Donna Murch outlines the historic and ongoing labor struggle at Rutgers University.
‘s head of labor relations, who worked for the Christie administration from 2010 to 2014. This is the chief bargainer that our president chose.
Absolutely. I think this point about wages is incredibly important. I’ve been thinking a lot about why this movement is emerging now, and what its relationship was even to the world that I grew up in; I was still coming of age under the Cold War in the ’70s and ’80s, and the attack on the labor movement was so profound.
So you have tenure-track faculty, and we’re all doing this, using tenure to fight for the contingent categories of labor. So in that sense, it’s a really exciting thing. And I’ve learned many things. Of course, we’re still in the midst of it. You asked where we are now. This is, what, Thursday, so it is the fourth day of our suspension; you don’t include the weekend. So I think there’s going to be a discussion tonight, where we get updates from the bargaining table, and decide if we’re going to resume the strike.
One of the reasons that I know that people are seeing what’s happening at Rutgers as super hopeful is, first of all, the concrete win of increased wages for some folks and acknowledgement and visibility, but it’s also the coalitional nature of the work. I’ve been involved in many different kinds of activism throughout my life, but I decided to really get involved in the union movement around 2015, 2016, because I saw clearly the rise of racial fascism, the election of Trump, and then later I was in Brazil right after Bolsonaro was elected, and it was one of the most frightening experiences that I’ve had.
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