Alexandra Adams and Lauren Barbato are members two separate bargaining units of AAUP-AFT at Rutgers University – the “full-timer” unit, and the “PTL” (part-time lecturer) unit, respectively. Earlier this year, after a dramatic strike mobilization by the full-time unit, AAUP-AFT settled what its staffers called “revolutionary” contracts. By contrast, Adams and Barbato felt these contracts sold out the bottom tiers of the union and squandered the potential of a strike action. In a short period of time Adams and Barbato went from enthusiastic strike organizers, publicly supporting their union leadership in the press, to leading a formidable “no” campaign and founding a dissident caucus to unseat this same leadership. File editor Jarrod Shanahan recently sat down with this dynamic duo for a discussion of their experiences at Rutgers and their work founding the Rutgers Rank-and-File Caucus.
Jarrod Shanahan: What is your position at Rutgers?
Alexandra Adams: I’m a fourth-year teaching assistant (TA). I teach two classes per semester. I’m also a full-time researcher for my PhD. A typical workday for me is twelve to fourteen hours, between research and teaching, twelve months a year, seven days a week.
Lauren Barbato: I was a TA for two years, and for the last two years I’ve been teaching the same classes as an adjunct. When I started teaching composition as a TA, we had two days of training and they threw us into a classroom to teach English 101.
AA: You had training? Look at you! I had never taken a biology class. My MS and BS aren’t in biology. On my first day of work they told me “You’re gonna teach Molecular Biology. Here’s a book. Go get ‘em!”
LB: Damn! So after graduating I got stuck in adjunct Hell. I’m still stuck in it! My first year as an adjunct, I was teaching three classes at Rutgers and two at Farleigh Dickinson. I should publicize it: that school was paying $2,500 per course! But I figured it could cover my car payments. I was also teaching at a high school program through Rutgers, for extra money. A lot of people in my department teach five, six, even eight classes per semester across multiple schools.
JS: How did you come to organize in AAUP-UFT?
AA: I began as the union rep for the Department of Biological Sciences. The way its structured at Rutgers, teaching assistants, graduate assistants, and “full-time” and tenure-track faculty are all in the same bargaining unit, and part-time lecturers (PTLs), also known as adjuncts, are in a different unit. During contract negotiations for my unit, the former, they were hiring organizers to mobilize for a strike. Most of us thought this was a very real thing, so we took the organizing bit very seriously. I was one of two or three field organizers for our campus. As a field organizer I got people to sign up for the union if they weren’t already a member, and to sign a pledge card to go on strike. Meanwhile, as a grad worker, I was making less than $26,000 a year, which had not increased since 2014, and we were working on a contract that had already expired fourteen months prior.
LB: I was hearing about strike mobilizations from my roommate, who’s a grad organizer in Alex’s unit, and I went to their protests. PTL leadership wasn’t really updating us. I became a member organizer for the PTL union and did some recruitment. But their emphasis was not on doing job actions. I was doing a lot of protests with the other unit, but none of it was coming from the PTL side.
JS: And then the contract campaign kicked into high gear.
LB: Things were getting really chaotic by mid-to-late March. We were sent a “job action survey,” ranging from whether we’d hand out flyers or strike indefinitely, with options for a one-day strike, two-day strike, etc. They never released results or called a strike authorization vote. We found out later the e-board [executive board] wanted to, but the current president and vice-president overruled them. It was confusing because the full-time unit held a strike authorization vote, and it passed by roughly 88%. So we were wondering if adjuncts could strike. Someone on Rutgers staff was telling adjuncts in my department we’d be fired if we went on strike. The union president was telling us we should strike and picket alongside the full-timers.
JS: How did this mobilization shake out?
AA: We were told by the union that they would call for a strike if the administration wanted to settle for anything less than ~$30,000 per year for grad students in the first year of the contract. On April 17, the bargaining team settled on a contract where grads would get a $1,000 retroactive increase for year 1, to bring us just under $27,000 – significantly less than what we were fighting for – and at the end of the four-year contract, we’d be making just above $30,000. Then they mass-emailed everyone in the union about this “revolutionary contract” they had just won.
