March 2024: CUNY Drags Its Feet, Strike School Increases the Heat
In This Issue!
Strike School Educates the PSC
The Taylor Law Was Made to Be Broken
One Year Without a Contract
Analysis by RAFA Members of Bargaining Progress
Launch of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine
Strike School Educates the PSC
CUNY on Strike has been hosting Strike Schools since January aiming to educate CUNY workers and students about the value of striking and why we should build this muscle memory back despite the illegality of striking in New York State. The second strike school, held over Zoom on February 22nd, had over 100 attendees and featured riveting presentations about the collective work of building a strike threat. The slow drip of austerity funding processes has been starving CUNY for decades: since 1992 we’ve seen a 40% drop in state funding per student, since 2020 we’ve lost 852 full-time positions, and we are currently grappling with major cuts to 9 ‘colleges of concern.’ Additionally, the adjunctification of CUNY is rising apace, and CUNY staff have experienced ballooning workloads and inflexible scheduling, harming students and putting us all on shaky ground. Given inflation, everyone except top administrators have had their wages cut since 2012.
We are all living and working through these cuts so it is sometimes hard to step back and see the big picture. All too often, our union asks: what are the consequences of striking? A better question might be: what are the consequences of not striking? Over decades, the consequences have been poverty wages, austerity, and precarity. A credible strike threat is all that will save us.
The Taylor Law Was Made to Be Broken
Watch a recording of this event on YouTube.
Over 100 PSC members gathered online and in-person to hear Josh Freeman (labor historian and former CUNY professor) discuss the history of the Taylor Law and its implications for strike organizing in the present. Dr. Freeman explained that there have been what he would call successful strikes under the Taylor Law, particularly the Transit Workers United strike in 1980 but that the consequences of violating the law are serious. They include the loss of two days pay for every day on strike, suspension of automatic dues collection for the union, and possible imprisonment of union leaders. This is why, as CUNY on Strike organizers have been arguing, and Dr. Freeman agrees, building a successful strike campaign will require the active engagement of the entire PSC membership and strong logistical leadership in terms of establishing a strike fund and making sure we have the legal resources we need to fight this unjust law.
Dr. Freeman made one other point we would like to highlight. He doesn’t know of any union or individual that’s been prosecuted under the Taylor Law for organizing towards strike readiness, which is what CUNY on Strike is attempting to do.
One Year of an Expired Contract
On Feb. 29, CUNY workers and students “celebrated” the year expiry of our contract. Informational pickets were held across CUNY campuses, particularly the 9 “campuses of concern” facing deep budget cuts. Here are some highlights across our schools:
York College
About 25 PSC members gathered in the atrium of York College’s main academic building to share a few pizzas and talk to passing students and faculty about the disastrous budget cuts facing York (over 11 million dollars, about 15% of York’s budget, in FY 2024). Among the crowd were familiar faces as well as some newcomers. Our organizing power at York is growing slowly but surely. We then marched to the administration offices chanting “What do we want? A good contract! When do we want it? Now!” and “Wages up, tuition down, New York is a union town!”
Baruch
On February 29th, a healthy medley of students, staff, and faculty gathered in the lobby of the campus’s Vertical Building for a speak-out to mark 1-year that we in the Professional Staff Congress have been working without a contract. We heard from adjuncts, full-timers, and higher education officers who spoke on the increasingly bleak working conditions and on their love of CUNY, its students, and the institution that we produce together.. Meeks Samuel, chair of the Baruch chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) spoke on the ballooning class sizes and the deeply shared interests of the students and workers of CUNY. Chants of “FREE CUNY!” were heard throughout Baruch’s bustling Vertical Building.
Prof. Schools + Guttman
Professional Schools members of the Graduate Center chapter joined forces with PSC members from Guttman Community College and CUNY Central for an informational picket in front of the School of Labor and Urban Studies. About 30 workers from SLU, SPS, Guttman, and Central formed a picket line on the busy West 43 Street, chanting about the expired contract, adjunct wages, and union power. We gave out hundreds of flyers to passersby, many of whom expressed support.
RAFA Members Analyze Bargaining Process
Bargaining Report 2/7:
Petty Proposals in the Face of Collective Power
by Sofya Aptekar
This bargaining session was the second after bargaining restarted this year, and it was held at CUNY Central, with a couple of dozen PSC members observing. The first half of the session involved management presenting proposals. Many of these seemed like petty ways to save relatively small amounts of money while eroding the working conditions of our members. For instance, they proposed making it a shared responsibility for an employee to get an evaluation memo within 10 days after a conference or observation. So if you don’t get your evaluation, it’s on you for not having asked. And they want it to be that if you did not ask to see your personnel file, you relinquish your right to claim that it is incomplete. Additionally, they want to cut off email access for our retirees and eliminate language that vaguely promises faculty offices. Petty garbage!
Our bargaining team also presented proposals. The two that stuck out for me had to do with CLIP (CUNY Language Immersion Program) and CUNY START instructors and college lab technicians. Fellow members in these titles were present to speak to what their work is like and make a strong case for job security, pay equity, and fair promotion policies. I think management will be swayed by fear of our collective power, not by logic or compassion, but these presentations were educational for fellow members not in those titles. Both sides also discussed moving the work of developing proposals into small committees. The new consultant on the management side, Gary Dellaverson (how much is CUNY paying him??), seemed less than thrilled with the presence of all of us observers at bargaining. It’s a tremendous step towards union power and democracy to have opened up bargaining sessions to members. The fact that management would prefer small committees closed to members should be a reason to keep and grow our new bargaining policies. Or open up committees the same way. I would sign up to observe!
CUNY Puts Its Gun on the Table. How Will Our Union Respond?
