Dear Colleague ,

We have a tentative agreement on a new contract for part-time lecturers at Rutgers and there will be salary increases, bonuses, and other improvements for PTLs starting this fall--if you, the members, vote to ratify the negotiated agreement.

Here’s a summary of the Tentative Agreement: Summary

Here’s the full Tentative Agreement: Full Tentative Agreement

The Executive Board of the PTLFC-AAUP-AFT and the Negotiating Team endorse the Tentative Agreement and encourage ratification.

Watch your email for a second email with voting instructions. 

Beyond the advances of this Tentative Agreement, we want to stress that we fought off administrative attempts to weaken our collective bargaining agreement: we avoided any language making our increases “subject to” funding from the State.  You may recall that management imposed a salary freeze on other faculty and staff by invoking such language, but PTLs received our increases as negotiated because that language is not in our contract.  The administration also tried to weaken our dues deduction and our COPE (Committee on Political Education) deduction provisions, which are important ways we maintain organizational strength.  We successfully avoided these attacks on our organization and our contract. 

This contract is only a beginning. We stopped the loss of benefits through strong organization. Now we need an active membership to implement it. Having a strong membership is crucial to everything we do and we thank you for your continued support and involvement in the union.

We look forward to making additional gains as we implement this new agreement, once it is ratified.  We will continue to work beyond negotiations on several issues.  There are new joint committees to be formed, one on health benefits and one on tuition remission, so let us know if you’re interested in becoming more involved in either of those processes.  We need to build a more engaged and activist organization to ensure that implementation of what we’ve accomplished unfolds as it should.  Membership numbers are also key to building organizational strength and, while we’ve been growing recently, we need to continue adding full members.  If you encounter any PTLs who might not yet have become full members, encourage them to join.  Only full members can ratify this Tentative Agreement.

As we move ahead, please keep in touch, letting us know your interests, concerns, and questions.

Let’s make the Rutgers PTLFC-AAUP-AFT a powerful example of academic employees improving their professional lives.

In solidarity,

Eleanor LaPointe, President
Steve Peterson, Chief Negotiator
On behalf of the Rutgers PTLFC-AAUP-AFT Executive Board and its Negotiating Team

Rutgers PTLFC-AAUP-AFT
11 Stone Street
New Brunswick, NJ 0890
Phone:732-964-1000