Professors, graduate student workers, researchers and other educators at Rutgers University launched an historic strike this week, the latest in a wave of collective bargaining activity that has taken hold at universities across the country over the past few years. The unions participating in the strike represent about 9,000 workers at Rutgers, New Jersey’s flagship public university. As part of the event, protesters demonstrated at picket lines at the three Rutgers campuses across the state and organizers said they expect instruction and “non-critical research” at the school to stop. The strike comes after several months of stalled negotiations over contracts that expired last summer.
“This is a significant strike in multiple ways,” said Risa Lieberwitz, a professor of labor and employment law at Cornell University. Part of what makes the strike monumental are some of the particular details surrounding it, Lieberwitz said, including that it’s the first strike by educators in Rutgers’ more than two century history and that it’s the first time tenure and tenure-track faculty have participated in a strike at a Big Ten university, according to union organizers. The action is also meaningful because it represents the culmination of organizing among a coalition of unions across Rutgers’ campuses that are demanding similar levels of job security among different types of educa …