The Final Fumes of the Rutgers' Teachers Strike.

From my field notes in the section titled: Strike! at Rutgers University

The general gloom of being in New Jersey dissipated as we entered the campus apparatus. The deadly navigation along the New Jersey Turnpike was now behind me, well out of my mind for a few hours while I enjoyed the time at Rutgers. This fateful day happened to be the final fumes of a substantial fight for the typical labor demands—time and wage. Grad teachers and college professors, who were primarily in the humanities department, were on strike from teaching until the demands posed by the AAUP-AFT backed Rutgers’ union were met by administration. Much of the strikers anger was directed at the president Jonathon Holloway in particular, who had assumed the position of president of the college in 2020.

The demonstration’s origin point was in front of a building that housed many classrooms. Unlike the ones at Bard in Olin Hall, these were falling in part in places and quite dismal looking. On the opposite hand the central Rutgers campus was beautiful. It was a sunny day which definitively aided in boosting peoples’ moods at the cost of an increase in sweat. After grabbing a cup of coffee I joined in the circle of strikers, who were circulating physically and through a list of chants. I can’t recall exactly the wording but all the big topics were covered—solidarity, wage increases, benefits, and disgust with administration. It took me a while to get comfortable with shouting and singing along with everyone else. I’ve gotten over the fear associated with canvassing a while ago now. That’s second nature to me at this point. But this felt quite embarrassing to be following the person in front of me shouting things while students gave all of us looks. This would dissipate quickly, however, I stopped thinking in lines of just myself. No one knows who I am and even if they did I’m not in this alone.

The campus was a shock to me after spending so much time at the small liberal arts college tucked away in Annandale. I’ve gone to Drexel University in my hometown many times to see friends and tour buildings. Both have a lot of similarities with rows of fraternity housing, chain restaurants as meal options, towering buildings that would make Olin Hall blush, and cut down the middle by a bustling main road that has to contend with over thirty-thousand students. Not only were we just at one of three Rutgers’ campuses but after speaking with a grad student in support of the strike I was informed of just how large alone Rutgers New Brunswick is. It’s like a mini city, existing by itself as its own ecosystem. According to another strike Rutgers is the largest landowner in New Brunswick and as a result affects the entirety of the city’s rent prices. Which signaled to me the wide reaching effects of such a large university like this and emphasizes the importance of workers to push back against such a beast.

During the first part of the demonstration we did a little round robin dance as mentioned previously. My feelings of discomfort was due to my nature, that being I’m a very shy and closed off person. I feel comfortable at Bard and back home but it takes me some time to warm up, and until I do I can be quite awkward. During this part people were constantly honking at us in support and shouting appraisal out the window and that was huge boost in my confidence. I’m on the right side, not that, that was ever a real concern but it was more reassurance that I should be there. This was the final day of the strike and the approval of any passerby made me feel like it was worthwhile that I came down here as some degenerate communist agitator.

The following part had us marching from the building we were posted out in front of to president Holloway’s office. Where once we arrived the brilliant union rep made herself fully visible. Perched on the steps of his office she echoed the frustration of every worker there today and earlier in the week. Her tough demeanor and rough way of speaking didn’t distract at all from her message. The way she pieced together sentence to sentence was eloquent in a way that I haven’t heard in a while, especially at a place like Bard. I thought of one person instantly who I hadn’t spoken to in a while, and ended up calling on the way back to the original site, was my grumpy old man who passes to me a long lineage of blue collar men and women, many of them strong union advocates. The gruffness and intellect reflects my dad in such a remarkable way. Both, the former I presume, are college educated but reject that pristine promise of comfortable job. My father has worked in social services for decades now, everything from assisting down-and-out veterans to helping at-risk youth study for their GEDs. His whole life he’s been struggling to stay above water and can’t help but drag up everyone he’s ever known with him. I assume that this union rep isn’t a perfect woman, neither is my father believe me, but they both seem to share a similar soul. A soul that only feels satisfied when others are thriving and those that constantly inflict pain and suffering below them deserve no second chances.

After the AAUP-AFT representative's speech, workers who voiced concerns, more chants, and my call with the old bastard, we made a return to our origin. By this time I felt more in place and less like an unwanted and unneeded. parasite gripping to some gallant beast making its strides. This fight wasn’t to better my life, I didn’t have to do anything in any particular way. I just need to follow the leader and every grad students or adjunct is that leader. It’s something beautiful in a strange kind of a way. I don’t have to stand out I can just be there to show support and make the collective more intimidating to those who may try and squash us. After another round of chants it was time for the lunch break. I gathered a couple slices of cheese pizza, at this point a cliché practice of any kind of union gatherings, and plopped down in the shade. Talking a bit with a couple of teachers and my classmates that I came with, one of the teachers I found amusing due to his frying pan that he was constantly smacking throughout the chants with a flimsy spatula.

More on the union itself, Rutgers AAUP-AFT is a merger between American Association of University Professors and American Federation of Teachers—the latter a subsidiary of the AFL-CIO. The union has been an institution since the early seventies, representing more than five-thousand workers and exists across all three universities in the Rutgers chain. On the day I attended the strike that seemed to be who was mainly attending, teachers of all brands. Yet it doesn’t stop there, this union on strike is just one part of the Coalition of Rutgers Unions that covers the multiple unions who represent over ninety-thousand kinds of workers at the universities. Honing in on the former, my knowledge of the organization comes from some teachers I spoke to there, an episode of The Dig, and their website. I didn’t learn any explicit details about their structure from either teachers or their rep, from the looks of how things were organized on this day it operates like any other local union. Decisions are reached through democratic decision making and the representative from the national helps guide them along a path and keep them in contact with the whole union community. Based on some of the speakers I’m gathering that this isn’t some symbolic collective either. The most vocal of the grad students took the stage on Holloway’s steps are voiced clearly their frustrations with their jobs. Members who turn out aren’t here to just show solidarity, they are active participants who are willing to ‘fight’ for better conditions.

