NYU UNIT ELIGIBILITY

Adjuncts are eligible for the bargaining unit if they teach at least 40 contact hours in one or more courses in an academic year, September 1 to August 31, or at least 75 contact hours of individual instruction or tutoring in a semester. The threshold for individual instruction seems higher but it is based on five students per week calculated by semester, not academic year.
 
If you are in the bargaining unit, this means you are covered by the contract between NYU and the union. The contract is also known as the Collective Bargaining Agreement, and is renegotiated and renewed every five or six years. It offers all adjuncts a number of benefits, rights, and protections.
 
Excluded from the bargaining unit are all full-time faculty, graduate student employees, research assistants, Tandon School of Engineering writing center instructors and tutors, and a few others. See the complete list in Article I of the contract.
 
If you are eligible for the bargaining unit you are also eligible for union membership and must begin paying dues within 31 days after you start working as an adjunct at NYU. Dues are 1.44 percent of your check and are only charged when you are working. There is a one-time $50 initiation fee. The fastest way to join the union is to fill out a card here and submit to mail@actuaw.org. 
 
Calculating contact hours can be tricky; 50 minutes in the classroom equals one contact hour. To calculate how many contact hours you teach per semester, determine how many minutes a week you teach in a classroom, then divide by 50, then multiply by the number of weeks in the semester.
 
For example: If you teach a 2-hour-and-30-minute class once a week, you would convert that to 150 minutes per week. Then divide those 150 minutes by 50 to arrive at three contact hours per week, then multiply by 14 weeks in a semester for a total of 42 contact hours. Teaching this one course means you are unit eligible. If you teach shorter courses you might still unit eligible if you reach a total of 40 contact hours over the academic year.