September Newsletter

Updates from across the CUNY system, with a focus on social justice unionism and rank & file organizing

Cross CUNY Working Group Against Racism and Colonialism

Several RAFA members have been working together with other comrades- members of different PSC committees, including the Anti-Racism Committee, International Committee, and Academic Freedom committee, as well as other CUNY organizations, rank and file workers and students- across CUNY over the summer to broaden and deepen solidarity around the resolution in Solidarity with the Palestinian People that was overwhelmingly passed by the Delegate Assembly in June. The resolution draws connections between the Palestinian liberation struggle and other anti-racist, anti-colonial and freedom struggles at CUNY and beyond. The aim of this ad hoc group is also to strategize how to address the attacks being levelled at the resolution as well as its supporters by disruptive and anti-union elements within and outside of the union. We decided to call ourselves “The Cross CUNY Working Group Against Racism and Colonialism”. Our first task was to organize a symposium and series of teach-ins for September to help prepare for the PSC Chapter-level discussion on BDS that the resolution requires for the Fall semester. The September event will be launched by a two panel symposium “Reckoning with Colonialism: Anti-Racist Struggle at CUNY & Beyond” that will take place on Thursday September 2nd, from 5:30-9:00pm. This symposium will be followed by four teach-ins organized around the following themes: Decolonizing Higher Education; Empowering CUNY Staff; Policing and Surveillance at CUNY; How Can Unions Resist Settler Colonialism and Racism. For more info, or to get involved, email us at NoRacismCUNY@protonmail.com.

The Cross-Campus Strike Authorization Vote Committee

The Cross-Campus Strike Authorization Vote committee continues its grassroots organizing for a strong, democratic union. A working group on open bargaining is hosting an event on Tuesday, October 12 at noon and 6pm to discuss more democratic, transparent, and accountable models for PSC bargaining. It’s important to start this discussion well ahead of our next contract negotiations. Open bargaining - where rank and file members attend and participate in contract bargaining - is an increasingly popular strategy. It is premised on the assumption that the power of the union is not in esoteric expertise behind closed doors but in its membership. The panel will feature higher education union officers who have developed and implemented open bargaining policies in their unions at UMass Boston and Oregon State, as well as PSC members who have been involved in contract bargaining for a conversation on democratizing the bargaining process at CUNY. A working group on the PSC budget is developing proposals and strategies to make the union budget process - and the budget itself -- more transparent and accountable to members, starting with such basics as having a meaningful review, input, and informed vote on the budget in the DA before the budget is implemented, not after, and is urging the PSC to invest more resources in organizing and mobilizing the membership.

A Cross-Group Retreat

​On August 19, seven groups from across CUNY and NYC -- Adjunct Project, Cross-CUNY Working Group Against Racism and Colonialism, CUNY for Palestine, Free CUNY, No North Brooklyn Pipeline, North Bronx Collective, and Rank and File Action (RAFA) -- held a pre-semester retreat to strengthen our CUNY and NYC organizing ecosystem. Each group shared about capacities, highlights from the last year, principles/strategies/campaigns/actions/events for 2021-2022, and how to better collaborate with each other. Coming out of the retreat, we plan to create a CUNY movement(s) calendar and a September online "club fair" so that broad CUNY communities can get activated in these various groups. Moving forward, we intend to strategically entwine a focus on free college access, campus reopening safety, revitalizing Ethnic/Gender/Sexuality Studies, open bargaining and workers' protection, cops off campus and out of our neighborhoods, community control of land and ecological defense, solidarity with Palestine and other colonized peoples, and beyond.

Updates from College of Staten Island

Aside from rallying last Spring to defend shared governance from an attempted takeover by President Fritz (who already received a vote of no confidence from faculty and staff in December 2020) the CSI-PSC leadership has fallen short in nearly all other respects. Even though commissioned to form a strike readiness committee, they have not lifted a finger. It was only because of the action committee, a group of about 6 to 7 people, that anything was done at all. We held an educational event, titled "Why Strike?" where we provided information about 1) The Attack on Public Higher Education; 2) The Taylor Law; 3) How Do We Fight Back? on the need to build a mass movement for the common good. Regarding the Palestine resolution, we foresee a similar inactivity on the part of leadership. If our action committee does not do something, nothing will be done. While our chapter president voted in favor of the resolution, many CSI-PSC members have remained silent or have publicly supported Israel, calling the use of the word 'apartheid' a form of bullying. Expanding our focus to broader social issues, which are not separated from but are in fact intimately related to our everyday lives, allows us to make demands for the common good, in solidarity with working peoples everywhere. We want to join with the Amazon workers and plan to ask Chris Smalls to give a talk about the struggle to unionize Amazon on Staten Island. As education workers, we need to be connected to that struggle too. This strategy is critical to building the class power that we need to win a strike.