LB: They used us and the grad students in the media. They used Alex, they used me with my broken ankle. I was like please don’t use me unless you’re going to pay me more. Adjuncts and TAs play well in the media. Tenure-track faculty don’t…
JS: Do you think the strike was a bluff?
LB: Strikes can of course be used as bluffs, but in this case yes, it was clear there was no intention of striking.
AA: After all was said and done, most other organizers I spoke to believe it absolutely was.
JS: Do you think a real strike would have won a better contract?
LB: A real strike would win a better contract for adjuncts and grads, not just full-time faculty. Real gains for adjuncts can’t be won at the bargaining table; they can only be won by striking!
AA: YES. A million times YES.
JS: But of course that didn’t happen. How did the resolution of the full-timer contract impact your view of AAUP-UFT?
LB: When they settled the contract for everybody but the adjuncts, we were angry and depressed. A lot of people were telling me they didn’t want to go to work. I remember my students saying “You’re not going on strike, you got a raise!” I was like “I didn’t get a raise.” Adjuncts continued working on an expired contract until the end of the semester. Our PTL leadership kept saying they were making progress but they weren’t. I knew we weren’t going to get anything. The leverage of the strike was gone.
AA: When we were still bargaining with the full-time unit, there was the full expectation that adjuncts would stand in solidarity with the full-time unit. That was one of the asks.
LB: “Strike alongside!”
AA: But the night the contract was settled, without even having the full terms, full-time faculty were responding to questions about whether they would stand in solidarity with PTLs, they were like oh we’re not allowed to. The day of. They knew they were never gonna do it.
LB: Our leadership was promised that the full-time unit wouldn’t settle without the adjuncts. And then that exact thing happened and the full-time unit said well we can’t promise that, it’s a legal issue. Our leadership was played by the full-time leadership, but also they didn’t mobilize at all. They had no faith in us doing a job action or striking. We felt betrayed by the full-time faculty. They had promised solidarity, but once they settled their contract, the union’s executive director Patrick Nowlan told them to stay out of it.
JS: How did you two link up and begin organizing together?
LB: In our rage!
AA: We were doing the same thing for effectively the same reason, but separately, and happened upon each other. The night the full-time union settled on our contract, I went absolutely fucking berserk on the internet on anyone who posted on any social media forum about how awesome the contract was. I was like: “Did you forget something? This is ‘revolutionary?’ Did you forget someone? Because I don’t think I got a fucking raise. And if solidarity doesn’t mean fuck all within the same bargaining unit, what’s going to happen to PTLs? Because they don’t even have a contract.” And Lauren was saying similar things with regard to the adjuncts.
LB: I was pissed! I was reading in the media about this is “historic,” “revolutionary,” “a huge victory;” I said there’s no victory if adjuncts don’t get anything.
JS: Do you think the word “revolutionary” is used a little too loosely these days?
LB: It was used for our PTL contract too!
JS: Last I checked we’re still living under capitalism.
LB: And still making poverty wages!
JS: So how did you transform this rage into organizing?
LB: The day after the full-time unit settled, Amy, one of our caucus founders who I met recruiting new members together, emailed me and said “I agree with you, what should we do?” We made a [online discussion platform] Slack group. Simultaneously a union staff organizer emailed me saying “OK, we need to focus on the PTLs now.” I was tasked with organizing a protest at Newark and I became the Newark point person. In Rutgers politics, everything is about New Brunswick, the union treats Newark and Camden as afterthoughts. We get a lot less help.
AA: That’s when I got involved. The day after my rampage, I got a messaged asking if I’d like to be a part of the Slack group. The PTLs were trying to organize a “grade in,” but it was something that had been assigned to them by the union. One union staffer came to help us set up. No resources were offered aside from a union banner for the table set-up they had to figure out for themselves, and there was no media coverage for the Newark campus event. I said OK, let me help out. Ultimately I think that’s how we came together… after everybody said “What are you doing here? You aren’t even an adjunct.”
