FALL 2023 Dispatch
In this issue:
Contract Campaign Action: PSC Sing Out, Shout Out on Dec. 2
Campus Responses to the War on Gaza
CUNY4Palestine Actions and Update
11/19 March on the Chancellor!
CUNY Adjunct Project
The GC Dining Commons Lives!
UAW Wins Big at the Big 3 — What Does That Mean For Us?
PSC DA Modality Fight: a Victory for Accessibility and Inclusion
RAFA Bargaining Update
Contract Campaign Action: PSC Sing Out, Shout Out on Dec. 2
Join members of the Grad Center chapter and RAFA members for a march to the Sing Out, Shout Out contract campaign rally on December 2. We will meet at the corner of 38 St and 3 Ave, in front of the D’Agostino, at 12:45pm. We will have beautiful posters, signs, and banners to help us walk up to the rally with maximum militant impact and style. #CUNYStrikeReady. Register for the rally (held @633 3rd Ave) here: https://psc-cuny.org/calendar/sing-out-shout-out-for-apeoplescuny/
Campus Responses to the War on Gaza
Since Oct. 7, CUNY college campuses have responded in various ways to student and faculty groups organizing for Palestine. Here we provide a partial round-up of campus activities, many of which showcase ongoing hostility toward Arab and Muslim students and blatant disregard of academic freedom.
Borough of Manhattan Community College:
BMCC has been dealing with targeted anti-Palestinian repression for almost a year now. In March 2023, the recently opened Social Justice & Equity Centers (SJEC) at BMCC–which included the Pride Centers, the Multicultural Centers, and the Women’s Center–hung a timeline of Palestinian occupation in the hallway. Tenured Zionist professors complained and it was eventually taken down with a statement issued by the President offering “our deepest and sincerest apologies to anyone who was offended and felt unsafe” by this exhibit (even while claiming to uphold “multiple perspectives” and “viewpoint diversity”). More egregious than this singular act of censorship is the fact that the SJEC is now shut down entirely and its employees–both women of color who are students in Hunter’s Silberman School of Social Work–terminated, even after extensive talks about future programming for the center. The administration’s official line, which is unfortunately echoed by the BMCC union chapter leaders, is that the funding for the centers ran out. But we know that repression of pro-Palestine activism stirs up currents of rightwing repression generally. And now, due to Zionist backlash, BMCC does not have a Pride Center.
In this context, organizing for Palestine at BMCC has been difficult. The Muslim Students Association organized a small protest that was pushed off campus by security officers. As for faculty, at the October chapter meeting, members passed a resolution concerning CUNY’s suppression of academic freedom against pro-Palestine voices, based on a previous GC resolution. Unfortunately, despite this seeming bright spot in our attempts to fight back, the chapter chair has refused to circulate or publish this resolution anywhere outside of the meeting, reiterating a commitment to bury its existence at the November chapter meeting. We call on union leaders to recognize and reaffirm democratic process by publicizing this resolution and ensuring the principles of academic freedom apply equally to all students and workers.
Brooklyn College:
Brooklyn College has experienced extreme repression of students speaking out for Palestine. The President of Brooklyn College, Michelle Anderson, associated students protesting for Palestine with terrorism and violence. The administration created barriers to students protesting on campus, and when the protest was held off-campus, Anderson sent an email implying that the protest was unsafe and calling on police to attend the action and “escort” students who felt unsafe. City councilwoman Inna Vernikov brought a gun to the protest and had it visibly protruding from her waistband, which is illegal in NYC, and has yet to be rebuked by Michelle Anderson. Brooklyn College has refused to host other events about Palestine, leaving Muslim students at Brooklyn College feeling unsafe and unprotected. There is a long history of Islamophobia and targeting of Brooklyn College students, including the NYPD illegally sending an undercover officer to befriend and spy on Muslim students on campus from 2011-2015.
As a result of the repression being experienced by students now, 19 Brooklyn College student organizations have stood up to demand the resignation of Michalle Anderson and have continued to mobilize for Palestine at weekly demonstrations despite the repression by the administration. Next one Weds 11/29 from 12-2 and 2-4 pm!
CCNY:
City College’s administration seems to be having the most pro-free-speech approach of the CUNY campuses so far, with the president making multiple statements affirming his commitment to academic freedom and his belief that speech that makes someone uncomfortable is different from speech that makes someone unsafe. However, at the CCNY chapter meeting, only a few members chose to speak during the section dedicated to discussing the GC chapter’s resolutions. Three faculty members were also the subject of a FOIL request from a Zionist lawyer that requested reimbursement records and emails with key words relating to Israel and Palestine.