Organizing at Queens: happy hour, adjunct rights & cross-title solidarity

At Queens College, the PSC chapter is less bureaucratic and more open to active participation than some chapters, but figuring out how to get involved can be hard because the service model of unionism fuels passivity and not everyone seems to understand the need to get rank-and-file members invested in chapter decision-making and organizing tasks. QC Adjuncts Unite, an autonomous group organizing on campus since 2018, has been holding biweekly Monday evening Zoom “solidarity happy hour” events where adjuncts and anyone else from the QC community can drop in to chat about what’s going on. QC Adjuncts Unite also recently co-sponsored an adjunct rights Q&A session with the chapter featuring PSC adjunct grievance counselors. Members of QC Adjuncts Unite are also involved in building a strong network of rank-and-file department co-reps, including adjunct co-reps, across QC. Email QC Adjuncts Unite at qcadjunctsunite@gmail.com and follow @QcUnite on Twitter. \n\nQueens College has been doing somewhat better with reopening than other CUNY colleges, but that’s not saying much. The PSC’s QC chapter has had five campus safety walkthroughs that push management to be more proactive on safety, but the college still hasn’t released ventilation data despite a Freedom of Information Law request, so we have to assume that none of the spaces meet PSC safety standards. Informally it seems like requests by staff to continue working remotely are getting… well, not actually approved, but not quite opposed by QC human resources. Other unions at QC are mostly silent. Many college assistants, represented by DC37, are supervised by PSC members, some of whom are pushing them to return to campus. The PSC could be doing much more CUNY-wide to address power dynamics and build cross-title solidarity by urging its members who supervise others to approve requests for continued remote work as we are doing at QC.

Adjunct Committee at John Jay

In late May 2021, John Jay adjuncts began meeting to discuss specifically adjunct concerns at the college. We launched a poll in June to assess adjunct priorities. From the poll and discussions, we identified 4 priorities: Reasonable class size, preserving adjunct health insurance, concerns over last minutes decisions by management to make changes to teaching schedules, and a demand to rehire all laid off adjuncts. We sent a letter outlining these priorities to President Karol Mason and Provost Yi Li. We asked that the $55 million that John Jay has been allocated for institutional funding be spent at least in part on these priority areas, rather than on what we have heard may be the allocation of these funds to reduce John Jay’s budget deficit. We brought our concerns to a meeting with Mason and Yi on August 5th and were roundly dismissed. Our sense of urgency increased as we felt the management’s plan for re-opening was inadequate to protect the health and safety, and indeed lives of John Jay students and workers. We had originally planned to escalate our actions with a petition and protest to call for a delay in the move to in-person classes, following the examples of Lehman College, Queens College (and later Baruch), and to start classes online for as long as needed to ensure health and safety concerns are met. Our immediate plans were put on hold due to not having enough support for these actions. But we continue to organize and will be meeting again in two weeks!

Organizing in the Bronx

Rank-and-file members at the three Bronx campuses have been organizing alongside students during the entirety of the pandemic. RAFA members have been active in the Hostos/Bronx Action Committee and the Student Strike Committee, which have been leading the struggle in The Bronx. We have organized numerous events on our own and participated in union-led efforts to oppose the racist austerity that has tightened its grip on CUNY during this period. Overcoming opposition from the administration and union leadership, we have held two caravans to the Bronx campus presidents’ houses, we hosted demonstrations on the Grand Concourse, a town hall on the history of student activism at CUNY, and a Student Speak-Out on the need to cancel bursar holds, among other things. We are geared up and ready to continue to struggle during the fall semester and are planning a number of activities, including a solidarity action with workers and students in Haiti and a caravan to the Chancellor’s house. We invite all members and students in the Bronx to get active in RAFA and anyone who would like to join the Hostos/Bronx Action Committee, please contact us at hostosactioncommittee68@gmail.com.

PSC/Delegate Assembly News

Delegates have been largely concerned with safety protocols and vaccine and mask mandates for the return to in-person instruction for many CUNY professors and staff this week. There is a lot of confusion and uneven standards around what “hybrid” instruction means; at Baruch, which incidentally has the highest percentage of in-person instruction in the system, “hybrid” can mean only one or two in-person sessions, and the chapter chair informed faculty that they could use their own discretion in switching in-person courses to remote if they feel unsafe before the vaccine mandate has officially set in. At Hunter College, chapter chair Jen Gaboury reported that many windows simply do not open; and yet hybrid instruction must be at least 50% in-person. A petition has been circulating demanding that the return of in-person classes be delayed until the vaccine mandate is established, James Davis appeared on NY1, and PSC leaders held a press conference at CUNY Central Tuesday morning with about forty people attending.