Credit: (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

A union representing about 2,000 part-time faculty at Rutgers University is trying to join with another union for full-time professors, hoping to increase its bargaining power as it enters contract negotiations.

For the first time in its 34-year history, the adjuncts union is proposing a merger and asking its members to support the plan as it prepares to present new demands on pay and conditions to the university.

The adjuncts union is seeking pay parity with teachers not on a tenure track and with multi-semester appointments — both requests it has not previously sought. It wants compensation including benefits to be proportional to those for a non-tenure track professor doing a comparable job.

To ensure job security, the union is calling for “presumptively renewable long-term contracts” that will let adjuncts know if they have a job beyond the current semester. It also is seeking a path to full employment for part-time faculty who want it.

In another demand that it has previously made but failed to obtain, the union is calling for access to health care coverage for adjuncts teaching two or more courses per semester. It is asking Rutgers to work with the state to make sure all part-time faculty are covered. About 20% of Rutgers adjuncts have no health insurance, their union says.

On the backs of adjuncts

“We understand that these are big demands,” the union said on its website. “We know that they would transform the University. But the way Rutgers now functions is on the backs of our cheap, exploitable labor, and by treating students and their education as an afterthought. This is not how a public university should function.”

Rutgers spokeswoman Dory Devlin said the university does not comment on current negotiations.

Amy Higer, president of the adjuncts union, argued that the proposed merger with the full-timers union would create a stronger front for negotiations.

“We are part of the faculty. We are part-time but we teach 30% of the classes at Rutgers, and we should be represented by the same union and sit at the bargaining table together,” she said. “We think that would put us in a stronger position. We would be with a larger union that represents more of the faculty.”

Rutgers’ adjuncts earn $5,600 to start for a three-credit course, making them somewhat better paid than part-timers at some public colleges. But they lack multi-semester appointments, providing a degree of job security that some other colleges offer, Higer said.

The current contract for the adjuncts union expires on June 30. Talks on the new contract are expected to start soon and are likely to go beyond that deadline, she said.

The proposal to join the full-timers union, which has already approved it,  is subject to a current “card campaign” that must be approved by 50% plus one of its members and then be accepted by the university authorities.

Approval unlikely

But the university is likely to resist the plan because a merged union would represent a stronger negotiating force in future talks on pay and conditions, Higer said.

“They will definitely not agree to it because it gives us more power, and they would have a hard time continuing to treat us as disposable,” she said. “We will be more powerful if we are all together, and that’s not in their interests. I expect them to see it as something they would rather we didn’t do.”

Even with doubts about whether the university will negotiate with a merged union, the unions are pressing on with their campaign in the hope of eventually becoming a single bargaining force, Higer said.

“Why are we pursuing this? Because it makes sense that all faculty negotiate a labor contract together,” she said. “This is how it’s done at many other universities. And adjunct faculty at Rutgers have for too long been an afterthought and treated as somehow disconnected from full-time faculty, when we teach the same classes, have the same education and serve the university, in many cases, in identical ways as the full-time faculty.”

Scattered far and wide

The adjuncts have not previously tried to merge with the full-time faculty union because it’s hard to gather the required level of support from hundreds of people who teach part time, don’t have offices on campus and may also teach at other universities, Higer said.

If the university rejects the union’s plan, it could take the matter to the Public Employment Relations Commission, a state body that mediates workplace disputes.

The two unions, plus another that represents biomedical and health sciences faculty, argue that all of Rutgers teaching staff should be treated as one body.

The three groups criticized what they called “artificial and outdated divisions” that diminish their power and leave each with different degrees of pay, job security and benefits, depending on campus or title.

“We do the teaching, clinical care and research at our university, and we will fight collectively to bring dignity and respect to all faculty,” they said in a statement.