Testimony on Contract by Steve London

Testimony Delivered To
The CUNY Board Of Trustees
Annual Bronx Borough Hearing
The Bronx County Courthouse

May 16, 2005

Steven London
First Vice President
Professional Staff Congress/CUNY

Good afternoon. I am pleased to be in the Bronx to deliver this testimony on behalf of our 20,000 members. The Bronx is home to four great CUNY institutions of higher education; Lehman College, Bronx Community College, Hostos Community College, and Bronx EOC. The faculty and staff of each of these institutions give their heart and soul to the education of the people of the Bronx and serve the borough’s needs in many ways.

As with the rest of CUNY, this effort is undertaken with fewer resources from the City and State than is needed. Years of tight budgets for CUNY have taken a toll not just on student life, infrastructure, and research facilities; they have also meant that our Welfare Fund has been starved of support. Even without adequate resources, we do our jobs well because we care about our students, the University, and the City.

Now, as we continue our efforts, we might conclude management and the Board of Trustees do not value the very faculty and other instructional staff who have been the backbone of these great institutions. I am here today to talk not only about Lehman, Hostos, and Bronx, but about all of CUNY and the challenge of settling a contract that sends a message opposite from the one management reflected in its proposals. The message should make clear that management and the Board understand what we do and value our contribution.

We have been without a new contract for two-and-a-half years, and the reason for this is that management’s demands have amounted to austerity salary offers, concessions, and a continuation of the under-funding of our Welfare Fund benefits resulting in its imminent insolvency. Our members have witnessed negotiations where CUNY’s negotiators press for demands that undermine professionalism, leave our salaries below the rate of inflation, deny our members basic due process rights, and require more cost-shifting onto our members to fund benefits. The message CUNY delivers is that, however strongly its curriculum stresses fair treatment and enlightened values, it’s okay to treat CUNY’s own workers shabbily.

For months, you have heard from many PSC members as they have called and sent letters explaining our needs, demonstrated, and delivered messages of protest as they appeared in person at Board meetings. Adjuncts, the most exploited workers in CUNY, are seeking fairness in hiring and termination practices and an end to their degrading and debased wage rate. HEOs also are demanding that basic due process rights be extended to those who have completed a standard probationary period. Retirees made clear that they wanted you to keep your historic commitment to maintain Welfare Fund benefits. Untenured faculty asked you to recognize and address the fact that they cannot live and raise a family in New York City under current working conditions; conditions which feature low salaries, minimal time for research, no childcare benefit, and degraded health and supplemental benefits. Librarians and faculty counselors have expressed their need to have real time for professional development and to do away with the provision that penalizes new library and counseling faculty by making them wait 10 years to reach annual leave parity with senior colleagues. CLIP teachers are demanding terms and conditions that recognize that they teach full-time, instead of being paid as part-time Continuing Education Teachers. Distinguished professors have implored you to recognize the realities of recruiting and retaining faculty in a competitive national market. And, senior faculty have explained the need for time to do more research and have proposed that a step in this direction be enhanced sabbaticals.

These modest and reasonable proposals will enable CUNY to better serve the City’s working population. Other proposals the PSC still has on the table are not remarkable, but similarly restrained demands that follow common labor practices.

For example, the PSC’s salary proposal has to be seen in the context of today’s inflation rate and the historical erosion of CUNY’s salary steps. Already, in the first two-and-a-half-years of this contract period, inflation has gone up almost 10%. In this context, the PSC’s salary demands are modest indeed. Since 1972, our salary steps have declined in value from 30% to 40%, depending on the step and title. This means that a member of the instructional staff positioned on a salary step comparable to one in 1972 will earn 30% to 40% less in real dollars. Even if an instructional staff member is eligible for a salary step increase, s/he is “moving up” a down escalator. CUNY salaries, once seen as among the best in the country, have now become an active deterrent to recruitment and retention of needed faculty and staff. There is no future for CUNY if salaries and benefits are so poor that the best faculty and staff cannot stay.

While we have made progress on a few of these issues, we look forward to making progress on many more. We have many other legitimate needs, but we have put these on hold for this round of bargaining.

Perhaps the best way to understand the difference between our proposal and management’s is that the union presents an alternative to management’s concessionary framework. We’ve seen that Chancellor Goldstein, despite his promise not to offer “an austerity contract” to the PSC, has done just that. Worse, he has tried to pass it off as the best we can hope for.

I call on the Board of Trustees, today, to offer a contract to the PSC that is worthy of our work and of the students we teach. I thank you for the work we did together in the last round of bargaining to make important advances for CUNY, and I now ask you to insist on a contract that will allow the instructional staff to do the work we love in the institution to which we have given our professional lives.