NYU professors set strike deadline, student resident advisors protest missed payments

At a rally staged just after New York University’s unionized full-time, non-tenure track faculty held their latest bargaining session with university management, union leadership announced that if they don’t have a contract by March 23, they will walk out on strike. Members of the Contract Faculty Union voted to authorize a strike with 90 percent support last month, with 75 percent of the union’s 930 members participating in the vote.  

Elisabeth Fay, a member of the CFU’s bargaining committee, told The Chief after the rally that professors chose March 23 as their strike deadline because it's the day when students and faculty return from spring break. 

“That seems like a good time to kind of demonstrate our absence from the university,” she said. "It's going to be tricky to restart operations if we're not there and I think NYU knows that." 

The university and union have three more bargaining sessions scheduled in the next ten days, and Fay hopes the two sides can close a “number of gaps” remaining, particularly on pay and job security. The two sides have been bargaining since late 2024 and the union has been steadily escalating towards strike authorization. 

Joseph Tirella, a spokesperson for NYU, said in a statement called the strike deadline "unwarranted and unjustifable."

"It comes immediately after the University offered their members the highest minimum salaries of any unionized full-time contract faculty in the country," he said. "Why would the union choose to disrupt thousands of students’ education when they have a market-leading offer in hand—and when the University has been pressing to resolve this contract through an independent mediator for more than four months?”

Resident advisors missing money  

Joining the CFU members at the rally Feb. 27 were dozens of undergraduate resident advisors who secured their first union contract in December. But members of the Student Workers at NYU (SWAN) say that over two months into the new year, they have yet to receive back pay promised under the contract or the raises that were a staple of the agreement.  

"They're saying its due to administrative holdups but at the end of the day they're a multimillion-dollar institution and if they wanted to pay us they could've," said Ollie Mundahl, a resident advisor on SWAN’s bargaining committee. "We knew that our back pay was going to take time -- our pay last semester -- but we had no idea that our pay for this semester would be delayed at all." 

The union gave NYU several weeks' time to start paying workers their $2,600 stipend owed to them under the contract, but the administration has now missed more than five pay periods and has told the union it may not be able to make workers whole until April.  

“We need our pay. A lot of RA's were depending on this to happen,” said Emily Lopez, a resident advisor also on the union’s bargaining committee, "There are people who can't pay medical bills. I have student loan interest that I was expecting to pay that I can’t” 

Resident advisors said that they hoped their rally with professors would put pressure on NYU's administration to finally pay workers what they're owed.

 Tirella did not provide a comment on the resident advisor's pay issue.

 Fay said that the resident advisors have the full support of professors, and that if NYU was shorting CFU members on pay, they would take similar action. She said she was hopeful the two sides could come to an agreement without a strike.

“Our union members do not want to go out on strike,” Fay said. “This is something they have been pushed into doing. We’re hopeful that we will be able to resolve this without withdrawing our labor."