In February 2024, New York University’s  (NYU) “contract faculty” — the non-tenure-track instructors who make up about half of the university’s full-time faculty — voted to form a union, Contract Faculty United–United Auto Workers (CFU-UAW) Local 7902. The roughly thousand-member-strong union began negotiations with NYU for a first contract in November 2024. More than a year later, however, contract faculty say that the administration is dragging its feet in bargaining, and that workers and management are still far apart on key issues including pay and job security. On February 9, CFU-UAW began holding a strike authorization vote, which will conclude on February 20.

Jacobin contributor Sara Wexler earlier this week sat down with Elisabeth Fay, a clinical associate professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science at NYU who teaches first-year writing, and Fanny Shum, a clinical associate professor in the mathematics department at NYU’s Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science, both members of the union’s bargaining team; they were joined by rank-and-file CFU member Brendan Hogan, a clinical professor in liberal studies at NYU who teaches political philosophy. They spoke about what organizing for a first contract has looked like and why the union is weighing a potential strike.