It’s hard to gauge first-hand the full potential of the strike as the day I attended was the terminal point. The union’s members, according to one adjunct, who maintained the strike were mainly those in the humanities department. I can’t say why, perhaps its due to the subject of their teaching or less security associated with that department. The union’s base when it comes to teachers, aside from a few exceptions, is grad students who are teaching and adjunct professors. Professors with tenure are secure and don’t feel the need to step off their platform and help a cause that doesn’t affect them directly. The former group of university teachers are slammed with huge teaching loads, dismal pay, and no certainty that they have a path forward. I’ve heard from my mother the stress that this kind of job induces. For a few years she was teaching at three different universities as an adjunct professor, having to grade thousands of papers a semester. The workload was overwhelming and she struggled to be there for students to build connections. The pay was crummy, and with no path revealing itself her she tapped out. My dad was also an English teacher and recounts similar stories. This is to say that a professors union will often drag into its ranks those dancing on that thin line

The main goal of the union is its members but along with that is the improvement of the whole institution. When its educators are compensated fairly and treated well, the students will inherent the benefits of such a deal. Relationships between teacher and student can prosper without a crushing schedule of classes that are forced upon adjuncts and the like. Providing teachers not only a path forward but the ability to teach better with clarity. I could see that with many undergraduates who turned up to the strike in solidarity with their overworked comrades. Striking is one powerful tool of the union, however, there are many more that can be employed when banded together. Collective bargaining at the negotiation table for fair contracts helps to construct a good faith relationship between boss and worker. It’s tried and true method that has been in effect since the great steel strikes of a yesteryear. Although it’s not the idealized blue collar coal miner with soot caked into his face, they are all one great big family of workers. It was effective then and it proves itself today to still hold true. Think Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, where the father demonstrates the power of a bundle of arrows as opposed to just solitary one. Friday was the final day of the strike and through sheer collective power they won a new contract. While it primarily an economic renegotiation which entailed higher pay, it’s still without a doubt a victory. The flexing of worker power is force to be reckoned with.

The strike’s choreography was led in large part by the union representative but not in an authoritarian sense. Those outspoken strikes who felt something deep inside of them and wanted to shout it out stepped out of line. Be it the adjunct before with his frying pan or a fellow Bard student who gripped the loudspeaker with assurance. He hadn’t led a chant before but it didn’t seem like it all, he seemed like a natural, most likely due to empathy. We were a well oiled machine and we achieved what the organizer set out to do.

However, I was slightly disappointed to be honest. I long for the days of a strike where it was less a dance as Francis Fox Piven says it and more of an actual fight. It’s not necessarily because of an aggravated yearning to enact violence on the oppressors. But because I feel that nonviolence protest is a way muzzling the true hidden power of the working class. It’s an invention of the liberal rebirth and active framing of history. Look at the Civil Rights Era, we praise MLK (not to tarnish him in anyway) for nonviolence and establish that as the ‘correct’ way to protest the powers at be. We now often forget Malcom X and when he is remembered there is often disdain by liberals who criticizes the violence that he championed. It’s misconstrued as structureless violence because to the upper class it’s a horrifying thought that the underclasses become aware of the power they have. The same was echoed during the George Floyd Uprisings with all the talks of senseless violence and destruction which again upset the balance and struck fear into the hearts of the oppressive class. Piven is right when she begs that we shouldn’t continue to follow this “narrow path of nonviolence.” We made great gains before in little time and I believe it’s still always going to be possible if handled in an uncomfortable way. Revolution won’t be served on a silver platter, it’s going to come raw on a blood-stained paper towel.

Of all my prior field trips, I found the strike at Rutgers to be the most rewarding. Part of it due to the happy ending with the workers celebrating a victory over Holloway and administration. I felt like I had just participated in something truly important, even if I had just played a small supporting role. I made the strike just one person bigger but maybe that wasn’t something that was needed. On the drive back to Bard I was thinking about how to get involved further into the labor movement—not that I wasn’t always thinking about that. But I really want to attend more strikes even if they aren’t the knuckle-busting battles of the past, they still have that collective essence that is hard to come by nowadays. It also reassured my goal of becoming a labor organizer because it’s evident that the small victories of a few workers are so close in reach. Unlike For The Many which focuses their efforts on organizing around pressure on elected candidates. Union organizing is all about a tiny local community but that community as I saw at Rutgers is truly organized. It didn’t feel so orchestrated like a For The Many event, it felt so natural with students walking to and fro talking to teachers on strike. No one, not even the paid union rep, talked in a way like they just got back from a training retreat.

I’m quite jealous of Rutgers, they have what seems to be such a lively community surrounding workers’ rights. People are versed in theory and in practice when it comes to organizing. I doubt many had to take a class when it comes assisting in a campaign for you fellow human. That’s really all labor organizing is, improving the conditions of work because it would lighten the load of you and your friends and comrades. If there ever again is a strike I’d be more than happy to return.