“The NYU administration has refused to follow the law, bargain in good faith, and settle a fair contract with my union, Contract Faculty United - UAW,” wrote Dr. Jacob Remes, a clinical associate professor at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, in an out-of-office message sent the morning of March 23. “I am on strike as of 11am on Monday, March 23.”
Remes, who is also a labor historian and a member of the union's bargaining committee, added a pointed message for anyone reading: “I encourage you to email NYU President Linda Mills and demand to know why she is disrupting the university by forcing half the university's full-time faculty to strike.”
It was a message playing out across campus in real time.
Approximately 950 non-tenure track faculty at New York University walked off the job on Monday, after their union and the university failed to reach agreement on raises and better job security. The strike landed with maximum symbolic weight, beginning at 11 a.m. as students were just returning from spring break.
The standoff did not materialize overnight. For over a year, NYU had been negotiating a first contract with the Contract Faculty United union. The union, formally known as CFU-UAW Local 7902, represents what amounts to a substantial share of the university's instructional workforce.
Contract faculty initially threatened to strike if the university did not meet their demands for increased compensation, job security, and family support in a December 16 letter to administrators. The union pushed for more frequent and longer bargaining sessions in January, and the university responded by increasing some sessions to five hours and holding several sessions per week.
The frustrations had been building. Most contract faculty workers at NYU say that they struggle to afford to live in one of the most expensive cities in the nation.
The membership's frustration crystallized in February. Contract faculty voted by 90% to authorize their elected Bargaining Committee to call a strike if circumstances justified, with a turnout of 75%.
The central flashpoint is compensation. The university offered the union a $90,000 wage floor for assistant professors, the lowest-ranked professors, which the union said is an improvement over prior offers but not enough to address the high cost of living in New York City. The union has demanded a $120,000 floor for those titles.
NYU has argued that the union's demands would increase base salaries of contract faculty in bargaining unit schools, currently averaging around $120,000, by nearly 50% on average in year one of the contract alone and continue to grow at least 6% per year.
The days immediately before the strike saw a frantic push at the bargaining table. There had been some hope that a deal could be reached early Monday when the university and union agreed to negotiate past the 8 a.m. deadline for three more hours.
The union had agreed to extend their strike deadline to allow further discussions after a marathon bargaining session over the weekend. The agreements piled up as the strike deadline loomed. On Friday, the university and the union had come to an agreement on only 18 issues. By Monday morning, the list of agreements had grown to 30.
But it wasn't enough. The core money questions — compensation, research funding, and housing — remained unresolved.
After a full night of negotiating and a three-hour delay, NYU's 950-member contract faculty union canceled classes and began picketing shortly after 11 a.m. Monday.
Remes, speaking to the crowd gathered outside the John A. Paulson Center late Monday afternoon, framed the stakes in the broadest terms possible.
“We will win the strong contract that we need and deserve,” he told the crowd. “But more importantly, we can win the university we need and deserve.”
NYU did not back down from its position. Chief Communications Officer Wiley Norvell issued a statement characterizing the strike as avoidable and pointing to the administration's weekend-long presence at the table as evidence of good faith.
“We respect our unionized contract faculty, but this strike is fundamentally unnecessary,” Norvell said. “The union owed it to students to pursue every option at the negotiating table before disrupting their education. They haven't.”
The university also repeated its call for third-party mediation, a proposal the union has rejected. University officials have called on the union to agree to utilize an impartial outside mediator who could help bridge differences and move negotiations forward, but they said that the union has refused.
NYU officials have said that every class affected has a plan in place so that students will continue their learning. But some students like Brendan Hill, a junior, wants the strike to be over.
“My hope is that a resolution is reached sooner rather than later,” said Hill. “We want to be in class with the professors who we signed up to take.”
