More than 9000 faculty and graduate students at Rutgers University staged a walkout Monday morning amid a tense labor dispute over salary increases, affordable housing, childcare, and healthcare. Organizers from three local unions, representing full-time faculty, graduate workers, postdoctoral researchers, counselors, part-time lecturers, and medical professionals, began the strike after almost a year of failed negotiations and the University continuing to not recognize their most essential demands. The walkout is the largest strike of public workers in New Jersey’s history, as well as being the most prominent strike in the state in the last 50 years.
This movement comes on the heels of other recent labor strikes, like the similar 50,000 faculty strike at the University of California, 30,000 teachers from the LA school district, or the numerous Amazon and Starbucks locations, slowly earning their right to collectively bargain over the past several years.
And yet, while all of these workers continue to fight for the rights and pay they deserve, the invisible hand of the free market works to keep them down and protect the capital at the top. In their official response to the strike, Rutgers University warned that they “may go to court to maintain university operations and protect our students, patients, and staff,” citing their belief that there are no legal protections for public sector workers to strike in New Jersey.
However, the faculty and graduate students are not the only of the working class to be affected by the endless union-busting techniques used by capital owners. While instances of unionizing seemed to be on the rise last year, so too was the rate of unfair labor practices. Some companies, like Chipotle, prefer to close stores over having their workers organize. Others, like Amazon, are spending tens of millions of dollars on illegal mandatory anti-union courses for their employees. Even still, some prefer the most direct method like Starbucks, who has fired over 100 union leaders from their stores since the movement began.
Corporate actions like these have led the ever declining rate of union membership to reach its lowest point in recorded history, further fueling the income inequality and class warfare that plagues our country.
While little can be done to mediate the vast problems with our economic system, you can continue to show your solidarity for workers by supporting their efforts, pushing for labor rights, or as one creative junior at Rutgers put it, skipping class in order to support striking faculty and friends.
