April Dispatch
In this issue!
RAFA and UUP Member Action Coalition (MAC) Statement on the New York Budget
An update on CUNY writing centers
On democratizing contract negotiations
ALU’s union victory and CUNY
Who are the lecturer lines going to?
A report on the 4/14 Delegate Assembly
A history of the Adjunct Faculty Association
Join the New Member PSC Book Club!
RAFA and UUP Member Action Coalition (MAC) Statement on the New York Budget
Rank and File Action and UUP Member Action Coalition are angered by the Enacted Budget that Governor Hochul and the legislature approved last Friday. After decades of state austerity in public higher education that has created racialized patterns of acute underinvestment across SUNY and CUNY, New York politicians promised this would be the year of massive reinvestment. In the end, they delivered a miniscule percentage of the many billions in cumulative cuts in real core operating dollars to CUNY and SUNY since the Great Recession.
It is past time for our unions to rethink lobbying as our primary tool in winning a just state budget. We call for a strategy that also includes preparing for job actions, up to and including strikes, timed around key budget dates. And we call on PSC and UUP leaderships to provide the support required by members as we collectively organize toward these actions, in coalition with higher ed unions, community partners, students, and their families. The power of unions is in rank and file members, not relationships with politicians, and it’s time higher education unionists start acting like it. We can and should do much more to fight for the state investments in CUNY and SUNY that our students so richly deserve. Together, we can win!
An Update on CUNY Writing Centers
Olivia W
Last month, we shared some information about the outsourcing of CUNY writing centers. Several folks got in touch with further information about this topic. One person shared that at BMCC, and likely at other campuses, writing center tutors are paid for by grants through the Research Foundation, which is un-unionized at most campuses. Even tutors with graduate degrees, who would be hired as non-teaching adjuncts under a PSC title, make less than $20 an hour, less than half the NTA rate of $46.49.
Democratizing Contract Negotiations
More and more unions–including higher ed worker unions–are adopting open bargaining procedures, where rank and file members are invited to participate and contribute to contract negotiations. Given management’s access to expensive union busting lawyers and other resources, the worker side is at a disadvantage when negotiations take place behind closed doors.
Opening up bargaining taps into the power of the union, which is its membership. Higher Ed workers who participate in open bargaining emphasize the organizing force of members hearing for themselves how management talks to and about workers. Management fears open bargaining –because it makes the union stronger. Multiple PSC delegates have raised PSC bargaining procedures on PSC listservs in the past month, explaining the advantages of open bargaining (see the GC chapter event on this). So far, the PSC bargaining team, limited to the Executive Council members, has remained silent on the subject of bargaining procedures, open or closed. On 04/11, PSC president James Davis sent a bargaining agreement for research professors to the Delegate Assembly, asking delegates to approve it mere three days later, raising concerns about transparency of the process. Looking forward to the the negotiations of the next contract, a member of the Executive Council told the Delegate Assembly that “no decisions have been made about what tactics and which process would work best in winning a good contract for PSC members.”
We look forward to participating in this decision making process. RAFA and allies plan to include open bargaining in our tabling, phone banking, and outreach campaigns as a key issue that connects to our vision for a democratic social justice union.
If you would like to table on your campus please fill out this form: https://forms.gle/c7vXchhAWr1izYqm6
The Staten Island Vote Heard Around The World
Chris S & Jay A
The Staten Island working class has sent an important message that has been heard above all the hype and propaganda about wars at the Oscars and Ukraine–there is no war but class war!
Despite Bezos and his henchmen and women spending millions on consultants spewing anti-union propaganda, including compulsory worker attendance at re-education meetings/camps, and all kinds of other forms of intimidation and repression, including NYPD arrests of organizers, SI Amazon workers won the union election vote–2,654-2,131.
We at the CSI Department of Sociology & Anthropology are especially proud about this victory since Karen Ponce, one of our graduates and part of the CSI Solidarity community, has been a worker-leader on the battlefield taking on Bezos and the billionaire class. Kudos Karen!