LB: The grade-in was our first organizing experience together. That was May 1. We were creating our caucus without even realizing it.
AA: We had sign-in sheets to get people’s contact info, and began inviting people to the Slack group so we could all stay in touch.
LB: At this point we realized the PTL leadership was not organizing, and they don’t know how to organize. They weren’t communicating with members. This whole time they were still saying they were making progress. We felt we had to take things into our own hands, and began working independently. Then when they settled, and we saw that it was a shitty contract, we said OK what can we do? And that was a “no campaign.”
JS: How did the “no” campaign play out?
LB: The campaign surprised leadership. They had no idea. We announced we were a caucus, and started a Facebook group, and then unveiled the “no” campaign less than two weeks later. The contract was settled on May 15, and the contract ratification vote went out May 20 and ended May 31.
As soon as the contract ratification ballot hit our emails, we responded with our first “no” email to members. We also surprised leadership by having a story in NJ media that morning that featured our caucus and criticized the contract. Our campaign was mostly remote: We released targeted emails to members, answered questions on social media, created factual tweets and graphics to spread the word, and held Zoom calls for members. Members were able to call in and discuss the contract and why we would vote no. Several other media outlets also covered our campaign, and we’re glad to have had help from 7k or Strike and the new rank-and-file coalition at Stony Brook University, too!
AA: In total, despite only having such a short period of time, 1/3 of all the people who voted on the contract voted no.
LB: A lot of people could tell it was a bad contract without us telling them. Leadership was not very active answering people’s questions, so I’d go on Facebook and Twitter and answer questions.
JS: How else have you been handling outreach?
LB: We don’t have access to the union’s communication resources, and that’s where leadership has the upper hand.
AA: It’s been hard to put our list together. There isn’t a Rutgers database of adjuncts. There are at least four different titles that apply to what we call “part-time lecturers.” So we started going department by department. We relied on people going through their own departments and identifying adjuncts they know.
LB: I’ve been going through every Rutgers webpage.
AA: We’ve been trying to stay active through different forums. Our Twitter is super active, we have a Facebook group, an Instagram, and we have a website! Meanwhile we are trying to built this more comprehensive email database.
LB: Everything has a different function. Emails can reach the most people at one time. We got pretty professional! At first we were so scrappy, we were just sending out emails through Gmail, and we could only send so many per day. Then we upgraded to Mailchimp.
JS: What kind of crew did this organizing pull together?
LB: A badass one. We have our core organizers and a Facebook group with at least ninety members. We also have a slate in the union election. After the contract, we turned to elections, which Alex and I were torn about.
AA: There were a lot of things we were doing, like working with the 7K or Strike organizers at CUNY. A lot of what our caucus did strongly is outreach, and linking up with other people who were part of the same movement. We were concerned about putting too much time and effort into elections rather than the things we actually stood for…
LB: In doing rank-and-file organizing, do I want to be part of the e-board, or running for president? I don’t want to model the same neoliberal policies that have done nothing for the rank-and-file. If we do win, it will be a kind of radical insurgency. One of our organizers calls us an “activist slate,” and that’s true. We’re not just focused on the contract. We have three years before we start bargaining for the next one. So it has to be all about mobilizing, but mobilizing about other issues. For example, Rutgers is going to raise student tuition 3%, and that’s something we need to take a stance on, and mobilize with along with students. We should also mobilize around issues like Black Lives Matter, immigration, reproductive rights, and building our communities. We can’t just be all about the money. At the end of the day we all want a living wage. It’s important, but it’s not the whole thing.
“When they settled the contract for everybody but the adjuncts, we were angry and depressed. A lot of people were telling me they didn’t want to go to work. I remember my students saying “You’re not going on strike, you got a raise!” I was like “I didn’t get a raise.” Adjuncts continued working on an expired contract until the end of the semester. Our PTL leadership kept saying they were making progress but they weren’t. “
Jarrod Shanahan is an assistant professor of criminal justice at Governors State University
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