The part-time faculty union at The New School is preparing to negotiate its next collective bargaining agreement with the university.

The part-time faculty unit of UAW-ACT Local 7902, the union representing student workers, health workers, and part-time faculty at The New School and adjunct faculty at New York University, will begin negotiations with The New School next fall.

Union representatives told The New School Free Press that issues with healthcare and job security were major concerns, as they prepare to negotiate the next collective bargaining agreement, the document which governs the conditions of employment and the workplace for unionized employees. 

The most recent CBA began in 2014 and expired in 2019. However, it remains in use as negotiations for a new CBA were delayed due to the pandemic. The CBA was amended to include COVID-19 related adjustments, such as the university freezing pension contributions.

The union is still drafting its exact requests for the upcoming CBA, but it has typically pushed for higher wages and better healthcare coverage, according to the part-time unit chair of the union and Parsons professor, Annie Larson.

Part-time faculty members — who make up 87% of The New School’s faculty according to university spokesperson Amy Malsin — are uniquely affected by healthcare issues, union reps said.

“We have both health insurance and pension plans, but it’s sometimes hard to reach eligibility for those as part-time faculty members,” ACT-UAW Local 9702 guide Alexander Robins, a professor at Parsons, said.

To be eligible for The New School’s health insurance last academic year, part-time faculty members had to have worked at the school for at least one academic year, taught a minimum of 90 hours across at least two courses and earned at least $6,647 for the prior academic year. They must have also been scheduled the following year to make at least $6,661 while teaching a minimum of 90 hours.

Robins also said the union is unhappy that the university switched faculty’s health insurance provider last year in the middle of the pandemic. Members felt the new insurance plan was inferior to their former coverage. 

“The change from UnitedHealthcare to Aetna was a change that was not comparable, and our collective bargaining agreement protects us [so] that year to year we can have comparable health insurance,” Robins said.

The Aetna plan featured an increased premium and a 10 percent co-insurance — the portion of a medical bill that’s paid out of pocket — while coverage for some procedures was cut, according to previous reporting by the Free Press. 

The union and university were unable to resolve the healthcare issue themselves and have since engaged an independent third-party through arbitration to help them come to resolution on the matter. 

The New School, meanwhile, maintains that it is one of the few institutions to provide health insurance for part-time faculty.

“We’re proud to be one of the few institutions that provides access to comprehensive health insurance, contributions to the retirement plan, and flexible spending accounts for part-time instructors,” Malsin said in a statement to the Free Press. 

Along with healthcare challenges, part-time faculty have faced numerous issues stemming from the pandemic throughout the past year and a half, union reps said. 

Professors have faced issues adjusting to Zoom classes the past three semesters. Many had to purchase their own virtual teaching equipment and others said they received inadequate childcare support from the school while having to balance working from home with watching their children, Larson said. 

The university “offers a dependent care flexible spending account that allows employees to set aside money on a pre-tax basis to help defray the cost of childcare,” Malsin said.

Other concerns union members have ahead of bargaining include the university’s management of its COVID-19 testing protocols. 

Larson believes the university made the right decision in declaring a vaccine mandate and requiring rigorous testing, but union members have taken issue with the university’s roll-out of COVID-19 protocols, she said. 

For instance, members said the university’s on-campus binx COVID-19 testing system has unreliable processing times, which has left some temporarily without campus access.

The union also pushed the university to allow immunocompromised and at-risk part-time faculty to teach remotely. The New School complied, but would not accommodate those without a disability defined by the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to Larson.

The union has also taken issue with delays in contact tracing and HEPA filtration unit installation, along with the late release of a study showing that 28% of occupiable spaces in The New School need additional HEPA filtration, which the university released more than a month into the semester. 

According to Larson, The New School was also late to inform workers of its employee health and safety plan. The university just recently communicated how it plans to comply with the NY Health and Essential Rights Act — which requires all private employers in New York state to adopt a health and safety plan to protect workers from airborne diseases — though the law required that plans be adopted in August and communicated with employees in September.

Malsin, however, said the university communicated those plans on Nov. 8 and noted many parts of the plan reflected safety protocols introduced this fall, inline with the community’s return to campus. 

Such issues on campus often exacerbate difficulties off campus for many part-time faculty who deal with financial instability, union reps said. 

Robins noted that many part-time faculty across the country are living by more precarious means than full-time faculty with some taking on multiple jobs to supplement their income. Part-timers typically have weaker workers rights as well, he said.  

“A significant amount of what we think of as university education is being done by people on short-term contracts with limited benefits [and] significantly lower wages than if we were to compare it to, say, tenured faculty,” Robins said. 

The New School depends on part-time faculty much more than other U.S. universities, a recent study shows. 

Part-time instructors make up 87% of The New School’s faculty, while part-time instructors made up an average of 51% of faculty across all American colleges during the 2019-2020 academic year, according to a report by the American Association of University Professors.

In addition, the university often creates a revolving door of professors due to its treatment of part-timers, Robins said. 

For instance, part-time faculty at The New School are not guaranteed a certain number of courses per semester until they reach annualized status, which is achieved after teaching for 11 semesters. According to Robins, the university often refuses to give professors classes as they edge closer to the 11-semester benchmark, effectively “holding a carrot on a stick” to part-time faculty hoping for more job stability.

However, non-annualized, part-time faculty are not guaranteed courses under the guidelines of the current CBA, Malsin said. 

She added that part-time professors are not given courses to teach for a host of reasons. 

“There are multiple factors that a program must take into consideration when making faculty appointments each planning cycle, including but not inclusive of curricular changes, student enrollment, an instructor’s performance history, the need for flexibility in hiring, and work load agreements with full-time and senior part-time faculty,” she said. 

Job security fears, along with other issues the union brought up, negatively affect a professor’s teaching ability, Larson said. 

The union’s main priority is to ensure professors can adequately serve students, Larson said.

“At the end of the day, all of our concern is about the experience that the students are having and making sure that students are having a quality educational experience and good relationships with faculty and with the college,” she said.

The union has worked to support faculty members so that they can be the best instructors they can for students.

Since the introduction of the union in 2004, part-time faculty have made major strides in improving working conditions, Larson said.

“Before the union existed, part-time faculty members at The New School didn’t have an automatic right to healthcare, or a right to a certain fee that the university has to pay out if they can’t offer you the number of classes or hours that they’re supposed to,” she said. “Everything we have is because of the union.”

Issues affecting part-time professors — who teach more than 85% of courses at The New School, according to Larson — can also come to affect students, she said, as the weight of a professor’s struggles may impact their work.

“Our working conditions as part-time faculty, those are the same conditions that students learn in so when faculty aren’t being treated well, that ultimately trickles down to the students,” Larson said. “If faculty have to worry about how to cover their healthcare, how to put food on the table, how to make ends meet [and] how to pay rent, they can’t put that same amount of energy and attention into the work that they do in the classroom.”