By Marc Kagan
You can read the union leadership’s report on the February 29th bargaining session here. It accurately itemizes a variety of PSC and management proposals. Most, on both sides, will likely never see the light of day again, or (in the case of union demands) will be “paid for” by small deductions from the general wage settlement.
The most significant features of the day were management’s proposal to completely eviscerate the existing 3-year appointment for Adjunct faculty; the bargaining team’s agreement to send most bargaining to closed sub-committees; and their defense of the decision to end most open bargaining in the post-bargaining “debrief” to the hundred members who had come to the union hall to show our support.
Under normal circumstances, management’s extreme desire to basically end the 3-year appointment, the most important gain of the 2016 contract, would disappear into the ether along with many other of its “wish list” demands.
But our circumstances are not “normal.” Management has declared that, because the 3-year appointment provision was written into the contract as a “pilot program,” it does not have to make those appointments (or reappointments) this spring – even though the provision specifically runs “through the end of the 2023-2024 academic year.” We don’t understand why the union leadership accepts this premise. But because they do, it puts them, and us, in a very difficult situation, where management can implement its threat against 1000 or so of our most senior and longest-serving Adjunct faculty unless it secures a contract to its liking in the next two months.
In other words, they’ve pulled out their gun and put it on the table. Their plan is that we will need to buy back existing rights on this (or on remote and other flexible work) with concessions on wages or working conditions. So, where is our gun? Where is our show of force, or power, against management?
Meanwhile, the bargaining team agreed to management’s demand that the sessions of subcommittees on Costing (the economic value of different contract items), Ed Tech, 3-Year Appointments, and Professional Development be closed to the PSC members who want to observe. (There was some indication there will be others as well.)
During the post-bargaining debrief, several of the Principal Officers defended this decision. One said, “with full transparency we can’t get the best contract.” Another said the reason CUNY has not responded to our proposals is because there are so many people in the room. A third said it was the only way to talk to management on specific issues.
Many members pushed back on this as a misbegotten strategy, made unilaterally without notice to, or consultation with, the union’s Delegate Assembly. They replied that it shows a lack of trust in the members to think we can’t understand, or would somehow prevent in-depth discussion. If management has so far been uneasy with members in the room, all the more reason not to give away that leverage and power. Keeping the meetings open will force management to be more selective about their words and battlefields when they know members are watching and care deeply. And we want members to continue reporting back to their co-workers.
Our real problem is that, after a year without a contract, the bargaining team is floundering. It’s under pressure from management’s threat to yank the 3-year appointments, but has developed no theory or plan to demonstrate countervailing union power. It hopes that, in secret, the same management that issues threats and swings a mid-year budget ax, will be more conciliatory. But this is grasping at straws. More likely is the prospect that union subcommittee members will feel themselves “liberated” to begin to discuss paring back demands, or even making concessions. That’s the best reason of all to keep all bargaining open.
Hansel Memo: Accountability and Control
In late January, Executive Vice Chancellor Wendy Hansel issued a memo directing CUNY college administrations to reduce costs “without compromising academic quality.” This memo affects all of us workers and students at CUNY, and it is important to examine its content. How does EVC Hansel want our bosses to make these cuts? Central to her plan is “optimal scheduling”, requiring increasing enrolled section sizes and raising minimal percent fill rates for classes to run to 85%. The memo refers to the need to “socialize” campuses into a culture of optimized scheduling, presumably aimed at staff and faculty scrambling to provide courses students need to graduate while preserving the health coverage and livelihoods of adjunct coworkers. “Accountability is a partner to control,” writes Hansel, as she calls for increasing course caps and section floors. If accountability and control do not inspire you, rest assured that failure to comply with the memo might lead to money taken away from faculty development and hiring.
Next steps? Closure or consolidation of programs that are not meeting enrolment and degree production criteria. Further mockery of faculty governance with administration using the student surveillance software Navigate to cut “unproductive credits” and classes with high failure rates. We reject this attempt to undermine our power as workers and the education of our students.
Program Eliminations Across the U.S. And Our Situation At CUNY
by Olivia Wood
The Hansel memo described above says programs across CUNY may be eliminated after a systematic program review. These types of “academic program reviews” and subsequent eliminations (alongside the layoffs of tenured faculty) are already happening across the United States, such as at West Virginia University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and two SUNY schools. While being a unionized workforce does make us more prepared to fight such attacks, it will still require a fight. In the 70s and 90s, the PSC was able to successfully reduce the number of retrenchments (firing of tenured and certificated faculty and staff), but it was not able to prevent them entirely; as the program review commences, we will all need to mobilize to protect each other. Read more about the nationwide attacks and our situation at CUNY in Olivia’s article in Left Voice, “U.S. Higher Education Is Being Gutted, but We Can Fight Back.”
Launch of CUNY FSJP (Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine)
CUNY now has a chapter as part of the national network of Faculty for Justice in Palestine. On March 18, this group held a name-reading vigil for Gaza after the Robert Fitch memorial lecture given by Robin D.G. Kelley at LaGuardia Community College. You can watch a recording of the vigil on their Instagram page here. If you would like to join CUNY FSJP, send an email to CUNYFSJP@gmail.com with “Request to Join” in the message.
Save The Date: Fight the MLC for Healthcare Workers Deserve - Sat. 4/13
Behind closed doors and without any consultation or input from those who would be affected by their decision, the Municipal Labor Committee agreed to change retirees' health coverage from traditional Medicare to private Medicare Advantage. Violating a fundamental principle of union democracy, retirees had no right to vote on this change.
Now the MLC and the City are in the process of changing the health coverage for those who are still working. Register for our forum where we will examine the resistance that the MLC's modus operandi has generated and discuss what it would take to make this organization transparent and democratic.