November dispatch

Written By RAFA CUNY

On November 20th, TNS management shared their "last, best, and final offer" and cut off negotiations. As explained in an email the bargaining committee sent out ahead of the vote on management’s contract, the “offer does more harm than good”:

  • It gives the university unlimited authority to hike out-of-pocket health care costs & could force some faculty and their families from our current insurance onto a costly and risky high deductible plan.

  • It chips away at long-time faculty members’ job security and would allow the university to continue to churn through new faculty, hiring and then firing after 8 semesters.

  • It does not provide real recourse against harassment/discrimination, even though this costs the university nothing.

  • It would result in declining real dollar wages.

If a majority of New School Adjuncts vote NO on this contract, the bargaining committee will push for continued negotiations with a mediator. In the meantime, TNS part-timers remain on strike and ask for the support and solidarity of CUNY and other NYC academic workers at the picket line. Specifically, they have asked for supporters from the PSC to join the picket line on Thursday (12/1) from 2-4pm. Please join if you can! 
 

Fordham Contingent Faculty Launch Strike Authorization Vote

Fordham Faculty United (SEIU Local 200 United), the union representing adjuncts, postdocs, and non-tenure track full time faculty at Fordham University, launched their Strike Authorization Vote this week, with an intended strike date of January 30. FFU asks all academic workers in the NYC area to sign the No Scab Pledge initiated by adjunct faculty at UAW-7902 (NYU and the New School). You can follow FFU's contract fight on Twitter and Instagram and learn more in the section of the Dispatch below about the Platform Committee’s Cross-Union Adjunct Struggle meeting.

This year, or any year:
Don’t Give to CUNY on Giving Tuesday! 

You probably have seen the emails asking you to donate money to CUNY. Rank and File Action urges you to ignore these emails! We don’t hold this position because we’re uncharitable or because we don’t care about CUNY workers or students. We urge you to ignore these emails because CUNY has relegated the bulk of its employees to poverty wages and diminishes its student’s education day by day with racist cutbacks. Giving them money won’t change this. Only solidarity between CUNY workers and students and militant opposition to these attacks has a chance to succeed.

 More than half of CUNY employees are part-time, struggling to cobble together a living wage by teaching at multiple CUNY campuses, and often working other jobs as well. There are CUNY part-time employees facing homelessness, hunger, and eviction. Through numerous contract campaigns we have struggled to force CUNY to pay its part-timers a decent wage, only to be told time and time again that it wasn’t possible. Full-timers are in a relatively better position but have also seen their real earnings diminish with one below-inflation raise after another. And now they hold out a hand and ask us to give them money?  We say no.

 CUNY used to be free. From its founding in the late 1800s until 1975, students, who were predominantly white, paid no tuition. After the historic student struggles to open CUNY to the vast number of BIPOC students of New York City, they responded by imposing tuition that has been going up ever since. At the same time, racist disinvestment from the city and state mean that CUNY has had to operate with steadily shrinking public funding. Students are thus caught in the racist vice grip of rising tuition and shrinking public investment. CUNY students are also disproportionately from low socio-economic status households: more than 50% come from families with household income less than $30,000. CUNY students: don’t give away your hard-earned money to a university that proves all the time that it doesn’t care about your education!

 Giving money to CUNY will never produce living wages for its workers or a decent education for its students. Giving money to CUNY is just one of the many attempts they employ to bind us together as “one big family,” urging us to see CUNY’s racist administration as our friends. It is an attempt to get us to ignore the systemic injustice at CUNY’s rotting center. Don’t fall for it! Rather than give money to CUNY we urge you to get involved in one of the many groups at CUNY that are actually fighting to make this place a decent place to work and learn, like RAFA for example! 

Amending the New York State Constitution
to Include the Right to Strike

NYS Public Employees' Fair Employment Act, aka the Taylor Law, prohibits public sector workers from going on strike. PSC GC Chapter members Sofya Aptekar and Marc Kagan and HEO Chapter member Gerry Martini recently participated in a zoom meeting with State Senator Jabari Bisport, the Chief of Staff of Assembly Member Emily Gallagher, and others, to discuss recently introduced legislation that would amend the NYS Constitution - rather than the Taylor Law itself - to enshrine the legal right of public employees (and farmworkers) to strike.

