After two years of organising, faculty at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York voted 77% in favour of forming a union with the United Auto Workers (UAW). The newly formed union, SVA Faculty United–UAW, will represent around 1,200 instructors at the revered art school. Issues that pushed SVA faculty to organise include pay equity, mounting workloads that have outpaced compensation and the loss of key benefits like retirement account contributions and sabbaticals.
“What these two life-altering years of organising taught me is that a union is not a magical solution that will resolve all work-related grievances, but a link of solidarity that will reflect us and be as strong or fragile as we make it,” says Merlin Ural Rivera, an adjunct faculty member at SVA.
The school—which awards bachelors and masters degrees across a range of artistic disciplines, and hosts exhibitions, at locations throughout Lower Manhattan—is the latest in a wave of art universities and colleges whose workers have formed unions in the past five years. The UAW already represents educators at Parsons School of Design, which is part of the New School, as well as New York University and Columbia University. Many faculty members across the country, including at SVA, have been moved to organise over similar key concerns including health and safety, professional development, job stability, pay and benefits for part-time and non-tenure-track instructors.
“This victory affirms that hundreds of educators and creatives across different disciplines are ready to unite around a just social cause and give solidarity a chance in these thunderous times,” Ural Rivera says. “We are here to build a wonderful, intimate community of professionals who are allowed the time and resources to follow their creative practices while also helping shape the next generation of artists and inspiring them to fight for self-determination.”
The union will begin the collective bargaining process with the school’s administration to approve their first contract. This is a critical phase where core issues like compensation, job security and benefits will be on the table. According to a 2022 analysis by Bloomberg Law, the average time taken for a newly formed union to ratify its first contract is 465 days, or just over 15 months.
“My husband and colleague Edwin Rivera-Arias and I were galvanised by the New School strike in 2022,” Ural Rivera adds. “During the pandemic, many instructors at SVA were asked to do a lot of extra work without being fairly compensated. Our benefits, such as 401(k) contributions and sabbaticals, were suspended, and we realised that our pay at SVA is woefully low in comparison to other art schools in New York City.”
SVA was founded in 1947 by the educator Silas H. Rhodes and the illustrator Burne Hogarth as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, a training facility for veterans of the Second World War whose educations were funded by the 1944 GI Bill. Over the decades, it evolved into one of the country’s most prominent art and design colleges, known for its ties to the commercial art world and its influential alumni—including Andrea Fraser, KAWS, Elizabeth Peyton, Christine Sun Kim and Lorna Simpson, among others. Many members of SVA’s large, diverse faculty are working artists, designers and scholars.
The school’s leadership “encouraged all eligible faculty to participate in the recent election, and the faculty have voted in favour of unionisation”, an SVA spokesperson tells The Art Newspaper in a statement. “SVA is proud of our reputation as a global leader in art and design education. We are committed to preserving and strengthening our academic community for years to come, and look forward to bargaining in good faith with the faculty union’s representatives.”