Although not endorsed by the chapter, Rank and File members of the CSI/PSC chapter worked with Karen and other ALU militants, along with longtime SI community and labor activists, to organize solidarity action at the SI Amazon warehouse on Sunday March 20, a few days before the vote started.
Of course, while the election was a huge victory, the next phase of winning a good contract against criminals who plan to not offer anything at the bargaining table has now begun. To win at this stage we must make the struggle at SI Amazon into a fight of the entire working class, including those of us at CUNY. The March 20th action was a small step in that direction.
One way to connect would be to invite Amazon workers, like Karen, to give a report on the struggle to our union meetings. That would be much more productive than officials from the Democratic Party, who have prosecuted the decades long war against unions, that we usually get.
Another possible way of connecting the struggles is regarding the partnership CUNY has with Amazon on tuition reimbursements. Instead of these crumbs, we need to demand a wealth tax on the billionaires like Bezos to pay for a FREE CUNY for ALL, ending the multiple tier divides, money for research, and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure–which the additional crumbs from Albany this year go nowhere near what we need.
And let's remember that stepping up the class struggle at home–which the ruling class fueled war fever, on all sides, is designed to smother–is key to building an effective anti-war, anti-imperialist, movement.
No War But Class War!
Who are these Lecturer Lines Going To? We need to Hire from Within!
It’s currently unclear how many of the full time Lecturer lines are going to candidates from within the CUNY system. A new “Hiring from Within for Excellence and Justice” campaign within the PSC is pushing for hiring committees to prioritize internal candidates, recognizing the hardships our adjuncts have faced for years and trusting that they have the skills, the credentials, the institutional knowledge, and the commitment to the CUNY population to be strong and viable candidates. We are going to need a lot more than statements to change the culture from within and put real pressure on P&B committees across CUNY.
We need mandates (as much as is possible); we need both pressure and support from PSC leaders and department chairs; and we need open conversations about implicit biases and assumptions that cause our very own adjuncts to be overlooked, contributing to their sense of being altogether undervalued and unseen. We also need conversion lines and clearer pathways to full time work that do not involve competition with external candidates who carry fancy credentials and the veneer of newness. No one measure is going to address this problem, or indeed the problem of full time positions potentially taking away courses from adjunct lecturers who depend on this ongoing paycheck.
One very small measure–that, again, will not fix the system or fix the culture, but may work in service of shifting it incrementally in the right direction–is to provide resources that help internal candidates understand and master the job search as a whole.
A cross-disciplinary professional development workshop on job market materials is being planned within the PSC for Friday May 6, 3:30-5:50 PM, over Zoom. There will be breakout rooms by discipline, and opportunities to form support groups afterwards to maintain contact throughout the summer, and to ensure that we don’t let the system of competition divide us.
Please look out for an official PSC email announcing the event with Zoom information, but if you would like to make sure you receive it, simply write to rafa.cuny@gmail.com and we will make sure it gets to you.
Report on the 4/14 Delegate Assembly
The PSC Delegate Assembly quickly and almost unanimously passed a resolution calling on President Biden to cancel student debt, joining the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties and Rutgers AAUP-AFT who passed similar resolutions this week. The resolutions follow an effective Debt Collective action in Washington D.C. earlier this month, that resulted in yet another postponement of student debt collections. Student debt cancellation will benefit higher education workers saddled with debt–especially those already more precarious–as well as our students, families, and community members. It’s a no brainer!
In the same meeting, delegates voted to approve the memorandum of agreement that the PSC negotiated on behalf of the newest category of members, Research Professors. Many concerns and questions were raised about the process and content of the agreement, not least the measly raises that constitute pay cuts, and the sinister implications for other job titles.
