Part-Time Faculty At Rutgers Reach Contract Agreement
RUTGERS University administrators and about 700 of its part-time lecturers have reached a tentative contract agreement. The four-year agreement, reached in September, schedules cumulative pay increases of roughly 25 percent for most of the lecturers. Accordingly, lecturers who teach by the credit will see their pay increase from $1,200 per semester credit this academic year to, incrementally, $1,500 in 2010-11. Lecturers who teach by the hour will receive similar percentage increases.
While the president of the part-time lecturers’ unit, Amy J. Bahruth, called the financial settlement “good” given the state’s financial climate, she said there was widespread disappointment that the university did not consider offering the part-timers health benefits.
“We really think it’s the state’s obligation,” Bahruth said. “If we’re teaching a half a load, we should get benefits.”
She said that institutions similar to Rutgers, such as the City University of New York and the State University of New York, included benefits in contracts with their part-timers.
“If you look at New York state, every part-timer at CUNY and SUNY gets full health benefits,” Bahruth said. “There’s definitely a precedent in the metropolitan area.”
The university’s vice president for academic affairs, Philip Furmanski, while sympathetic to the lecturers’ wish for affordable health benefits, said that Rutgers is not a comparable institution to CUNY and SUNY and as such cannot do as much for its part-timers.
“Those are very large systems that are much closer ingrained with the state system,” Furmanski said.
“Most of the (comparable) places that we know about are also unable to provide health benefits” to part-time lecturers and their equivalents, he added. “It is simply not financially feasible to provide that for our part-time employees.”
Furmanski said the university did its best to forge an equitable contract with the lecturers.
“Its a fair and reasonable contract. We are very pleased to provide salary increases as we could,” Furmanski said. “In a time of serious budget constraints, we did what we could.”
About 1,000 part-time lecturers, most of whom are represented by the bargaining unit, teach one-third of Rutgers’ courses.
In what Bahruth called an encouraging sign, the agreement reinstates a labor-management committee that will look at affordable health-benefit options for the lecturers.
Still, she said, union representatives will now take their bid for health benefits to the state Legislature. “We feel that’s the direction we have to go because (Rutgers administrators) were really not willing to open the door” to discussions on benefits.
Other parts of the agreement, which will go to membership for a vote later this month, include access to recreational facilities for all part-time lecturers at all campus locations; a strengthened grievance procedure; an expansion of nondiscrimination protection; and a written explanation of nonreappointment at four semesters, instead of six.
The settlement, two months after the old contract expired, took place much earlier than in past bargaining rounds, Bahruth said.
“We feel it’s a step in the right direction,” said Bahruth, a lecturer in the Labor Studies Department who begins teaching her fall classes today. “We are approaching where we need to be, but we’re not there yet” With the university’s full-time faculty and graduate and teaching assistants settling last month, Rutgers educators are now under contract for another four years.
