About 80% of full-time union lecturers in the School of Arts and Sciences are walking out on Monday and Tuesday in an effort to bargain for a third contract with Tufts administration. The full-time lecturers will not be working for two days in support of livable salaries and manageable workloads.
A total of 122 of Tufts FTLs are represented by Service Employees International Union Local 509. The FTLs plan to rally at 10 a.m. at the Mayer Campus Center to start the two day walkout. Students are still expected to attend classes taught by tenured faculty, part-time lecturers and professors of the practice, according to an email sent by Dean Brizuela last Friday.
The FTL Union demands adjustments in salaries and workloads to keep up with the rise in the cost of living in the Greater Boston area and increased student admission. The union has been bargaining for their third contract since April 2024.
“Our experience in this bargaining round, which started last April, has been very different from the previous experience,” Penn Loh, distinguished senior lecturer of the Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning Department, senior lecturer of Tisch College and member of the Founding Group of the Union said. “We have not experienced a lot of the in-depth back and forth, and we remain pretty far apart, particularly on salary. So we now feel like we don’t really have a choice to make further progress in our bargaining unless we take more drastic action.”
According to the FTL’s bargaining fact sheet, the cost of living for full-time lecturers has increased 21% since 2020 but salaries have only increased by 13.1%. The entry-level salary for FTLs is $64,000 which is under the living wage of $64,870 for a single, childless adult living in Middlesex County, Massachusetts.
The average FTL salary is around $93,000 which is “at or below 80% of area median income (depending on household size), a level which is eligible for many publicly-subsidized affordable housing programs in the greater Boston region,” according to the FTL union fact sheet.
In addition to demanding livable salaries, the FTL union demands manageable workloads with the increased undergraduate enrollment in the School of Arts and Sciences.
According to the FTL union, from 2019 to 2023, undergraduate enrollment in A&S had increased by 12.4%, while there was only an increase of full-time faculty by 6.8%.
The increased undergraduate enrollment also creates more pressure on departments to increase program enrollment for FTLs.
“Our faculty is not growing at the same rate,” Loh said. “I am seeing more students in my classes. I co-teach a required course, and we’ve got 67 [students] in the spring, where I think the last time I taught it there were 45 which we thought was a pretty healthy number back then.”
In addition to feeling overworked, FTLs have less time to spend with students as a result of the increase in class size, according to the union. FTLs teaching larger entry-level courses spanning from 100 to 400+ students are “disproportionately taught” by FTLs.
Full-time lecturer union members shared their experience of the difficulties that come with increased workloads and trying to keep up with the increased cost of living.
Phuong [Phoebe] Dinh, a full-time lecturer in the Psychology Department, explained their reason for joining the union and their experience in the 10 months of negotiation.
“I’m joining my Full-Time Lecturers union in the upcoming walkout because we have been negotiating for 10 months but our calls for a livable wage and manageable workload have not been heard,” Dinh wrote in a statement to the Daily. “Because I do not have what I need to be able to put my whole heart into this job and to do so sustainably. Because I’m already in deep burnout two years into teaching, and as a junior faculty member I cannot believe I am contemplating whether I can stay in the profession long term.”
Patrick Collins, executive director of media relations at Tufts, explained the university’s engagement with the union in a statement to the Daily.
“Currently, the two sides have a disagreement over compensation and workload. The university has a compensation and merit increase philosophy that it applies to all faculty and staff. This philosophy generally includes an interest in compensating faculty and staff with attention to the relevant external market and internal equity, among other factors,” he wrote. “We look forward to continuing to work with SEIU to arrive at an agreement.”
As negotiations continue, both sides will continue to attempt to reach an agreement on a favorable contract.
“The impact is really about sending a message to the administration, we don’t want to do this, but we really need them to come back to the bargaining table with more realistic proposals, particularly around the salary,” Loh said.
“Our greatest hope is that this will kind of reset where we are in negotiations, to the point where the administration comes back with more realistic proposals particularly around summer,” Loh said.