The legislation as currently written (Bill A9115/S9191) simply adds the word “strike” to Article I, Section 17 of the constitution: 

Employees shall have the right to organize, strike, and to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing.

Amending the constitution requires passage by two successive sessions of the NYS legislature (i.e., with an election in-between) and then approval by voters. Accordingly, this would be a long-term process, but an exciting one. It creates a basis for activists to have discussion within their unions about the value of being able to strike and the necessity for support of this legislation. In other words, it would immediately put the idea of striking back on the radar of public employees and, if passed, prevent the punitive penalties that now exist.

By seeking to amend the constitution rather than the Taylor Law itself, this path heads off any attempt to “trade” the right to strike for abolition of the “Triborough amendment,” which prevents employers from unilaterally changing the terms of a contract (wages, health benefits, working conditions, etc.) when a contract expires.   

There are legal questions to consider. How would the courts and the Public Employee Relations Board (which regulates the Taylor Law) interpret this wording? Which parts of the Taylor Law would become unconstitutional? What political compromises (changes of language) might be necessary to pass the amendment?

All of these are appropriate questions – which nonetheless should not stop us from immediately beginning to agitate for PSC to support this legislation as written, and to actively participate in ongoing discussions about how to ensure its passage.

RAFA and MAC team up for a town hall on
Breaking Unjust Laws

On November 10, UUP Mass Action Coalition and RAFA held a second joint town-hall to discuss organizing against the state laws that make striking for public sector workers illegal (see video here). Two panelists from public sector unions in other states where such laws are on the books shared how they decided to break the law and why it was worth it. Mark Higbee, the vice president of AAUP at Eastern Michigan University, reported that EMU workers tapped into their history of illegal strikes and community support in what is an industrial union state where people understand bad faith bargaining by management. They authorized their strike the day after their contract expired and right before the semester, and managed to save healthcare for all campus workers as well as winning large raises. 

There is a wave of teacher strikes in defiance of the unjust anti-strike law in Massachusetts right now. Jessica Wender-Shubow, the president of Brookline Educators, stressed that the union rank-and-file made the union go on strike, tired of being told to do the same things that do not work. Members felt that they could no longer wait for permission to achieve self-respect and dignity. Union activists talked to 95% of members and knew what the strike vote would be before they held it. People fought for the most vulnerable workers in their union. The union decided that paying the fine to the school district as a penalty was worth it. The collective action was scary, stressful, but also joyful and empowering and is now spreading like wildfire across the state, in defiance of unjust laws. Educator unions are bargaining for the common good, including eviction moratoriums, and locals are helping each other pay the strike penalties. Jessica said it was no longer Colgate versus Crest as far as strategy: we need to enact principled action and unleash the energy of the rank and file.

The Platform Committee Hosts Cross-Union
Adjunct Struggle Meeting

Members of the Platform Committee, a committee established by the Committee for Adjuncts and Part-timers (CAP), gathered together adjuncts from other colleges across New York to discuss the struggles and successes of their contract fights. Schools such as NYU, The New School, and Fordham were represented, and the discussion was a lively roundtable both on contract gains and demands and how unions across the city are fighting for better pay, benefits, and job security. We heard, for example, from David Klassen on how NYU adjuncts won a pay increase of $10,200 for a 4-credit course and a bonus of $2,000 for anyone who taught during the height of the pandemic. Jaclyn Lovell, from the New School, informed us on the current strike situation and how management refuses to come to the table to pay adjuncts a living wage.

What stood out, and underlined, the conversation was need for large, open bargaining in the negotiating process as well as the credible strike threat in order to win. Open bargaining has been a key element of these unions’ fights by bringing more people into union activity through the bargaining process as well as showing power to the university bosses. Jaclyn highlighted that at the beginning of the process “40 to 60” part-time faculty participated in the bargaining process, but that number grew to over 200 part-time faculty in the room, as she notes, “to hear” the university’s lawyers and counter offers.

This was a key lesson from the event, and one we hope the PSC will learn and implement in our upcoming contract negotiations. It is clear, from hearing from our comrades in other higher-ed unions, that open bargaining–coupled with the actual threat of job actions–is necessary in order to win the kinds of demands that our adjunct, part-time staff, as well as full time faculty staff, deserve.

