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[protesters chanting]

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

On Monday morning at Rutgers University in New Jersey, thousands of professors, part-time lecturers, graduate and undergraduate student workers all marched together, holding signs reading, "We are on strike for a better Rutgers." In response to the strike of more than 9,000 workers, University President Jonathan Holloway threatened legal action against faculty, claiming that the strike was illegal, but the coalition of unions asserts there is no state law prohibiting work stoppages or strikes by public employees, including the faculty at Rutgers.

So far, the standoff between the university and its workers has caused the governor of New Jersey to step in and try to come to a resolution. We spoke on Wednesday morning with Donna Murch, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, and the New Brunswick Chapter President of Rutgers AAUP AFT, one of the unions which is on strike. Professor Murch, thanks for joining us today.

Dr. Donna Murch: Oh, it's such a pleasure to be on your show.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Help us understand what are the issues at stake. Why are these unions in solidarity and on strike?

Dr. Donna Murch: The core demands now are focusing on the most vulnerable and lowest paid workers in our unit, which are adjunct part-time faculty, and also graduate students, getting them a livable wage, and taking part-time lecturers and linking their pay to other non-tenure track lecturers. This is a strike at the core of what the university has become, which is dependent on poorly paid sweated academic labor. We believe that all academic workers deserve a living wage. Many of our adjuncts are on Medicaid, and are essentially, while teaching, having an enormous teaching burden, cannot afford rent and food, and health care on the very low wages that they are being paid.

There are also other non-economic demands. Our union believes in bargaining for the common good, and we talk about it in terms of intersectional unionism. That's the piece that I wrote for The Guardian. That piece was written as an organizing piece because we are deeply committed to bringing together and recognizing difference in the labor movement. Thinking about race, gender, and national origin and how that affects us in the workplace and how we move through the world, but we combine that with an industrial vision, meaning not organizing by job category, but really trying to expand our unions to become wall-to-wall unions.

It's recognizing the essential forms of difference, and it's that vision that is dictating our contract campaign and our demands. Some of the non-economic demands include also important concessions, important givebacks to our students. We are fighting for a $15 minimum wage for the undergraduates. We are fighting for rent control on Rutgers properties, and we're fighting for the forgiveness of fees and fines that have prevented students from enrolling, as well as debt relief for people who have been unable to receive their diplomas.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: I want you to pause right there for just a moment because, again, I want to be sure that we don't go too quickly past a few things that folks may not fully understand if they're not in this moment in their own lives. Remind people this point around students and fees.

Dr. Donna Murch: It functions in two ways for the undergraduates. One of the most destructive things is that if people owe fees and fines, sometimes they are unable to enroll, even to be able to get to the point of completing a degree. It's two things. It's debt relief, to really help our undergraduates who have very heavy workloads. It's stopping this practice of preventing people enrolling when they still have fees and fines, and once they're able to complete their degree, to complete the coursework, that they can receive their diplomas, versus this punitive denying of this credential, which is the entire reason that they went to university.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Jonathan Holloway, who is the president of Rutgers and a relatively new President, when he came in 2020, during the pandemic, a tough time to be in university leadership, but he did become one of the country's highest-paid public university presidents with a compensation package of over a million dollars. I'm wondering how President Holloway has responded to the broad set of concerns that are on the table.

Dr. Donna Murch: Our new president, who came in in 2020, is an African American historian, and I am also a 20-century African American historian. We were so excited about his coming. He had written about issues of labor and class in the Black community, several books, including Confronting the Veil, which was about 1930s Black labor intellectuals like Abram Harris and Oliver Fox.

We expected and he always spoke about a new day in Rutgers, because our previous president, in many ways, was quite anti-union, but we couldn't have predicted the profile of the Holloway administration. There are ways that we could argue that, in my experience, of 20 years at Rutgers, that he's emerged as the most anti-union president. I say this because we have been over 10 months without a contract, and it was very clear to the administration that the union negotiations were going to be important and that they would affect a broad category of people in a university that is located in New Brunswick, Newark, and Camden that really have large numbers of Black and brown people in them.

