Wellesley faculty end their strike, with no union contract in hand - The Boston Globe (2025)

Spokesperson Stacey Schmeidel added that all professors on unpaid leave for over a month, including those on the strike, are required to pay their own premiums. And amid concerns on campus that losing visas or health insurance could result in international faculty being deported, Wellesley said Friday that the move was not an attack on noncitizen employees in the union.

The strike, which started on March 27, disrupted classes and forced some students to switch to alternative courses — a mandate from university leaders that some labor experts saw as an aggressive strategy to end the faculty strike.

The requirement affected students who needed sufficient credits to graduate this semester, or who are required to keep a full course load to maintain their athletic eligibility, financial aid, and student visas.

Some tenured professors, who are not a part of the union, expanded their class sizes and taught impacted courses as substitutes to keep academic instruction going during the strike, though other departments refused to cross the picket line or overextend their staff.

Students who elected not to shift their schedules may receive half-credit for classes that have not met for the required number of minutes under federal standards, Schmeidel added.

In a statement on its website Thursday, the bargaining committee for the Wellesley Organized Academic Workers said that the unit “made a lot of progress toward a first agreement,” despite the college’s “anti-union rhetoric, delay tactics, and attempts to divide our community” during the strike.

“While we are returning to work, the fight is not over,” the statement continued. “We have yet to reach a final agreement, and we will not be worn down by Wellesley’s anti-worker tactics.”

University leaders said in a statement Thursday that they are “grateful to the WOAW-UAW’s bargaining team and members for coming to this decision,” it read. “While the strike is ending, the critical work of negotiating a final contract that recognizes the significant contributions of our NTT faculty is continuing.”

Through almost a year of ongoing negotiations, the WOAW-UAW has been pushing for child care protections, limits to teaching hours, and higher wages — closer to those of tenured professors. The semester ends in early May.

The union’s effort comes at an increasingly precarious time for labor organizing on college campuses, already in the line of sight of the Trump administration. New unions among graduate students, resident assistants, and faculty boomed in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, but a National Labor Relations Board less friendly to organized labor appears poised to slow momentum.

Universities, too, are wary of supporting unions and drawing the ire of federal officials, Patricia Campos-Medina, executive director at The Worker Institute at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, told the Globe last month. Wellesley is already among the 60 colleges under review from the White House for not adequately protecting Jewish students.

“This could be seen as an example that [Wellesley does] not want to be seen as caving to union protest,” Campos-Medina said.

Diti Kohli can be reached at diti.kohli@globe.com. Follow her @ditikohli_.