Students from the art programs at Rhode Island School of Design and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, took to the streets this week to support striking staff at the two higher education institutions. RISD guards have been on strike since April 3, while on April 10, approximately 9,000 Rutgers employees, including faculty, adjuncts and graduate students, staged the largest strike in the company’s 257-year history. ‘university. Workers at both universities are seeking better salaries, with those at Rutgers pushing specifically for equal pay for equal work for adjunct faculty, guaranteed funding and a living wage for graduates, job security for all faculty, reasonable salary increases commensurate with inflation, affordable student housing, and the waiving of unpaid student tuition and fines.
At RISD, students joined striking members of Teamsters Local 251, which includes movers, gardeners and janitors, on the picket line on April 12. Hyperallergic reports that the architecture, digital media and sculpture departments have all announced their solidarity with the strikers and that the painting department has postponed classes for one day so that students, staff and faculty work together to write a statement of support. Paul Soulellis, head of the school’s graphic design department, told the Brown Daily Herald this faculty, including members of its department, held classes outside or off campus in solidarity with the strikers.
The faculty’s refusal to cross the picket line is “a sign of respect for the idea of unified voices and collective action when individual voices cannot be heard,” said film department head Amy Kravitz. RISD animation and video. publication. RISD workers have been negotiating a new contract since June 2022, but bargaining ground stalled after the union turned down what it considered an unfair offer from management on February 16. RISD President Crystal Williams in a statement defended the school’s offer of an average wage of $17.90 an hour for the lowest-paid workers. The union demanded a minimum wage of $20. For context, the average cost of a rental apartment in Providence is reported be $1,414. With many landlords requiring a renter’s income of forty times that monthly payment, an annual income of around $56,560 is required. A worker would need to earn about $27.20 an hour to afford an apartment, nearly ten dollars more than the university offered and seven dollars more than the base salary asking.
On April 10, members of the Providence City Council wrote to the board of Williams and RISD, urging them to engage in “honest negotiations”. “Insisting on being paid a living wage is not an excessive demand and we support these workers as they exercise their right to organize and strike,” the board said.
At Rutgers, where the strike follows a stalled contract negotiation for eleven months, prices continue quickly, with the action having only a few days. The striking faculty members stressed that their action was also intended to benefit students, many of whom joined them on the picket line. “We also fight for students and the community in the form of housing justice and a beloved community fund supported by Rutgers for local residents who are experiencing or have experienced financial and other hardship and have excluded from other state or federal assistance programs,” David Letwin, a professor at the Mason Gross School of the Arts and a member of the executive board of the American Association of University Professors and American Federation of Teachers (AAUP-AFT ) from the university, said The arts journal.
The strikes follow successful action by the staff and faculty of New York’s New School in expression the low salaries the college paid to its adjunct professors. The strike, which saw classrooms go dark for weeks as students joined their teachers – nearly 90 per cent of whom are assistants – on the picket line, has drawn unwanted attention to the New School, which was founded in 1919 as a progressive alternative to expensive Ivy League colleges. .
