Long Island U.'s Brooklyn Campus Revokes Health-Care Coverage for Striking Faculty

Striking faculty members at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus were informed by e-mail that their health-care coverage through the university has been canceled but that they could continue coverage at their own expense under the terms of the federal Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, or Cobra.

Brian Harmon, the campus’s public-relations director, said that the university stopped faculty members’ health-care coverage when the strike began, on Wednesday, the first day of fall classes, because it is permissible to do so under the institution’s policies on benefits. The coverage, he added, can be reestablished once the professors go back to their classrooms.

“They are not working in the classrooms at the moment, so they don’t have the coverage,” Mr. Harmon said. “But they have the option of coverage under Cobra.”

Faculty members said they see the measure as a form of intimidation.

“We think it is an attempt to pressure us to accept their contract offer and go back to the classrooms, " said Ralph Engelman, chairman of the journalism and communication-studies department at the Brooklyn campus and a delegate of the Long Island University Faculty Federation, an American Federation of Teachers and AFL-CIO affiliate.

James Gentile, general counsel at National Labor College, says that colleges have canceled the health coverage of striking employees before, but that such a move is rare.

“It is clearly a means to try and pressure their employees to go back to work,” Mr. Gentile said.

Faculty members voted to begin the strike this week after their union rejected the university’s final contract offer. Faculty members had agreed to pay more for health care, according to a statement from the union, but they rejected a university demand that they forgo raises for the next three years.