Why It’s Time to Strike

After more than a year without a contract and in the face of continued regressive bargaining by management, the AAUP’s staff union has announced a series of ULP strikes.

On June 30, after the AAUP’s bargaining team issued an ultimatum to the United Staff of the AAUP (US-AAUP) to accept its current proposal or lose retroactive pay, US-AAUP members voted to authorize a strike, empowering the staff union’s executive committee to declare a strike at a future date. Today, after nearly four more months of trying to reach a settlement, we are announcing that an unfair labor practice (ULP) strike will begin next week. 

We need your help. Please email members of the AAUP’s Council and let them know it’s time to settle the contract. You’ll find their contact information and more about what you can do at the end of this post. 

We have waited so long to declare a strike because we held out hope that management would recognize that it was in the best interests of the AAUP to negotiate in good faith and settle a contract with its staff. As of late June, previous stand-alone compensation proposals put forth by the management team had included retroactive pay going back to January 1, 2023, so the threat to withhold such pay, in addition to being an appalling tactic for a labor organization to use against its own employees, would amount to regressive bargaining. Management’s regressive compensation proposal immediately withdrew nearly $125,000 in pay—taking from the pockets of staff members and their families—that had been put on the table by the employer until that point, yet there was no mitigating financial change to justify such a change in position. Sadly, the AAUP continues to refuse to budge from its regressive position on retroactive pay, instead maintaining a position that staff salary adjustments become effective on the pay period after ratification, removing roughly $15,000 in additional back pay with each month that the employer drags out negotiations. Moreover, the proposals made by the employer since June have moved away from rather than toward our position on other outstanding issues, including telework and recharge leave. Rather than providing incentives to reach an agreement, the employer seems determined not to settle the contract.

Meanwhile, the US-AAUP has continued to uphold our values of equity and stability for the AAUP while moving toward management’s positions. We have offered major concessions on study leave, moving in our packaged proposals from six months for all staff to four months for all staff and—after an inequitable counter from management of four months at half pay that would make study leave accessible only to the highest paid staff members—to three months, in effect offering to halve what is an existing benefit for most of the staff. For nearly two months the employer team has refused to move from its position. We have also compromised on the education benefit, offering to withdraw our proposal to allow staff to apply this existing benefit to student loan debt, without increasing the cost of the benefit for AAUP, which widely promotes student loan debt relief as one of its national advocacy issues. Both of those concessions were included in a package we sent to the AAUP bargaining team on Monday in a final effort to avert a strike.

That package was rejected, providing further evidence of the employer’s intention not to settle. As we noted in our last Substack post, the staff union has filed two ULP charges against the AAUP, on the failure to fulfill information requests and the failure to bargain in good faith. These charges—above all, the AAUP’s pattern of regressive bargaining on compensation, demonstrated by its withholding of retroactive pay owed to the staff—are the basis for our upcoming strike. We have been working without a contract for more than a year, and even as we prepare to enter mediation, the AAUP’s management refuses to engage with us on our proposals while removing from the table more of the retroactive pay we are owed with each passing month. Mediation is a tool, but it’s not enough given how clearly management has shown that concessions and attempts to engage in real discussion will not move them to a settlement. We can wait no longer. The time has come for us to withhold our labor.

Our strike declaration comes in the midst of turmoil and continuing turnover in the national office. Last week yet another of our colleagues, a database expert with fifteen years of service to the Association and a depth of institutional knowledge, gave notice of her resignation. Like others who have resigned in recent months, she is leaving not because of an exciting new opportunity but because daily working conditions have made it feel impossible to stay. And because of the AAUP’s current hiring freeze, it’s not clear who will take over her responsibilities for managing the membership office. In a post we published a few weeks ago, we asked why the AAUP is making its staff contingent by replacing valued employees (including another database expert in the membership office) with contractors and other short-term workers. In spite of high levels of attrition, there has been no effort to retain staff, and management appears not to care about how turnover affects AAUP members, chapters, and collective morale. 

