Rutgers student sues over ‘selfish and illegal’ faculty strike

A Rutgers University student sued seven local and national faculty unions Friday for last spring’s weeklong walkout, accusing the labor groups of “a selfish and illegal strike” and demanding compensation for lost educational time.

Jeremy Li, a commuter student at the New Brunswick campus who’s now a junior, wants a state Superior Court judge to declare the April strike illegal, arguing the 9,000-plus faculty who walked off the job are public employees barred by law from striking. He’s seeking class certification and says the 67,000 students impacted deserve “justice, accountability, and compensation.”

“The Rutgers faculty unions were aware that strikes would cancel classes, causing students to miss out on the education they had paid for,” the complaint states. “In fact, that was the key for them to gain the leverage they wanted at the bargaining table. So they chose to strike in spite of the damage they knew it would do to students’ educations.”

Li names as defendants the Rutgers AAUP-AFT, which represents some 6,000 full-time faculty, graduate workers, postdocs, and counselors; the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, which represents 2,800 lecturers; and AAUP-BHSNJ, which represents over 1,000 Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences faculty. Also named are two state and two national unions (New Jersey AFL-CIO, New Jersey American Federation of Teachers, and their national counterparts) for providing “substantial assistance to the strike.”

Alan Maass, a spokesman for Rutgers AAUP-AFT, said he couldn’t comment because the union hadn’t yet been formally notified of the lawsuit. Representatives from the other local unions did not respond Friday to a request for comment.

Li accuses the unions of breach of contract, negligence, conspiracy, and violations of the state Consumer Fraud Act. Union leaders timed the strike just weeks before the academic year ended to maximize disruption, fearing a summer strike wouldn’t be effective, Li’s attorneys Patrick Hughes and Daniel Suhr said.

The attorneys recently filed similar lawsuits against teachers’ unions in Chicago, Massachusetts, and Kentucky for financial and emotional damages stemming from strikes there.

Li’s complaint is important nationally, Suhr said.

“It will set a crucial legal precedent that unions have to pay for the suffering they cause when they shut down schools with illegal strikes,” he said in a statement. “Our goal is nothing less than to see an end to illegal strikes in higher education, and this case will help achieve that by making the unions pay for the damage they caused to students.”

Li, a business student who chairs the Rutgers Republicans and has served in the University Senate, has appeared on Fox News to criticize Rutgers faculty and administrators as anti-Israel and for campus COVID restrictions.