CSI:
In October, activists called a special meeting to vote on a ceasefire resolution and while we did not have quorum and thus could not hold a binding vote, we nevertheless had a discussion regarding both the genocide in Gaza and the unacceptable, biased statements issued by Chancellor Matos and President Lynch on the crisis. A Palestinian student read a powerful statement condemning the symbolic violence and blatant double standard of the Chancellor and President’s statements, expressing a profound sense of exclusion felt by Palestinian, Muslim and Arab students at CSI. We proposed next steps that would include organizing a public assembly with President Lynch where students could address him directly. We also plan on having a second special meeting to vote on the ceasefire resolution, and we ask that other chapters call special meetings to pass a similar resolution. 10 member signatures are needed to call a special meeting. As stated in Article IX, Section 7 of the PSC constitution, "Upon receipt of such a petition, the Chairperson shall call the special meeting."
Graduate Center:
photo credit: Luigi Morris
The GC Chapter has responded to the genocide in Gaza in several ways, truly serving as a model for all other chapters. With input from organizers across the union, we wrote two versions of a resolution for the Delegate Assembly, the first focusing on the actions of the Chancellor, and the second on how our union should respond. We ended up withdrawing this resolution in response to what we saw was a twofold win: 1) PSC officials responded to the pressure generated by our first resolution by issuing a sign-on letter to the Chancellor. While weaker than our resolution, it is nonetheless light-years better than their initial statement. We encourage all members to sign the letter. 2) The pressure of the second version of our resolution resulted in the union president announcing new policies that address all of our “resolved” clauses, such as training with Faculty First Responders. We are pushing for these in writing available publicly to all. Outside the Delegate Assembly, members of the GC Chapter were key players in organizing a series of teach-ins on Palestine, as well as a rally and a powerful die-in on the steps of the Graduate Center. Two of our chapter members wrote a critical response to the Teaching and Learning Center’s disappointing piece on classroom strategies during “the ongoing violence in the Middle East”.
Queens College:
At Queens College, where Palestine solidarity organizing has been mostly invisible for nearly a decade, a new chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) was born in October. While this SJP doesn’t yet have official club status, that hasn’t stopped it from holding a couple of well-attended rallies. At one of these rallies, a group of high school students joined after staging a walkout from Townsend Harris High School, located on the QC campus. NYPD was present for both rallies, but QC students refused to hold their rallies in the police pens set up for them; instead they asserted their rights to choose their own protest locations. (Under CUNY’s “Henderson Rules,” students and workers can speak out anywhere on campus, as long as they don’t use violence or block other students or workers from accessing buildings.)
Faculty and staff at QC have been much quieter, but a few attended the SJP rallies, and others got activated in mid-November after QC president Frank Wu sent out a college-wide email on November 8, saying that he had reported the Muslim Student Association (MSA) Instagram account to the NYPD for investigation because it allegedly shared “misinformation” (a post questioning Israel’s version of Oct. 7 events). The PSC chapter executive committee declined to respond to this email as a body because of internal disagreements, but more than 50 QC faculty and staff members, along with over 200 QC students and a few alumni, signed onto an open letter expressing concern about President Wu’s attack on the students, noting the sordid history of NYPD surveillance against Muslim students in the past at QC and other CUNY colleges.
CUNY4Palestine Actions and Update:
Many members of RAFA have also been participating actively in CUNY for Palestine (C4P), which brings together CUNY workers and students fighting for Palestinian liberation. We encourage everyone to sign onto CUNY for Palestine’s October 14 statement (tiny.cc/C4P2023) and also to sign the new solidarity pledge, endorsed by over 100 organizations across the country, that calls on university students, faculty, and staff to pledge to stand together to defend our right to speak out against genocide, settler colonialism, and in solidarity with Palestine liberation (tiny.cc/PalestineSolidarityPledge). Reach out to cuny4palestine@gmail.com to be connected to Palestine solidarity organizing at your CUNY campus, and follow C4P on social media: Twitter @Cuny4P Instagram@cuny4palestine Linktree linktr.ee/cuny4palestine
End AFL-CIO Complicity with Genocide Protest!
On November 9th, CUNY for Palestine and Labor for Palestine, including several RAFA members, organized a protest against the AFL-CIO’s complicity with the US-backed zionist genocide in Gaza as part of the national Shut it Down for Palestine day of action.