We love the AAUP and the academic labor movement we serve. We want to see our bargaining and advocacy chapters grow and thrive for decades to come, and for that to happen, we need consistent support from a stable and well-staffed AAUP. Sometimes, it seems that management thinks they can run the Association without us, and in the coming weeks we will give them a glimpse of what that would really be like by beginning a rolling strike. Next week, and over the following weeks, we will begin withholding our labor one day at a time, with teams of bargaining-unit members stopping their work to remind management of the value of our contributions. This means that AAUP members who need assistance from striking staff will simply have to wait and that our work on and planning for investigative reports, projects, publications, events, and campaigns will be on pause. Through these actions, which will escalate over time, we are showing management that they need us and that it is in their interest—and in the interest of the Association and its members—to come to a fair agreement with us.

AAUP members and chapter leaders have also expressed their disappointment at how the AAUP’s management has dragged out the negotiations and failed to bargain in ways that demonstrate a commitment to equity. 

“How can AAUP investigate universities for potential censure or sanction, and criticize them for, say, lack of transparency, when they are not living by those standards? Those leading the AAUP need to acknowledge the fact that how they treat their staff is a direct reflection on the organization itself. The very principles the AAUP stands for are at risk, and their actions are putting all AAUP chapters at risk,” said Leonore Fleming, AAUP-Utica president, speaking on behalf of the AAUP-Utica.

Oskar Harmon, secretary/treasurer of the UConn chapter of the AAUP, noted that the US-AAUP’s positions are reasonable and that AAUP members would never accept some of the proposals put forth by the Association’s own management: “Our AAUP union won wage increases less than inflation but significantly more than those proposed by the AAUP staff union, and for our union ‘study leave’ is a bridge too far to negotiate away.” He also expressed support for the upcoming ULP strikes: “The rolling strike by department strategy, like the UAW, is a testament to the strength of the cohesive bonds of the members of the AAUP staff union. My dream is that individual AAUP chapters will organize at their next meeting a moment of observance of support of the strike action by our brothers and sisters in the AAUP staff union.” 

We want to continue our work to support AAUP members and the academic labor movement, and we want to defend equity and the stability of the Association so that it can continue to support generations of academics. We have offered the employer team every opportunity to choose equity and stability, and they have rejected it for more than five hundred days of negotiations. We believe that a ULP strike will show them the way. Our plan is to expand the strike each week, increasing its impact, in the hope that withholding our labor will encourage the employer to reconsider its regressive stance and accept our latest proposal or present a new proposal that moves toward us in the areas that remain unresolved: compensation, retroactive payment of salary increases, telework, and study and recharge leave.

Here’s what you can do. Take three minutes to email all members of the Council, including the executive committee, and tell them it’s time to settle. Tell them to bargain in good faith, and to bargain with actual equity at the forefront of their proposals. Let them know they need to listen to AAUP members and leaders and represent the values of the organization. Please email all of them so they understand the importance and urgency of this issue. And please forward this Substack post to at least two colleagues and ask them to contact the Council and subscribe to our Substack as well.

Here is the Council’s contact information (you can copy the list directly into the send line of your email; Council members’ full information is listed below)

irene.mulvey@gmail.com, davisp1971@gmail.com, sinclair@aaup.org, longa@law.unm.edu, nmajumdar@pscmail.org, rawlsg@yahoo.com, antonio.gallo@csun.edu, karosemb@umd.edu, dmurch@history.rutgers.edu, davarian.baldwin@trincoll.edu 

Irene T. Mulvey, President (2024), Mathematics, Fairfield University (retired)

Paul Davis, Vice President (2024), History and American Government, Cincinnati State Technical and Community College

Christopher Sinclair, Secretary-Treasurer (2024), Mathematics, University of Oregon

Ernesto Longa (2026), Law/Library Science, University of New Mexico

Nivedita Majumdar (2024), English, City University of New York, John Jay College

Glinda Rawls (2024), Counseling, Western Michigan University

Antonio Gallo (2026), Ethnic Studies, California State University, Northridge

Karin Rosemblatt (2026), History, University of Maryland, College Park     

Donna Murch (2026), History, Rutgers University 

Davarian Baldwin (2026), American Studies, Trinity College