Members of the United Council of Academics at NJIT (UCAN) are voting on tentative agreements for new contracts finalized by the union’s member bargaining team and administration officials over the weekend. If ratified by UCAN members, the contracts would cover adjunct faculty, postdoctoral research employees, and graduate workers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) through the end of June 2026.

Members received the full text of the agreements along with a ratification ballot earlier this week. Meetings will be held for members to discuss the tentative agreements, and the vote will run through Tuesday, January 30, with results announced that day.

“UCAN is a democratic union, and our members will have the final say on whether the agreements we reached at the bargaining table will be ratified,” said UCAN Vice President Jeffrey Reaves. “We’re proud of what we achieved through our organizing, pressure, and bargaining, but our members will decide if it’s what they want for their contracts.”

UCAN President Brian O’Donnell said the agreements address the priorities that members identified for new contracts. The most important, he said, is parity with the salaries won by adjunct faculty, postdocs, and grad workers at Rutgers University after their strike last spring. NJIT is located across the street from the Rutgers-Newark campus, highlighting the close relationship between the two institutions.

Under the tentative agreement, minimum pay for adjunct faculty at NJIT would increase by 32 percent in the first year of a new contract (already past, but the pay increases are retroactive) and 44.2 percent over four years. Minimum salaries for graduate workers would increase 34.1 percent over four years, and the bottom salary for postdocs would likewise match the increases won at Rutgers.

Other gains in the agreements include: strengthened job security for adjunct faculty, who must reapply for their classes each semester; additional pay and other provisions for adjuncts who teach large classes; six years of guaranteed funding and full health insurance coverage for grad employees; earlier deadlines for postdocs to be notified about reappointments; and improved grievance procedures for everyone represented by UCAN.

O’Donnell credited members for the wins. “These are the kind of transformative changes that simply can’t be won just sitting at a bargaining table—something we learned from the stonewalling we faced in the first year of this campaign,” said O’Donnell. “It took strengthening our local, protesting, challenging the university head on, and ultimately a 98 percent strike vote and 70 people willing to bargain for our side past 1 a.m. to win what our members need. This win belongs to all of us.”

In late November and early December, over 98 percent of UCAN members who cast a ballot voted to authorize the union’s elected leadership body to call a strike to achieve the union’s goals for a new agreement. Union leaders believe this message from members got through to the NJIT administration after well over a year of delays and stonewalling following the expiration of the previous contract. Progress came quickly in the weeks around the holiday period, they said.

Todd Wolfson, president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, which represents some 6,000 full-time faculty, grad workers, postdocs, and counselors at Rutgers University, said he saw a strong contract for UCAN as a continuation of the contract campaign at Rutgers last spring, which led to the first strike in the state university’s 257-year history.

“We know that NJIT educators, researchers, and students cross the street in Newark all the time—some departments even span both campuses,” Wolfson said. “So we see the UCAN contract as another stage of our own fight. We prioritized pay increases and other measures for the lowest-paid and most vulnerable at Rutgers, and we’re proud of our sibling union for having achieved the same at NJIT.”