Speakers drew attention to the long history of the AFL-CIO supporting settler colonial violence and dispossession in Palestine, dating back to the AFL’s endorsement of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which paved the way for the establishment of the settler colonial state of Israeli in 1948. Later, in the 1920s, the AFL raised funds for the Histadrut, which despite claims to be a labor federation has actually served as a key instrument of zionist colonization and capital accumulation. Speakers drew comparisons to the AFL-CIO’s nefarious role in promoting US imperialist policies across the global South, undermining leftist influence in trade unions and providing support for interventions against socialist and nationlist governments. Not only does the AFL-CIO leadership continue to maintain support for zionist settler colonialism through its assistance for the Histadrut as well as investing millions in the Israeli government through the purchase of bonds without consultation with its members; it has consistently opposed the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and has taken steps to prevent members from adopting or event discussing resolutions related to BDS or Palestinian rights. For example, two years ago, the AFL-CIO leadership used a procedural rule to tell the San Francisco Labor Council that it could not even debate a resolution on BDS. More recently, after a central labor council in Olympia, Washington, unanimously passed a cease-fire and Palestine solidarity resolution, the national AFL-CIO stepped in to quash the measure.
Speakers at the rally addressed the need to challenge the labor bureaucrats and zionist gatekeepers and heed the call of the Palestinian federation trade unions as many internationalist trade unionists have already done by bringing union resolutions condemning the genocide and calling for an end to US military and political support for Israel as well as mobilizing our collective power in the workplace by blocking the transport of weapons for Israel along various points of the supply chain.
March on the Chancellor!
Together with CUNY4Palestine, RAFA organized a March on the Chancellor on Nov. 19. Originally planned before October 7, this event morphed from a focus on neoliberal austerity and adjunct impoverishment to incorporate the very much related issue of repression and attacks on Palestinian solidarity efforts at CUNY. About 40 students and workers marched from the Pelham train station to the Chancellor’s home in the Westchester suburb of Pelham, where we enjoyed chants and speeches against racist austerity, genocide, and political repression, and a picnic lunch on the chancellor’s front yard.
The Adjunct Project is So Back
The Adjunct Project is an initiative of the Doctoral and Graduate Students’ Council at the Graduate Center. It is tasked with providing information about adjunct struggles, doing event programming and connecting student and worker struggles on the Grad Center campus. It had lain dormant for a while, but in the Spring semester the DGSC brought in three new coordinators: Giacomo Bianchino, Justin Beauchamp and Nikita Meghani. The coordinators will be providing bargaining updates to students and workers at the GC, while also developing resources for adjunct organizing across CUNY. You can follow their work on their website, or in social media (Twitter: @GCadjuncts, insta: gcadjuncts). Look out for their monthly newsletter!
Presidents Pass; The Commons Remain
At the end of August, as GC activists were preparing to welcome a new raft of students at campus orientation meetings, we received word that the Dining Commons on level 8 had been shut down. This had been a site of struggle for a whole semester, as we fought against the administration’s indifference to our wellbeing and refusal to restore dining services to the GC. We built the Commons into a space of solidarity and education, hosting regular events and providing food and other resources for free to impoverished students and workers. After the closing of the commons, we started another mobile pantry in the Foundation Lounge on level one. The administration removed it a number of times, and recommended in an email that students go on food stamps if they’re hungry. Then, seemingly from nowhere, GC folks received an email from Garrell, declaring that she was stepping down as President. She will be replaced by union-friendly Dean of Sciences Joshua Brumberg as interim president. Through our activism, we had won commitments from admin to reopen the cafeteria and establish a permanent pantry at their expense. Garrell’s closure of the Reclaimed Commons was clearly a last “fuck you” as she made to exit the building. Reclaim the Commons, GC RAFA and the PSC GC Chapter all welcome her resignation, taking it as yet another major victory in a year of successful campaigns. Her presidency was marked by indifference and managerial hubris. She is gone now, but we are still here: it takes more than a padlock to enclose the Commons.
UAW Wins Big at the Big 3 — What Does That Mean For Us?
The UAW’s new contracts at Ford, GM, and Stellantis won enormous raises and other key wins like the elimination of some tiers of workers, the reopening of a closed plant, and the right to strike over plant closures. Some of the lowest-paid full time workers will go from making around $35k to over $80k per year over the course of the contract. We’ve already seen reverberations — Toyota raised wages very soon after the contracts were announced. A huge win like this one can have a galvanizing effect across the whole labor movement — why shouldn’t our own lowest-paid workers get 25% raises effective immediately, if they can win it? UAW also represents many higher ed workers at other universities, so workers in those unions might be particularly inspired to shoot for more ambitious demands and with more militant language and strategy. Always remember, a rising tide lifts all boats!
PSC DA Modality Fight: a Victory for Accessibility and Inclusion
In October, the PSC Executive Council put forward a resolution that they hoped would force delegates and alternates back to in-person meetings of the Delegate Assembly, after spending the past year ignoring multiple, well-reasoned arguments from DA members demanding equal access to remote participation. The resolution sought to set up “a one-year pilot in which remote attendance is made available and in-person attendance is expressly preferred,” where remote attendance would only be available to delegates and alternates who have a disability or a health condition or whose work at CUNY was fully remote.
