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TEACH-CUNY | LOBBY-YOUR-LEGISLATOR
By
Tony O’Brien, Queens College Contract Liaison for the PSC
A new labor contract with CUNY is currently being negotiated by the PSC,
and students have a large stake in it, just as patients have a stake in
contracts negotiated by health care professionals: in both cases, our conditions
of work impact on your conditions as those who are served by our work.
We believe that after hearing about the contract proposals, you will see
how much of a common interest with us students have in getting a good contract
with CUNY. The PSC (Professional Staff Congress/CUNY, American Federation of
Teachers Local 2334) is the union of CUNY faculty and professional staff, both
full-time and part-time. It is one
of the oldest and largest higher education unions in the country. Since its
formation in 1972, the PSC has bargained for employment contracts at CUNY.
In the last few years, however, we have been galvanized into a higher
level of activity by the attacks leveled at CUNY by politicians like Mayor
Giuliani; the huge drop in State and City funding of CUNY with the resulting
increases in tuition; the cutting in half of the numbers of full-time faculty
and the terrible exploitation of part-time faculty; and the shrinking of
programs and course offerings.
These attacks amount to a crisis at CUNY for both students and ourselves.
The PSC, as well as lobbying the politicians for more funding, is using the
contract bargaining mechanism to fight back.
We would like to show you how students benefit from our main contract
demands.
We are calling on you to come to the public hearings, “Teach CUNY,”
on March 28, to hear more about the CUNY crisis and our contract fight, and to
support us. We would like you to think carefully about how your interests as
students, and ours, as academic labor, converge. And thanks for listening!
Academic labor, like academic freedom, is a concept that includes
students and faculty alike. We both in our different ways share a city and a
workplace; we share a kind of work, research, writing, learning/teaching; and we
share a commitment to intellectual development for ourselves and our
communities. Both students and faculty are, as W. E. B. Du Bois states his ideal
in Souls of Black Folk, “co-workers in the kingdom of culture.”
As the CUNY faculty and staff union, the PSC wants to share with students
the heart of our proposed new contract now being negotiated with CUNY
management. We do this to broaden
students’ understanding of your university; we argue that your interests often
coincide with ours and that you would benefit from our proposals; and we ask for
your aid in the campaign for a contract that will rebuild CUNY as a great urban
public university, the terrain we share and value in the vast kingdom of
culture.
1)
Salary.
We want two things: a salary scale for all our members equal to that at
comparable universities; and pay equity among our ranks.
How do these demands benefit students, who make much less than their
teachers? The fact is that CUNY salaries, once good, have not kept up.
This means it is harder to recruit the best faculty and staff, and harder
to retain them. Students benefit
from the best staff, and will suffer if our salaries don’t keep up. We are
demanding a huge increase in full-time faculty positions, and it is no good
doing that without competitive salaries.
Pay equity applies to many of us, like lecturers and lab technicians, but
especially to the 7,000 part-time teachers, or adjunct faculty, who now teach
over half the courses at CUNY. We
adjuncts are superb, experienced teachers who teach the bedrock introductory
courses, and so the whole of CUNY in fact rests on our work.
But we are horribly paid, close to the minimum hourly wage when you count
in preparation and grading time. We
get no pay for advising you in office hours (if we have an office). We work in
an academic sweatshop. We need parity in salary simply to be able to live.
Pay equity for adjuncts has direct benefits to students. With upgraded
pay, proper office space and pay for office hours, seniority and annual
contracts, health benefits and access to child care, we the adjunct faculty will
for the first time have something approaching professional conditions of work.
Better working conditions for adjuncts--an end to the atmosphere of
poverty wages, uncertainty, harassment, and insecurity in which adjuncts have
been forced to live--translate into being able to do better work. This will
result immediately in better instruction, advisement, and mentoring for our
students, especially important in
the early and introductory courses where adjuncts are concentrated.
We are talking about the majority of all courses, and virtually the whole
layer of basic skills and introductory teaching.
2)
Workload.
You see us in classrooms and offices, and know that we publish research,
but you may not have a very clear idea of the work required by our job
description. At CUNY there is,
quite rightly, a heavy demand for significant publications for tenure and
promotion, and research at this level normally consumes a third or more of our
work time. This research benefits the students we teach by bringing to our
classes more lively, up-to-date contributions to our field.
Our teaching and advisement duties, and what we call “service” (the
important committee work that makes a department and a college run), are also
very time-consuming and absorb, as they should, much of our work time. But there
is a trade-off between time teaching and time for research. At CUNY, as budgets
have been cut, management has insisted both on heavier teaching loads than at
comparable institutions, and on the same high levels of research without the
time and support to accomplish it.
Our contract proposals on workload aim to get research and teaching time
back into balance. At a university
which requires as much research as CUNY does, teaching load is usually much
lower than the three, four, or even five courses per semester imposed at CUNY.
The PSC contract asks for a reduction in teaching load of one course per
semester so as to enhance our research. How
would this benefit students?
First, as with salaries, we need teaching loads which allow us to attract
and keep the best faculty. Research
time and support also yields a higher quality of publications, which are the
main thing that raises the profile of a college and the value of its degrees. Reduced teaching hours also mean more faculty time spent with
students on advisement and mentoring, which many believe is the most important
marker of a good college.
We want to stress that the same benefits flow to students from a fair
workload for professional staff, those of us who work most closely with
students, registering, counseling, and running labs.
3)
Bargaining over How the University Is Run.
We propose that CUNY management, when they make any significant policy changes
that have an impact on our terms and conditions of employment, be required to
negotiate with the PSC beforehand the impact of such policy changes.. They hate
this proposal. They have absorbed
the corporate model of how to run things, in which the boss rules supreme.
Administrators
have a role in a complex modern university, but it should certainly not be to
monopolize the making of policy at the expense of the main stakeholders,
faculty, staff, and students. While
the Trustees have the authority to make policy, they should in a democratic
institution be held accountable for the impact of those policies on the faculty,
staff, and student stakeholders in the university. The faculty and staff
contract is one mechanism by which that democratic balance can be restored, to
all our benefit.
This is, after all, not a corporation but a university, whose best
tradition for centuries has been that
in a teaching and learning community it is the teachers and learners--not
managers--who know best how to make things work.
The Board of Trustees’ much-contested decision to end remedial courses
at senior colleges, which passed the State Regents review by one vote, is a good
example. Many of us worked hard
alongside student organizations, testifying and rallying and lobbying, to defeat
this policy change because of its terrible effects on student access and
success. If we had been able to use
the power of the union to negotiate directly about its impact on our jobs, our
curriculum, our commitment to our students’ success, we might well have won.
This proposed change is a structural change, a way to counter corporate
managerialism in the running of CUNY, whose benefits to students as well as to
us could be far-reaching indeed.
SUMMARY
Some of you or your family members are in unions and know what a labor
contract is, but you may never have thought like this before about a union
contract. Our main point is simple:
as in hospitals, where the professional conditions of the staff are intimately
tied to the quality of service to the client, so it is in a university.
Our working conditions condition the quality of your instruction and
services. We hope to have shown
this for salary, workload, and bargaining over how the college runs.
But there is another benefit to students of giving your support to a
breakthrough contract like this, something greater than the sum of its parts:
your own empowerment as students, your self-understanding, your awareness of the
institution which frames your learning, your active citizenship in this
community. Join us in the budget struggle in Albany and City Hall. Join us to
end the academic sweatshop for your hard-working adjunct faculty.
Join us for a contract with a new vision for CUNY. The PSC stands ready
to be a co-worker with our students in the kingdom of culture.