The School of Visual Arts has become the latest New York campus to unionize, after 1,200 instructors voted 77% in favor of joining the United Auto Workers last week.
The bargaining unit, SVA Faculty United–UAW, now joins Columbia, New York University, and Parsons under the same labor umbrella and will seek its first contract this summer. Ballots were tallied by the Labor Relations Board in Manhattan on May 23.
Adjunct faculty make up most of SVA’s teaching corps. According to labor organizers who spoke with Hyperallergic, which first reported the news, the adjunct model has eroded both financial security and morale. SVA has cited stagnant wages, heavier course loads and the loss of retirement contributions and paid sabbaticals, as reasons for unionizing.
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At comparable art and design schools across the country, it’s commonplace for working artists to hold additional roles as teachers to supplement their incomes, which are typically funded with tuition fees. As of 2024, 26 percent of the school’s tuition revenue went towards teacher’s salaries.
A spokesperson for SVA told press that the administration has “encouraged all eligible faculty to participate in the election,” and pledged to bargain “in good faith,” amid contract negotiations.
SVA, which oversees around 4,000 undergraduate and graduate students, is the latest art school in the U.S. to push union efforts forward after a period of waning student enrollment, post-Covid 19 pandemic.
Between 2018 and 2022, according to publicly available SVA fiscal reports, the school’s enrolled students dropped by 8 percent. Across the country, at CalArts, enrolled student numbers dropped by 11 percent between between 2019 and 2023. That drop was reported before the West Coast school voted to unionize with with a 71% majority in November 2024.
Forthcoming negotiations, which are expected to take place over the summer, will focus on baseline salaries, workload limits and reinstating retirement matches. Any pact would need approval from both the union and SVA’s board.
The UAW now counts more than 50,000 academic workers across the U.S. as members, pressing for more footholds as universities rely increasingly on part-time labor.