In a discussion of the failed New Deal For CUNY, the Brooklyn College chapter executive committee broke away from the “celebrating the loss as a win” narrative with a strong statement decrying low expectations and refusing to thank Hochul, instead condemning her for a slew of reprehensible policies like the rollback of bail reform. The BC EC stated its commitment to getting strike ready.
The Adjunct Faculty Association: A History and a Legacy
Nic N
The CUNY Digital History Archive aggregates the digital (and digitizes the analog) history of CUNY and pulls together flyers, pamphlets, articles, and talks that create the story of CUNY. Within that story, exists the now-defunct Adjunct Faculty Association–a cousin and precursor to RAFA. And much like this dispatch, the AFA had its own newsletter and issued its first edition in February of 1974.
As 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the formation of the PSC, the importance of looking back seems obvious. And in that looking back, it is clear that from the beginning the division between full time and part time faculty (and staff) representation within the union is both a key feature and the union’s greatest, continuous failure. In negotiating that first contract, an ad hoc and autonomous committee was created to advocate for adjuncts and part timers: the Adjunct and Part-Time Faculty Caucus. The Caucus decided on 19 demands, with equal pay and benefits for equal work at the center of their platform.
From that first contract, a strategy for winning benefits for adjuncts and part timers would oscillate between inside and outside tactics. After what was seen as a failure of a first contract for adjuncts and part timers (partially because the Caucus was shut out of the bargaining by the Board of Higher Education and the PSC because the request came too late), the Caucus abandoned its inside tactic–which called for adjuncts to join the union en masse to influence the bargaining. In the wake of the contract and its failures, they embraced a more outsider role, and the Adjunct Faculty Association was born as an organization to agitate and advocate.
It is clear the issues adjuncts and part timers faced in the 1970s are the issues we face today, and in their first newsletter they write about disproportionate pay and pay cuts among other issues. It was an organization promoting material equality for adjuncts and strike readiness as can be found in their 1975 pamphlet “An Appeal to the Faculty to Vote for a Strike.” Although there isn’t a plethora of materials from the AFA in the digital archive, it is clear they were functioning until at least 1994 when the John Jay chapter of the AFA issued the flier “Equal Pay for Equal Work.” The flier made several demands to address the adjunct/full time pay gap including: “salary adjustments, paid office hours, job security, governance inclusion, job flexibility, and support for scholarly activities by adjuncts” according to the archive.
Whether or not history is repeating or simply rhyming, the issues we are confronting today have existed as long as the PSC has, and that the legacy in which RAFA finds itself is a rich one filled with dedicated activists and organizers. As we discussed above, open bargaining in the next contract is crucial to fighting for adjunct and part timer rights and benefits. Although the 1972 Caucus was shut out of negotiations, the independent formation of the AFA paved the way for the fight for adjuncts and part timers from outside official union bodies at the very beginning of the PSC. It is fitting that the current contract expires as the PSC turns 50, and with this history in mind, we will be here, with our allies, to carry on the fight of the AFA.
New PSC Member Book Club!
A newly formed PSC Member Book Club will be tackling Democracy is Power at their first meeting.
On Democracy is Power:
Do you want to know how to run your local union more effectively or how to get more members involved? Democracy Is Power, by Mike Parker and Martha Gruelle, provide a blueprint for building a member-driven union. They demonstrate what member control really looks like, and why it is crucial to labor's future.
With a focus on union activity in the workplace, the authors describe democratic approaches to contracts, grievances, communications, and leaders’ relationship with members. They shine a revealing light on democratic union culture, yet also address the more obvious parts of democracy, like elections and bylaws.
The Book Club will meet on Saturday, May 14th, at 2pm, at an outdoor venue (TBD)
Democracy is Power is currently unavailable in physical copy (after the tragic damage to Labor Notes' home office after a flood), but RSVP here for a PDF copy. Please consider making a donation to Labor Notes if you will be attending, since we are not paying for each book.
RSVP here if you would like to attend (or even if you can’t but would like to be invited to future book clubs).