Join our CFU Week of Action, Mon. 3/20 – Fri. 3/24

When I tell my students how far I commute to teach, they say “NYU must be paying you crazy money for that!” No, kids, it’s the other way around. I live way, way out there because, over a decade of teaching here, my salary has fallen further and further behind the cost of living in NYC. And why wouldn’t it? Without a union to leverage our collective power as contract faculty, NYU has had no material incentive to scale our salaries to keep pace with the cost of living.

A majority of contract faculty have signed up to form our union so that we can collectively bargain for salaries that keep pace with the cost of living. We are coming together to unionize because we want to protect and improve employment benefits. We are unionizing to assert and defend academic freedom in a university that fires professors without due process.

NYU’s leadership must now agree to a fair and neutral process for recognizing our union. 

To ensure they do, it’s time for all of us to act! I’ve committed to build our union in my department during CFU’s Week of Action, Monday 3/20 – Friday 3/24, and you can too: 

Be Visible: Starting March 20, hang a CFU poster on your door, and wear your union button every day, all week. Let your colleagues and students see that you’re proud to be part of Contract Faculty United.

Show Up: On Thursday, March 23, 2-4pm, join our informational picket outside Bobst Library demanding a fair process for prompt recognition of our union. Click here and commit to being there!

Teach In: Take 5-10 minutes to talk with your students about our union, and invite them to learn more about CFU and other campus unions at the upcoming Labor Spring Teach-in, Thursday, March 23, at 6 pm.

Join the Movement: On Friday, March 24, 11:30am-1pm, connect with union siblings from across the city to remember the martyrs of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, who died in a building where some of us now work. Click here to commit to standing with the New York labor movement as they continue to stand with us.

A majority of us have been signed up in support of CFU since 2020, and we’ve waited long enough. Let’s show the NYU administration that contract faculty are ready to take action. 

Your colleague,

Ger O’Donoghue

Expository Writing Program, CAS