NEW JERSEY —“Our working conditions are your learning conditions!” Under this unifying idea, graduate students and faculty have been organizing and moving towards a strike over the past few months here at Rutgers University, building mass student support and solidarity along the way. The causes of the strike include:
An injury to one is an injury to all
While the leadership of the union (AAUP) bargained “hard.”It was mainly for the tenure-track faculty, as they saw the biggest gains. Graduate students—many of whom are paid so poorly that they have to visit the campus food bank—did not win a badly needed retroactive pay increase for this year. After four years, they will be earning a mere $30,000, an unlivable wage in the state of New Jersey. Some non-tenure track, full-time lecturers will gain longer contracts, but still not guaranteed tenure. This means that they face continuing job insecurity in the academic “gig” economy.
The real elephant in the room, though, has been the situation of Part-Time Lecturers (PTLs), most of whom make a minimal $5,100 per semester course, have no health benefits, are hired from semester to semester with little prior notice, and can be fired without cause. PTLs are, moreover, excluded from the AAUP bargaining unity, representing tenure-track faculty and graduate workers. The increasing use of PTLs rather than full-time faculty at Rutgers is the scandal of higher education throughout the U.S., where “adjunctification” has become a weapon by the U.S. capitalist class for dismantling tenure, which decades ago was a hard-fought reform victory.
The meaning of “victory”
The AAUP leadership misleads this growing movement of student-teacher unity in proclaiming the outcome of recent contract negotiations to be a “historic” victory. This union misleadership has given a stamp of approval to the structured inequality destroying living and learning standards across Rutgers University and increasingly prevailing in higher education throughout the U.S. Moreover, the kinds of gains won for tenure-track faculty will be wiped away if they do not unite in a single union with faculty who are lower in the teaching hierarchy.
Our real victory consists in the movement of solidarity that has developed over the course of the academic year. Members of the Board of Governors routinely encountered large and militant picket lines chanting “Shame! Shame!” Students—burdened by debt and headed into the “gig” economy themselves–joined the picket lines and formed groups to support faculty and grads in the event of a strike. Members of the campus janitors’ union did not remove posters plastered around the campus. Construction workers in a nearby building ceased using their loud equipment when rallies were taking place. Other unions marched in support. Members of one Steelworkers Union traveled from as far as Pittsburgh to express solidarity. Faculty from colleges in New York and New Jersey spoke at Newark campus rallies in support of a strike at Rutgers.
Strikes can be schools for communist revolution
Lenin, a communist revolutionary who helped lead the working class to build the world’s first workers’ state, the Soviet Union, once wrote that strikes are “schools for communism.”
Lenin did not mean that the economic gains won are gradual stepping-stones toward communist revolution. He meant that participation in class-conscious reform struggles can open workers to the revolutionary idea that the international working class needs to run the whole of society. Members and friends of PLP, intimately involved in the strike movement at various levels, have continually brought CHALLENGE and the words “capitalism,” “communism,” “revolution,” and “class struggle” into the conversation—and received big cheers. We have learned valuable lessons about how to put forward a revolutionary perspective in the midst of a reform struggle. Our ranks are expanding. Beneath the cynicism and passivity seemingly prevailing on college campuses these days, there exists a tremendous potential for building a revolutionary communist movement.