July 25th, and we’re happy to report on our second bargaining session.

Using the information we’ve collected over the last academic year through hundreds of in-person interviews, and supplemented with all of your responses to our recent bargaining surveys, we put forward a batch of creative proposals that would dramatically improve the lives and working conditions for the nearly 800 academic workers that will be covered under any future contracts.

Among many other things, we put forward proposals to:

Significantly raise adjunct salaries and create a system of additional ranks of Adjunct Instructor II and III with higher salaries and multi-year contracts,
Raise graduate employee wages to the level of parity with Rutgers salaries and lower the expected clock hour workload from 20 to 15,
Early mandatory deadlines for reappointment for all covered employees,
Full tuition remission for adjuncts and their dependent children,
Lowered parking costs for all covered employees,
Paid orientations for all new employees to provide them with access to necessary information and resources in order to perform effectively at work
Expanded sick and personal leave for all covered employees,
Unused vacation payout for research employees and post-docs

We also formally requested information from the administration around issues of graduate employee summer funding, health insurance plans for all covered employees, and mandatory fees in order to have accurate data with which to craft specific improvements which we will also submit soon.

The administration spent the session listening to our proposals, and informed us that they would give us a complete response at our next session, as well as some proposals of their own. We agreed on multiple bargaining dates in late August to give them time to prepare, and are ready to work hard to reach a fair settlement soon.

Best,
Susan Bristol, Adjunct Instructor, CoAD
Subash K. Ray, Research Assistant, Biology
Jeffrey Reaves, Adjunct Instructor, NCE
Patrick Nowlan, Executive Director, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Joe Richard, Organizer, AAUP-AFT
Victoria Pacheco, Staff Associate, AAUP-AFT
Jacob Chaffin, Organizer, AAUP-AFT