Nearly 1,800 part-time faculty members who have been on strike since November 16 will return to work at the New School following the announcement on Saturday night that negotiators had reached a tentative collective-bargaining agreement.
“This is a strong, fair five-year contract that increases compensation significantly, protects health-care benefits, and ensures that part-time faculty are paid for additional work done outside the classroom to support our students,” a joint statement by the New York City university and the union says.
The leadership of the union, ACT-UAW Local 7902, will unanimously recommend that its members vote to ratify the deal, with a vote expected to take place in the next few days. “In the meantime, the union has ended the strike, and all university classes and events will resume, as scheduled, effective immediately,” according to the statement.
On Thursday the university issued a statement saying it had taken “the extraordinary step to agree to all of the union’s compensation demands, with the addition of an administrative-services fee to compensate part-time faculty for their work outside the classroom.” The New School had announced on Wednesday it would stop paying and making retirement and health-care contributions to the striking workers.
The university has not yet said publicly how it will pay for the raises. The New School’s president, Dwight A. McBride, said in an interview on Sunday that the agreement would require financial sacrifices. “Today, we celebrate and are thrilled that the strike is over and that we are back to work, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say the contract is a significant financial stress for the university” over the next five years, he said. Although projections are still being calculated, he estimated the New School could face “somewhere in the order of around $20 million a year that we’ll have to make up.” He said it would be “a challenge and a stretch, but one that is important in this moment in terms of recognizing the work of our part-time faculty.”
Asked whether tuition increases were likely, McBride said that “all options” for cutting costs and increasing revenue would have to be on the table.
In a statement late Saturday, the union said the contract included “substantial raises,” with the largest going to faculty members currently being paid at the lowest rates.
Lee-Sean Huang, who teaches part time at the New School’s Parsons School of Design, said in an interview on Sunday that his pay, for a 45-hour seminar he taught this fall, would increase from $127 to $136 per contact hour — a 7-percent increase. “I’m feeling really good about it,” he said of the tentative agreement, although he said the raises would not make up for the 18-percent hit the union said its members had suffered in real earnings due to inflation since their last pay raise, in 2018.
The contract also would strengthen job security and offer paid family leave and a professional-development fund, the union said. And it apparently would resolve what had become the major sticking point in the negotiations late last week, by addressing concerns that some people might lose health-care coverage and others could see their rates soar.
The tentative contract, the union said, includes “expanded health-care eligibility to faculty teaching one course, no hikes to our out-of-pocket health-insurance costs, and caps to annual premium increases.”
Part-time workers make up more than 80 percent of the teaching faculty at the private liberal-arts university. As the strike dragged into its fourth week, with classes canceled and grades up in the air, a group of angry parents threatened to file a class-action lawsuit against the New School and to withhold tuition payments.
Total costs for full-time new undergraduates who live on campus amounted to about $79,000 last academic year, up 7 percent from the previous year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The cost, which included some $52,000 in tuition and fees, was significantly less for students with scholarships.
‘Back to Our Mission’
Many full-time faculty members had pledged to support their part-time colleagues by refusing to cross picket lines. The university told them last week that they’d have to start submitting weekly forms showing that they were fulfilling their teaching, research, and service responsibilities. Meanwhile, it indicated, in a post on Twitter, that it was considering hiring replacements for the striking workers if the walkout wasn’t resolved by the end of the year.
“This is an excellent contract that demonstrates the deep respect we have for all the contributions of our part-time faculty at the New School, as well as one that sets new standards for part-time faculty nationwide,” the university’s statement on Thursday said. “We want nothing more than to get back to our mission of teaching, learning, and creating.”
In the plan it outlined on Thursday, the New School said it was also providing a supplemental bonus of $2,100 for each member of the adjuncts’ union who taught during the pandemic. The university said it had also agreed to improvements in health insurance, retirement, and tuition benefits. And it said it was adding a new way for part-time faculty members to challenge disciplinary decisions stemming from internal sexual-harassment investigations.
The union contends that it’s unfair for a single person, paid by the university, to make binding decisions in such cases without instructors’ having the opportunity to appeal to a neutral arbitrator. The details of the university’s new plan weren’t spelled out in its statement.
There’s a lot of healing that’s going to have to happen in our community on all sides.
The strike had gotten increasingly ugly last week, with reports of violent and racist threats’ being made on social media against university staff members and their families. The New School’s faculty, student, and staff senates issued a joint statement condemning the threats against “at-will employees who were just doing their jobs.” The union also condemned the threats, and the university released a statement saying it “shares the outrage and concern” and had notified law-enforcement and campus-safety officials.
McBride, the president, said the social-media threats had been “soul-crushing” to the university leaders and staff members targeted. “No one should feel unsafe coming to their workplace,” he said. “On a personal note,” he said, “there’s a lot of healing that’s going to have to happen in our community on all sides — leadership, students, faculty — for us to effectively move together as a community.”
Students who supported the striking workers staged a protest at the campus’s University Center after the New School said it would stop paying the strikers on Wednesday. The students had pledged to remain there until the university resumed paying the instructors and a fair contract was signed.
Meanwhile, progress was reported in resolving strikes that have brought much of the teaching and research to a standstill across the University of California system in recent weeks. Members of UAW Local 5810, the union representing postdocs and academic researchers, announced on Saturday that their members had voted overwhelmingly to ratify five-year contracts that include significant pay raises.
At the same time, negotiators have agreed to bring in a private mediator to try to resolve a continuing dispute involving thousands of graduate students who have been on strike since November 14. That strike has paralyzed the 10-campus system and thrown the end of the semester, including final exams and grading, into chaos.
