On Thursday, December 19th, the PSC-CUNY Delegate Assembly voted to recommend the tentative contract agreement to the membership for ratification. While this motion carried easily, there was significant opposition expressed at the delegate assembly. As a member of the City Tech PSC-CUNY chapter and a delegate who voted “No,” I want to share my reasons in the spirit of democratic debate and discussion.
To begin with, it’s important to note that even among those who voted “yes,” the tone was not celebratory; rather the contract was presented as the best the bargaining committee could achieve in difficult political circumstances. There were nonetheless some important gains, including the inclusion of SEEK Directors and College Discovery Directors in the bargaining unit, protections against outsourcing instruction to AI or individuals outside of the bargaining unit, an extension of parental leave, a guaranteed raise of one step for promotion and reclassification, reassigned time for tenured faculty members, and an increase in the amount available for PSC-CUNY research awards.
While the financial package with retroactive pay raises and a signing bonus will be welcome to all of us who have weathered high inflation rates and cost of living increases without any across the board raises for almost two years, it’s important to note that the negotiated raises do not “break the pattern” of raises negotiated with other unions, nor do they keep up with inflation. In other words, despite the raises, our real wages overall will continue to decline as increases in cost of living far outpace the relatively small raises in our paychecks.
Furthermore, while some gains were made for HEOs, the tentative agreement does not include a contractual right to remote work, which was a key demand; meanwhile, a much-touted program for two-year reappointments for CLIP and CUNY Start instructors leaves so much to the discretion of management that it is virtually unenforceable.
While these were all issues that concern me, ultimately what worries me the most is what I see as a severe step backwards in the fight for adjunct parity and job security in this contract.
A crucial demand from the start of our contract campaign was the maintenance and solidification of the multi-year contracts for adjunct faculty. As some might remember, this was previously negotiated as a “pilot program” that CUNY decided to discontinue when the pilot period ended. For me, winning the permanent implementation of the three-year-contract was the bare minimum necessary to move toward a goal of adjunct parity and job security. Instead, the proposed contract extends the number of semesters that an adjunct must teach to be eligible for a contract of only two years which can only be extended to three years following the first year, and then, only at the department’s discretion. In addition to these concessions, the program remains a “pilot,” which means we will be back to square one in our next round of negotiations. For me, this is an unacceptable step backwards that not only means losing ground in the fight against contingency but opens the door to whittling it away even further in our next round of negotiations.
Likewise, the pay for adjuncts is simply unacceptable. It is well-below what adjunct demands were many years ago and will increase precarity and grow the divides in our union: by 2027, adjuncts will receive $7,100 per 3-credit course. By comparison, this is $1,000 less than the current base pay for a 3-credit course at Rutgers University, and $1,500 less than at Fordham. Some PSC-CUNY members may remember that 7K per course was the demand in the last round of negotiations six years ago which after accounting for inflation would equal $8,770 in today’s dollars.
I also have huge reservations about the restructuring of adjunct pay from an hourly basis to a per-course basis. This means that pay raises for adjuncts will be tied to increases in workload, including professional development, trainings, advisement and other responsibilities. While PSC-CUNY’s bargaining team and leadership has insisted that there are strong limits as to what can be required and has argued that we can use the grievance procedure to ensure that these new workload provisions are not abused, I have no doubt this will lead to increases in workload at most colleges. While we can grieve some of these abuses, many people are hesitant to file grievances—particularly members with less job security—and the grievance procedure can take years during which members are required to comply until and unless we win. If the contract is ratified, obviously, our union chapter will do our best to resist abuses of the new workload clause, but the best way to resist it is union-wide, by refusing to open the door for this in our contract, not by asking people to individually fight around what is reasonable and allowable under these new provisions.
I was one of the 30 people arrested in October as part of a PSC-CUNY action in support of our contract campaign. At the time, we were each asked to write a sentence stating why we were risking arrest. I wrote that I risked arrest for adjunct pay parity and job security because as a full-time faculty member, I feel like it is crucial to put this demand front and center as it is essential to the future of our union and the university. In the university context, I think this is what it means to uphold the old union slogan “An Injury to One is an Injury to All.” I cannot therefore in good conscience vote in support of a contract that not only does not make gains in terms of parity and job security for adjunct faculty but takes a significant step backwards.
I know how hard they have worked to bring us this MOA and I do not question the commitment, diligence, and ingenuity of the Bargaining Team. I think the problem is that a bargaining team’s commitment, diligence, and ingenuity is not enough to win full adjunct parity and job security or beat the pattern in any substantial way. To reverse the current trends toward an increasingly tiered and unequal system of university labor would require a willingness to build a different kind of contract campaign that includes strike readiness as part of the strategy and tactics. To be clear: using the term strike readiness does not mean I am unaware of the consequences, or that I am any less fearful than others about the political conditions we face or the dangers of the Taylor law or have some deep desire to strike, but rather because I believe that a union that has lost its ability to pose a credible strike threat has lost its ability to win. For me, this must be connected to a discussion of what our demands are: I don’t think, for example, it would be worth risking the consequences of the Taylor laws for an extra 1% in pay but a fight to end contingency and demand parity is one we could mobilize around and build mass support for. The October action showed the potential to mobilize the union around such demands. We will need more such actions to build our capacity to fight to end the widening gap between tenure-track and adjunct faculty.
I know that there is a lot of fear about the risks in this political moment of voting no on the tentative agreement. I fully understand that fear. The problem is fear benefits the employer. I don’t think it will be possible in the coming years to fight against the attacks on unions and universities without taking risk and rethinking our approach to both demands and strategy. I am voting no because I think fighting for parity is too important to accept CUNY’s intransigence as a reality that can’t be confronted. Regardless of how everyone else votes, however, I also hope we can begin a bigger conversation about how we can reorient our union to have a more expansive vision and strategy for parity that will require moving beyond smart bargaining to center collective action with solidarity as an inviolable principle.