RAFA delegates and alternates joined many others in condemning the resolution, noting that the union should be doing whatever it can to increase participation, not limiting it, and pointing out that the EC was sowing division, eroding morale, and losing credibility at a crucial time in contract negotiations. At the DA itself, RAFA delegates moved an amendment that maintained the commitment to remote attendance while eliminating all restrictions on it, ensuring inclusion and accessibility going forward for not only delegates and alternates but for all PSC members attending the DA meetings. The amendment passed overwhelmingly, a major victory for DA members who had grown tired of being browbeaten by PSC leadership over their support for remote attendance. The amendment eliminated reference to a one-year pilot, so the policy does not need to be revisited in the future.
RAFA Bargaining Update
by Nathan Nikolic
RAFA members would like to express, first of all, how excited we are to have a version of open bargaining, something RAFA has long advocated. We applaud PSC Leadership’s commitment to inviting all union members to attend a session (multiple sessions where space permits) and the timely bargaining updates they have sent to the membership after each session. We also appreciate the Q&A periods during caucus breaks and after each session where members share their observations and suggestions with the bargaining team and each other. The mass inclusion of rank-and-file members in the bargaining process is a welcome change from previous rounds of negotiations. We hope to see the Principal Officers continue to prioritize member engagement and transparency throughout the contract campaign.
Currently, negotiations are stalled due to a medical emergency facing CUNY’s chief negotiator. But once they are restarted, we have a few concerns and suggestions about the bargaining process so far. These are all aimed at building broad-base engagement and our power as a union.
Bargaining Orientations–these could be conducted asynchronously rather than synchronously so that more members can become involved. If the Leadership insists on having live orientations beforehand, they should at least deputize PSC staff organizers and Chapter leaders to hold them regularly at each campus.
Taking Member Comments Seriously–Members have repeatedly asked for the Bargaining Team to bring copies of the materials they are providing to Management for attending members to follow along. Each time someone brings this up, there seems to be general agreement, but at the next session there are still no copies for the members.
Full Bargaining Updates–The bargaining updates so far have overwhelmingly focused on the proposals PSC Leadership has brought to the table. There has been some focus on Management’s responses and proposals but not enough. From statements like “Remote work is not a right” to dismissive remarks about the effects of racial disparities during the pandemic, to the disgusting claim that the University is not actually responsible for making sure its workers can buy food and put a roof over their heads, Management’s negotiating team has said some truly egregious things, and it is clear that they are looking not only to reject any proposals we are making during this round of bargaining but to erode the protections and gains of previous contracts. We want members to understand the extremely recalcitrant stance CUNY Management have taken thus far in order to understand what kind of organizing and power it will take to win a good contract.
Addressing the Elephant in the Room: How Can We Actually Win?–we have had few open and honest conversations about what it will actually take to win even the most modest demands in our bargaining agenda, let alone the more radical ones. In addition to building strike readiness, the only real weapon we have, we should consider coordinating symbolic actions at bargaining sessions that involve protests, disruptions, and other actions that signal to Management our commitment to winning the demands we’ve put forward and our rejection of their neoliberal austerity agenda.
Inadequate Demands for Adjuncts–The Bargaining Team has called for a parity demand between Adjuncts and Lecturers that would raise the minimum pay per 3-credit class to about $7,200 dollars at the beginning of our new contract and to about 10k at the end of five years (this assumes that we also win certain salary demands for Lecturers). While an immediate 2k raise per class would mean a lot for most adjuncts, we don’t understand why the Bargaining Team is not coming to the table with a higher demand, especially taking into account the fact that we will probably negotiate down from any proposed number over the course of bargaining. We believe that Leadership should adopt the Adjunct and Part-Timer Platform Committee’s demand for 13k per 3-credit class as a starting point, understanding that we are unlikely to win the full amounts of any proposals we put forward.
Bargaining for the Common Good/Fully Open Bargaining–While we are thrilled to see so many PSC members attending bargaining, we believe sessions should be opened up to our students and the broader NYC community. CUNY is a public institution, funded primarily through taxpayer dollars, and everyone in NYC therefore has a stake in it. We should hear from students and NYC residents about their vision for a People’s CUNY. We should all stand in solidarity to support PSC member demands, student demands, and broader struggles for social justice in our communities. Let’s push for a contract that includes the elimination of tuition, small class sizes, adequate advisors and support staff, a contract that gets the NYPD and military recruiters off our campuses and establishes community control of university resources and governance.