You can view the entire event here: https://youtu.be/3ercABy4GuY

Join Public Sector Workers this Saturday
at People’s Forum!

This coming Saturday, Dec. 3 from 10 AM - 1 PM, a formation of reform-minded union members from PSC, DC37, UFT, ALE ,and NYSNA will be gathering to learn more about our shared struggles as we face an austerity-minded Adams administration hellbent on wielding divide-and-conquer techniques against us. While PSC is dependent on the NYS budget, our union is still stifled by the restrictions of citywide pattern bargaining that establish “raises” that don’t begin to catch up with skyrocketing inflation, and we continue to grapple with the legacy of the anti-strike Taylor Law. Please join us for all or part of this assembly as we build a community of militant rank & file members willing and able to confront these challenges together. If you are not inspired and invigorated by the time you leave, we’ll give you a refund! RSVP in advance at http://bit.ly/Dec2022PSRF

11/11 Organizing Meeting for the People's Hearing on Racism and Repression at CUNY

Organizers for the People's Hearing on Racism and Repression at CUNY met Friday, November 18, to discuss next steps. The idea for the hearing emerged as part of CUNY organizing around the June 2022 New York City Council Higher Education “hearing” on anti-semitism and the resolution that was presented by council members Eric Dinwoitz and Gale Brewer. CUNY for Palestine wrote their own resolution, which explained that the City Council hearing was not in fact concerned with anti-semitism and was instead part of a manufactured zionist backlash against a highly successful year of organizing, and growing support for Palestinian liberation as well as coalition building with other anti-racist and social justice groups organizing within the CUNY community. The CUNY for Palestine resolution detailed numerous incidents of racism, particularly anti-Palestinian and anti-Black racism, across CUNY that were intentionally obscured by the sham hearing. It also announced a People’s Hearing to bring to light these incidents as well as other forms of institutional racism and repression at CUNY and to demand action from the administration.

The People's Hearing is envisioned as the culmination of collaborative work between different groups and organizations at CUNY (and the NYC community more broadly) including solidarity with Palestine, Puerto Rico, Philippines, Haiti and other liberation struggles, anti-racism, abolition, decolonization/landback, the fight for a free and fully funded CUNY, against gentrification, racist austerity, adjunctification and the exploitative multi-tier system of labor, heteropatriarchy, policing and surveillance, etc.. The aim is to build on past successes and work together to achieve a truly transformed and People's CUNY- and People’s New York! Watch this space for more information about the launch event in February.

The next planning meeting will be on December 2nd, 6-7pm. For more info or to get involved, email: CUNY4Palestine@gmail.com

RAFA and the PSC at Labor Notes
Troublemakers School NYC

On the 19th of November, a large contingent from RAFA and the PSC gathered at the Beacon High School in Manhattan for the Labor Notes Troublemakers’ conference. They were joined by about 400 other union militants from around the city and state, making it the largest meeting of its kind so far. Workshops on organizing and mobilizing within your union were bookended by plenary sessions, with keynotes from members of unions across sectors and geographies. Amidst a packed room for the ‘Public Sector Bargaining Landscape’ panel (pictured below), and alongside activists from DC37 and UFT Retirees, RAFA member Boyda Johnstone shared lessons and takeaways from the ‘vote no’ campaign following on #7KorStrike in the last PSC contract struggle. In the afternoon, PSC member Sofya Aptekar led a workshop on ‘Turning an Issue Into a Campaign.’ 

The sense of excitement around impending strike actions by major unions, and solidarity with existing strike movements, was palpable. Unfortunately, another common sentiment was impatience with the obduracy and insularity of union officialdom, particularly in the public sector. The attempts by union bureaucrats to confine our work to dead-ends like legislative action, or to restrict member access to the work of bargaining, swelled the panel “What to do When the Union Breaks Your Heart” to the point of needing a whole auditorium. The most urgent lessons people took away from the event was the unconditional necessity of open bargaining for large-scale victories in bargaining; the ongoing importance of face-to-face organizing at a chapter level; and the viability of a project to model the kind of union you want to see at the level of your own organizing. If we can build around ourselves the image of a more perfect union in our group work, perhaps people will awake from the apathy and languor of membership in an indifferent organization.

RAFA CUNY
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