Opinions Fordham Faculty (and Students) United

Fordham faculty and the university reached a tentative agreement, but the fight for labor justice isn’t over

ANA KEVORKIAN Head Copy Editor

There was one word on everyone’s mind during 2022 — and no, Merriam-Webster, it wasn’t “gaslighting.” Rather, the word that defined the past year’s political and social discourse was “union.”

From Starbucks baristas organizing at record speed to Staten Island Amazon employees forming the first union in the company’s history, workers across the country have mobilized at historic rates to secure higher wages and better benefits. Before being elected mayor of Boston in 2013, U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh spent his career as a union organizer in Boston, and his tenure in the Biden administration has coincided with the highest level of labor union activity in decades.

Nevertheless, the United States is far from a workers’ paradise. On Dec. 2, ahead of an impending rail worker strike, the federal government intervened in a contract dispute between rail owners and the workers’ union, forcing the employees to accept the existing agreement and ignoring their demand for paid sick leave. By implementing this “deal” through federal intervention, Congress and the Biden administration prevented the union from exercising its right to strike.

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 protects workers’ “right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.”

More specifically, the NLRA states that nothing may “interfere with or impede or diminish in any way the right to strike or to affect the limitations or qualifications on that right.”

In other words, all workers have the legal right, under United States federal law, to self-organize and, if necessary, strike in order to collectively bargain.

Recently, faculty and graduate student unions across New York City have exercised this right in order to win concessions from their universities — many of whom have, over the past several years, relied more heavily on adjunct and nontenure-track faculty while paying them lower wages on average than their tenure-track counterparts.

Fordham Faculty United (FFU), the union for part-time and adjunct faculty at Fordham University that was formed in 2017, spent much of 2022 in unsuccessful negotiations with the university for their next collective bargaining agreement (CBA). On Dec. 26, the union members voted to authorize a strike, which was set to begin on Jan. 30, 2023.

Luckily, on Jan. 18, just 12 days before the planned strike, the union announced that the university had accepted its proposal and they had entered a tentative agreement (TA), pending approval by union members. This TA contains three key provisions that were top priorities for FFU throughout the negotiation process, as outlined in an Aug. 16 open letter from FFU.

Fordham professors, the majority of whom are adjunct or nontenure-track, make Fordham what it is; it is high time that they’re paid fairly and equitably.

School of Social Service (GSSS) and Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education earn, on average, between $2,100 and $2,400 less per course than their counterparts in other schools. The letter from FFU highlighted that in addition to baselessly devaluing certain fields, this disparity “perpetuates systemic gender and racial inequalities, for at Fordham, as elsewhere, women predominate in the social work and education fields, and the GSSS faculty serves the most racially diverse group of students at the university.” By beginning to rectify these disparities, the TA will make progress toward faculty receiving equal pay for equal work.

On their website, FFU noted that the initial strike petition, which was signed by the majority of members in October and November, led the administration to make its largest movement since negotiations began in March; in other words, the union’s vote to strike was, in part, a last-ditch (and, ultimately, successful) effort to encourage the university to meet its demands.