Since the
fiscal crisis of 1975-77, New York’s municipal and other
public-employee unions have accepted two concepts imposed by
management as the basis for collective bargaining. The first is
that unions may gain improvements in salary, benefits and working
conditions only if workers “pay” for them by giving something
back to the city and state. The second is that settlements for all
public-employee unions will follow the same economic guidelines,
known as the city and state “patterns.”
For
example, if the PSC wants to win a more effective grievance
procedure, management argues that we have to surrender some of our
rights to due process in exchange. Or if we want to reduce
teaching loads to align them with national norms, management would
argue that this “cost” must be subtracted from the percentage
salary increase set by the pattern. In the current anti-labor
climate, the city and state seek to set the pattern through the
lowest settlement they can get away with, and then pressure unions
to settle early for modest across-the-board increases.
Unions
have found advantages in bargaining together; the gains made this
year on pensions and health benefits came as a result of working
in coalition. But fissures in the pattern began to appear in City
bargaining a few years ago, when some union leaders—now removed
from office—resorted to ballot-stuffing, fearful that the
members would not accept a pattern with two years of 0% increases
in the midst of the century’s most sustained economic boom.
This year
several city unions, notably teachers, librarians and police, have
argued that their lack of regionally-competitive salaries has hurt
New York City, and that they require settlements tailored to their
individual needs. The PSC has stressed that CUNY’s salaries and
workloads must be competitive nationally, because that’s the
labor market in which we operate. But despite these arguments,
pressure from management to accept the pattern remains intense,
and it is still axiomatic in management circles that unions must
give something up for every advance we make. The balance of power
hasn’t fundamentally shifted since 1977.
If each
step forward requires another step back, the result is that labor
stands still—or worse, that we are forced to lose ground
somewhere else if our salaries are ever going to rise. Now we have
Mayor Giuliani demanding that K-12 teachers accept individual
merit pay in order to gain competitive salaries, and CUNY
management proposing to replace our step salary system with
discretionary pay. To win improved health benefits and satisfy the
City’s demand for increased “worker productivity,” the
Municipal Labor Committee was expected to finance the gains from
its own money—a special reserve fund to protect workers’
health benefits against future shortfalls.
But the
issue goes beyond money. A hidden danger of the concessionary
contract culture is that we surrender rights to win dollars.
Concessionary bargaining pits each of us against ourselves.
In
response to this management-driven culture, the PSC has advanced a
different paradigm. Our approach is based on what should be a
simple notion: that the union’s demands should represent the
real needs of our members and our students. We are starting from
what we need, not from what we can carve out of the pattern. The
future of the University is on the table, and there are not many
years left to restore it to health. Pretending we need less will
not help us to win a thing. “Your silence will not protect
you,” the feminist theorist Audre Lorde reminds us.
Our
contract demands are an enumeration of CUNY’s needs if it is to
be a serious public university. Nothing more, but nothing less. We
are bargaining for the restoration of salaries, once among the
best in academia, that have lost up to 50% of their value. We are
bargaining for teaching
loads that make it possible to do research, for pay equity for the
army of part-timers who now teach most of CUNY’s courses, and
for conditions of academic life for both staff and faculty that
allow us to function as a real university. We have insisted that
our members’ rights on such issues as control of intellectual
property be protected, not reduced.
Jairo
Barragan
After a
quarter-century of concessions to management we see no reason to
cannibalize ourselves further. But when we present our demands at
the bargaining table, management’s mantra is invariably, “We
need you to give something up.” When we press to expand our
members’ rights in the workplace, management replies that CUNY
might be improved if faculty’s existing rights were diminished.
This is
the atmosphere of stalemate in which management made a salary
offer of 2%, 2%, and 2.5% at the negotiating session on June 21.
Battered by months of protests by the PSC over their failure to
make any kind of economic offer, management finally produced a
salary offer identical to one made two days earlier to the DC37
unions that work at CUNY (Gittelsons and College Assistants) and
aligned with the offer of 2 years at 2.5% that was rejected as
inadequate by the United Federation of Teachers. The offer exposes
the chasm between the triumphalist rhetoric about CUNY’s
resurrection that is used in public, and the repressive culture of
bargaining to which management actually subscribes. To the world,
it’s “Study with the Best”; to us, it’s “Shut Up and
Take the Pattern.”
How are we
going to break through this logjam and win a contract that
produces more than cosmetic changes? The PSC negotiating team is
clear that victory will be reflected, but not won, at the
bargaining table. We have to change the balance of power. Whether
we win that battle depends on how much we and our students and our
sister unions at CUNY and the wider New York community are willing
to do.
We have
written letters to the Chancellor, held a Teach CUNY Day,
demonstrated at the Board and at a negotiating session, conducted
informational picketing. The response from members has been
magnificent. But it is not enough. We must learn how to intensify
the pressure and engage in actions that capture the imagination of
the people of New York, their elected officials, and the rest of
the labor movement. We will never do that by thinking small.
The trick
about a new paradigm is that you don’t see it all at once, but
there are stirrings that suggest it is emerging. When the transit
workers marched across the Brooklyn Bridge in June to demand
health care for workers as a right, they chanted, “The public
comes first!” We are not alone in connecting our labor struggle
to larger issues of rights and needs, or attempting to build
public support for a breakthrough contract. Allies and models for
this approach can be found within labor, perhaps also in the
developing movements around globalization, sweatshops and the
environment.
We are not
alone, and that is why we can win. But winning the contract we
want means upping the ante. Are we ready?
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