Bargain A Fair Contract With Rutgers Workers

Rutgers Board of Governors

URA members have been working for 161 days without a contract as of Dec. 6. Despite this, our members have continued to provide invaluable services to this institution, ensuring that our students are admitted, housed, fed, counseled, and guided towards graduation. Management has continued this pattern of surface bargaining even as we, like other workers at this university, experience record levels of inflation, confront staffing shortages that increase our members' workloads, and will soon be burdened with rising healthcare costs that Rutgers has done nothing to alleviate. Please sign on to tell Tell Rutgers Board of Governors to direct management to bargain a fair contract.

To: Rutgers Board of Governors
From: [Your Name]

Dear Rutgers Board of Governors,

We are addressing you as the body with the highest level of leadership and accountability for the management of the University. That leadership must take into account the entire University community.

As of December 6, the day of this meeting, URA members have been working for 161 days without a contract.

Rutgers would collapse without us.

The faculty are the brains of the University, and the students are the blood, but the staff are the backbone, without our work, Rutgers would soon collapse. We ensure that our students are admitted, housed, fed, counseled, and guided towards graduation. We support our research and teaching to further the University's mission, and we serve and collaborate with farmers, K-12 students, the marine sciences, and more. We make purchases, payments, and safeguard operations across Rutgers—to clean, cook, fix, pay, process, schedule, write, file, plant, plow, and much more.

At the same time, we are experiencing high inflation, rising health insurance costs, and staffing shortages. Jobs at Rutgers are harder to fill and employees are harder to retain. We are overworked and demonstrably underpaid when compared to other industries, yet we are still expected to “do more with less.”

At the bargaining table, the administration has unnecessarily lengthened negotiations and rejected or ignored proposals on our core issues of compensation, career pathways, telework, and healthcare. A skilled, motivated and fairly-compensated staff is needed to take Rutgers into the future.

We demand that you direct management to bargain meaningfully and to address our needs as crucial parts of what President Holloway calls our "beloved community."