Inside The Historic Rutgers Strike | Donna Murch | TMR

Emma is joined by Donna Murch, associate professor of History at Rutgers University and President of the New Brunswick Chapter of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, to give an update on the teacher's strike going on at the university right now.

Donna Murch then walks through the creation of Rutgers’ multi-Union coalition in the wake of pandemic cutbacks, their bargaining process, and why NJ labor law is bolstering their fight, before concluding the conversation by walking through union demands, and how best to support them in this endeavor.

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And we are joined by Donna Murch associate professor of history at Rutgers president of the New Brunswick chapter of Rutgers up a-f-t. which is the union representing the full-time faculty grad workers postdoc Associates and counselors. And Donna is also the chair of the Union's bipoc caucus. Donna, thank you so much for coming on, and what a t-shirt. I'm so glad we get to see it. I position myself to show off our Union logo. I love it. I love it. So came the union logo in 2014 when we had a new generation of Union leadership. Yeah I mean and it's they're whole you're holding a pencil right there with that's that's amazing. I love to see it. So I look like I'm from New Jersey. So Rutgers and we both are actually me and my producer. Rutgers is an institution obviously. And this strike is historic, the fact that you guys have overcome three unions and it's around 9000 workers banding together to stand up to the university. Like how did this decision come about and how were you all able to kind of come together and show as your shirt says solidarity with one another? Yeah, thank you for that question. you know what's emerged at Rutgers is the Coalition of Rutgers unions. And it dates directly back to the pandemic. So you had alliances of all the unions with Rutgers. There are a lot of them they're 24. and since the early 2000s, they would bargain together sometimes on health care where there were shared interests. So they were like a loose Confederation. But it was during the pandemic when five percent of the workforce was laid off that we came together largely at Zoom meetings to organize to stop the layoffs. When people were laid off they lost their health insurance. So we all remember what it was like for New Jersey in 2020 those first months. So I think the Union Coalition honestly is something beautiful that came out of something very difficult. So to prevent more layoffs the records AUP aft which is one of the unions chose its own form of structured furloughs that were funded by the Department of Labor. and it was our way of saying we will come together in solidarity to do a structured furlough if you agree not to lay off any more workers by January until after January 1st, 2022. Which meant that if anyone was laid off at that time they would be able to keep their health insurance until the end of the year. So that's where the Union Coalition came from. Right and then what happened when that kind of question was brought to the university? We won.