Shocking Lockout Leaves 400 LIU Brooklyn Faculty Members Without Pay or Insurance

FORT GREENE, BROOKLYN — Hundreds of LIU Brooklyn faculty members expecting to attend the fall's first day of classes on Tuesday were instead shocked and outraged to find the campus off-limits, along with their email accounts and health insurance plans.

The unprecedented lockout, stemming from an ongoing contract dispute, reportedly impacted 400 teachers. The faculty members, including full and part-time professors, will not receive pay and are banned from the school's Fort Greene campus until their collective five-year contract is negotiated. The contract expired on Aug. 31.

As the Village Voice reports:

"Contract negotiations between administration and the Long Island University Faculty Federation, which represents full-time and adjunct faculty, had been underway since April. The existing contract was set to expire on August 31st and historically LIUFF has negotiated with the university through Labor Day. However, when administrators made their best final offer on the 31st, they threatened faculty with the September 2nd lockout — well before LIUFF’s traditional vote on the Tuesday after Labor Day."

This is the first time that a lockout has been levied against an entire university faculty. As Cornell University labor specialist Kate Bronfenbrenner explained to The Atlantic, lockouts are typically "used in the industrial sector, where customers are removed from labor practice."

LIU Brooklyn, a satellite campus of the Brookdale, New York-based university, has 11,200 students in over 200 academic programs. Tuition runs up to $34,000 per year.

On Tuesday, not all students were excited to attend classes taught by interim professors. A nursing student named Valerie Rufo told Gothamist that she spent time in an overcrowded classroom where about 100 students were taught by a replacement instructor.

"She was trying to teach but nothing was really correlating with our syllabus, so we just left class," Rufo said. "Even if you wanted to write something, you were writing on your lap. It took her about half an hour to get her PowerPoint working."

Some students joined faculty demonstrations Tuesday afternoon in front of the campus. Added support was provided by social justice groups like NY Communites for Change.

Flyer from #LIUlockout students. This is not okay. NOT TODAY. pic.twitter.com/yfuPSwKHTb
— Emily Drabinski (@edrabinski) September" class="redactor-linkify-object">https://twitter.com/edrabinski... 7, 2016

Lead image courtesy of Holly Victoria Norval/Flickr