Opinion: NYU must provide paid family leave for all

What if you had to choose between bonding with your newborn child or caring for a seriously ill family member and getting paid? It’s a choice no one should have to make. Yet it's one that adjunct faculty members at New York University continue to face. That’s why, together with the city public advocate, Brooklyn and Manhattan borough presidents and 31 City Council Members, I delivered a letter to NYU President Linda Mills calling on NYU to extend Paid Family Leave to its approximately 3,000 adjunct faculty members.

In 2016, New York state passed the Paid Family Leave Act to ensure that workers don’t have to choose between making ends meet and caring for their loved ones. The law provides for up to 12 weeks of paid, job-protected leave. But because of an arcane carveout in the law, teachers at nonprofit institutions, including major research universities like NYU, are excluded from the program unless their employer voluntarily opts in. 

For the last year, members of ACT-UAW Local 7902, the union that represents adjunct faculty at NYU, have been urging the university to do just that. As the daughter of a retired union worker with Otis Elevator company and a domestic worker who provided care to neighborhood children, I understand on a personal level the urgency of the NYU Adjuncts Union’s effort and am proud to support it.

Adjunct faculty teach thousands of courses at NYU each year, and this spring, I joined their union at a public rally to put a spotlight on the University’s failure to provide paid family leave, as a matter of basic dignity and respect. At the rally, I heard from NYU adjunct faculty members about their personal struggles being denied access to paid family leave. For many contingent workers, it is impossible to simultaneously make ends meet and care for their loved ones in the absence of paid family leave. 

One professor spoke about having to shuttle back and forth every week, at great expense, between New York City and her family home in the Midwest to care for her ailing father, while making sure she never missed a class. Women typically bear the brunt of family caregiving responsibilities, perpetuating gender wage disparities. Studies show that paid family leave can help to close the gap, allowing women to care for their families without being forced to leave the workforce and forfeit earnings, health care and retirement savings. 

Another NYU professor shared the many challenges he experienced in bonding with his infant children without access to paid family leave. Indeed, studies demonstrate that provision of this critical benefit dramatically improves family stability, maternal mental health, infant and child wellbeing and fathers’ engagement in child bonding and childcare, among other outcomes. It has positive impacts on the health and development of young children and the mental and physical wellbeing of new parents. 

New York is dedicated to ensuring that workers have access to paid family leave. It is fundamental to building a caring economy in which all of our city’s residents are able to thrive and to live and work with dignity. Research also shows that access to paid family leave promotes racial equity and justice, and it has been shown to benefit not only workers and their families but also our economy and society at large. 

Providing this critical benefit is good for NYU’s adjunct faculty and for its students – and for its reputation as a premier educational institution in our great city. That adjunct faculty will bear the cost of premiums through payroll deductions further underscores why this should be a no-brainer for NYU. Universities such as The New School, CUNY, Pratt Institute and the University of Rochester already provide paid family leave to their part-time teaching faculty. It’s past time that NYU did the same.