We’re Joining Together for a better SVA!

As faculty, we are coming together as a union so we can bargain collectively with SVA. We are joining the thousands of academic workers at NYU, Columbia, and the New School (Parsons) who are seeking to secure a better future through collective bargaining, and we are part of a growing movement in private institutions like RISD, Pratt, Cooper Union, and California College of the Arts, where unionized faculty have negotiated meaningful improvements to salary, benefits, and working conditions.

Without collective bargaining, we have experienced stagnant salaries, increasing amounts of uncompensated work, vanishing benefits, and threats to job security and academic freedom. With collective bargaining, we can negotiate a binding agreement so that SVA cannot change the terms of our employment without our consent. Our students’ learning conditions are our working conditions. When we are able to communicate and negotiate as equals with SVA, and as a result live more securely, we will be able to focus more on quality teaching.

As employees across SVA, we have formed a union in order to improve our working conditions and to make the university a more equitable and accessible institution for teaching and learning. Like tens of thousands of faculty who already have unions at institutions across the US, we deserve the voice and respect we gain through collective bargaining.

Use the form to sign a union authorization card and be counted in the majority!

Without a union:

• SVA unilaterally determines our working conditions and can change them at any time without our consent.

With a union:

• We elect a bargaining committee that gathers input from faculty across campus to develop our priorities.

• Our bargaining committee negotiates on equal footing toward a fair agreement with SVA.

• We decide democratically, through a vote, whether to approve any agreement as our contract.

• That contract secures our terms and conditions of employment and is binding and enforceable, usually through appeal to a neutral arbitrator.