Montclair State Adjunct Teachers Campaign For ‘Equal Pay’

Adjunct professors at Montclair State University say they have collected an outpouring of support in their campaign for “equal pay” at the 20,000-student large institution.

The Montclair Adjunct Union AFT Local 6025, which represents 1,100 adjunct professors at MSU, reported that its members presented a folder containing their “Pay Equity Petition” to the Board of Trustees on Thursday.

The school’s adjunct professors are currently working under terms of an expired contract that pays them “less than their full-time faculty counterparts for teaching exactly the same classes,” union members allege in an online petition titled “Support Equal Pay for Adjunct Faculty.”

See the Change.org petition here.

“We hope this outpouring of support for Adjunct Pay Equity gets the attention of the Board of Trustees and helps them understand that the entire MSU community is watching, and wants them to do right by adjunct faculty at Montclair,” the union stated via social media.

A university spokeswoman previously told Patch that the most recent adjunct contract was effective from July 1, 2011, to June 30, 2015.

But members of the school community with questions about the delay between contracts need to reach out to state officials, not MSU administrators, the spokeswoman said.

“In accordance with New Jersey law, statewide labor agreements for the various organized employees at the state colleges and universities - including adjunct contracts - are negotiated by the Governor’s Office of Employee Relations and not the individual institutions... As a consequence, Montclair State University does not have control over the timing of the negotiations process.”

• See related article: No Contract For Montclair State Adjuncts: Teachers Union Wants 'Equal Pay'

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