RU Strike Diary, Day 2 Post Mortem
A Good Exhaustion Prevented Me From Getting This Out Yesterday
The word from the table is progress. It’s slow, but it’s happening, driven by the power we’ve assembled on the streets of New Brunswick, Piscataway, Camden, and Newark.
More than a thousand strikers across the campuses is not something you ignore. And we’re planning to grow our already robust pickets every day until this strike ends.
Several images stood out for me from Day 2:
The massive picket that marched up College Avenue and circled the campus, led by students and faculty carrying a banner declaring “Equal Pay for Equal Work” — which has been the central fight of the adjunct union. Our demands were centered in this amazing march, as was a push for equity — for adjuncts, grad workers, students, and the community.
Rutgers functions like a corporation in too many ways, chewing up and spitting out vulnerable workers and the community in which it’s situated. It’s real estate practices — buying up properties across the city and either raising rents or gentrifying— are making New Brunswick unaffordable. It’s why we’re calling for a rent freeze on Rutgers’ properties, an end to predatory student fees and punitive actions when those fees and fines go unpaid, and a community fund to help our neighbors.
We’ve been saying that this strike is about faculty and students and the university’s largely poor and immigrant neighbors, and we mean it.
Later in the day came the mass convergence, when all of the New Brunswick picketing marched to the entrance gates of Old Queens, the origin point of Rutgers. Picketers from Cook and Douglass were joined by their colleagues from Busch and Livingston and marched down George Street through the center of town. They were joined by the Mason Gross School of the Arts and Edward Bloustein school and marched to meet the College Ave crew, creating a sea of picketers as we marched to Voorhees Mall and a not-quite impromptu party/rally.
I’m not one for hyperbole or sentimentality, so when I say it gave me chills the reader should understand I mean it.
More important, though, was the impact on the bargaining table. Our colleagues there were buoyed by our show of strength, our joy, outer commitment. And they are using it to their advantage. Management appears to be buckling, and we plan to keep this up until we win a better Rutgers, a kinder less corporate Rutgers.
Onward in solidarity!