We were hopeful, but his approach has been very punitive, he has never come to the bargaining table, not even once. When it became clear that the union was mobilizing towards a job action, he sent out an email to all of the faculty in our university and to all of the undergraduates informing them that public sector strikes are illegal, and if people pursue a strike or other job actions, they would face fees, fines, not only union fines, but individual fines, and even arrests.

Yes, this has never happened before. This is our first strike, but we have come very close to the brink many times. I think that the scale of shock and surprise at the university was enormous. There's a second piece that I would identify, which is that even though we have a Democratic governor, or a labor governor, and we have a humanist as our president at Rutgers, but Jonathan Holloway chose as his chief negotiator, David Cohen, who was the head of labor relations under Chris Christie.

We will all remember in 2015 when the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, went on national television on CNN and said, a national teachers' union deserves a punch to the face. By that, he meant AFT, which is one of our parent unions. Essentially, the person who has really been structuring and leading the negotiations is a former Chris Christie official. If you look at it through that lens of who Jonathan Holloway chose to represent him, he elevated him as a special envoy to the President and expanded his job category to head up a new entity called the Office of University Labor Relations. If you understand that political history, it's easier to see how we have gotten to this point.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Stay with us. We're back with more on the strike at Rutgers right after this. We're back and we're still with Donna Murch, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers, talking about the current strike at Rutgers University. Let me ask where you think this is going.

Dr. Donna Murch: First, I would say is that with the threat of the injunction, which was the greatest threat to this 9,000-person strike, in response, other faculty members came together and issued and signed an open letter to Jonathan Holloway, telling him not to criminalize the strike. One of the exciting things that's happened is because of that support from all over the country, over 1,000 people have signed the letter, and some of the most famous academics that Johnson Holloway has not issued an injunction. That's the first step to make.

We have been able to pursue this as a legal public sector strike, and it is the largest public sector strike in New Jersey history. I am extremely hopeful, the scale of both protests and participation. The university is essentially shut down right now. The estimates are that 70% of the classes have been canceled. Yesterday there was a march of 2,000 people in New Brunswick that shut down George Street, which is the main thoroughfare. The protests are so large because of the recognition about the most vulnerable workers, but also there's an outpouring of support from labor in New Jersey. There's a construction site that's the Zimmerli Art Museum.

It's been shut down because the construction workers don't want to cross the picket line. We've had support from Central Labor Councils who came and spoke at rallies. There's a true labor coalition and it's a labor coalition that recognizes both the importance of race and gender and social justice equity, but also believes in the right of public sector to living wages. I am very hopeful.

We have made a lot of movement on our economic demands that I think wouldn't have been possible without the direct intervention of the governor. There are still noneconomic demands that have to do with contingency about building in job security for the most vulnerable workers so that they don't have to renew their contracts every semester, so that they are not trapped in this twilight world of working for Rutgers for many years, but at every six months maybe in danger of losing their livelihood entirely.

The bargaining for the common good demands that I talked to you about, about foregrounding the undergraduates, some of those are non-economic demands and also for supporting new labor. I think that there are still ways to go, but there has been progress and just an enormous show of support and solidarity. I've been teaching at Rutgers for 20 years and seeing the strike and all the coalition and relationships that have been built with workers of all kinds, it's really made me attached to New Jersey in a new way.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Donna Murch is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers and the New Brunswick Chapter President of the Rutgers AAUP AFT. Professor Murch, thank you so much for joining us.

Donna Murch: Oh, it was so my pleasure.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: A statement from University President Jonathan Holloway in response to the strike reads in part, "To say that this is deeply disappointing would be an understatement, especially given that just two days ago, both sides agreed in good faith to the appointment of a mediator to help us reach agreements. We will, of course, negotiate for as long as it takes to reach agreements and will not engage in personal attacks or misinformation."

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