Austerity has hit workers and students hard at the City University of New York. Adjunct professors across the system are paid starvation wages—as low as $3,200 per course—forcing them to take second and third jobs to make ends meet.
Higher education officers (HEOs) and laboratory staff presently look forward to raises so pitiful they amount to pay cuts in light of steady inflation. Meanwhile students’ tuition is rising annually while funding for facilities, financial assistance, and course offerings continues to evaporate. State and city austerity measures have choked access to the affordable quality education that CUNY claims to provide. And after more than two years of contract bargaining, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), CUNY’s faculty union, is still at a stalemate with management. In response, CUNY students and staff alike are asking: What is to be done? Resoundingly, they are calling for mass action.
In particular, PSC’s rank-and-file has begun to stir. These members are questioning their minimized role in their union’s contract fight, and have begun to organize themselves across CUNY’s twenty-five campuses to raise public awareness of their demand for a living wage and a fully-funded university. Above all, they are questioning their leadership’s refusal to use the most effective tool unions have against bosses’ austerity measures: a strike.
LEADERSHIP LACKS STRATEGY
Union leadership purports to demand a $7K/ course minimum wage for adjunct faculty, but refuses to commit to escalating tactics should this demand not be met. As a result, an increasing number of rank-and-file PSC members have articulated a clear alternative: “$7K or Strike.” The $7K or Strike campaign, a grassroots movement of PSC members, has grown up around this demand, advocating a minimum of $7000 per course for adjunct instructors, and a strike as the one way to win it.
Adjuncts, students, and other underpaid CUNY workers associated with the campaign feel that PSC’s leadership is bargaining with CUNY management from a position of weakness, relying on performative tactics and lobbying, and disempowering most members in the process. A series of low-stakes demonstrations and photo-ops orchestrated by PSC’s executive committee in NYC and Albany, along with vague slogans (including the recent “United for Wage Justice at CUNY”), have done little to nothing to mobilize the PSC’s 30,000-person membership. “The groundbreaking teachers’ strikes in Chicago, LA, Oakland, West Virginia, and elsewhere, which won game-changing gains for students, families, and workers alike, took years to build,” a statement posted to $7K or Strike’s website reads. “As rank-and-file union members, we believe that we are overdue to build toward a strike.”
The $7K or Strike campaign has its roots in years of rank-and-file organizing by labor activists operating inside and outside of PSC. Much of the campaign’s infrastructure originated in a “no” campaign against PSC’s 2016 austerity contract, which failed to meet inflation and widened the gap between the tiers of CUNY’s academic workforce by distributing the highest wages to its highest earners. In this campaign rank-and-file activists were put on the defensive, lacking access to PSC communication channels, and having no control over the timetable of events. In the years since, many core organizers of $7K or Strike have worked to build alternative communication apparatuses, and laid the foundation for an independent campaign for a $7K minimum wage for CUNY adjuncts, which succeeded in late 2017 in forcing PSC leadership to adopt this demand as their own in the present round of contract negotiations.
BUILDING TOWARDS A STRIKE
The campaign has continued to build momentum toward a credible strike threat, without official sanction or assistance, and in doing so has drastically driven up rank-and-file engagement. $7K or Strike activists consistently draw record numbers of union members to local chapter meetings, sessions of the union’s Delegate Assembly, meetings of the Committee for Adjuncts and Part-Timers (CAP), and dozens of campus demonstrations. These have included a number of “grade-ins,” in which adjunct workers occupy hallways and common spaces on CUNY campuses to make their unpaid work visible. Tides of adjuncts have transformed leadership-approved grade-ins for $7K into mass demonstrations for $7K or Strike. On two such occasions at Brooklyn College, more than fifty adjuncts worked alongside students under $7K or Strike banners, as well as messages like: “MOST OF MY WORK, INCLUDING THE GRADING I’M DOING RIGHT NOW, IS UNPAID.”
Moreover, eleven PSC chapters have passed resolutions supporting a strike for $7K, often at meetings with record turnout, despite the vocal opposition of chapter chairs and other paid spokespeople of central leadership.
Amid this groundswell of grassroots union power, however, PSC leadership has inched away from the $7K per course demand that rank-and-file pressure forced it to adopt. What’s more, leadership has employed scare tactics and scolding to demoralize the growing rank-and-file movement. In February, a widely circulated open letter from PSC’s Principal Officers, including President Barbara Bowen, tarred adjunct activists as “divisive.” The letter called $7K or Strike’s message “deceitful,” and even claimed that rank-and-file activists were guilty of “insulting, confusing and alienating” other union members. PSC functionaries have gone as far as to invoke New York State’s draconian Taylor Law, which prohibits public sector employees from striking, against the rank-and-file campaign. This is in spite of the fact that victorious public sector strikes have overcome this law numerous times, and that the PSC voted to authorize a strike as recently as spring 2016. PSC leadership’s official resistance to bottom-up labor action is obvious. So what, then, is their alternative?
BROKEN BUSINESS UNIONISM
In short, more of the same: lobbying indifferent lawmakers in Albany and at City Hall, and engaging in protracted, locked-door bargaining sessions with CUNY management, leaving rank-and-file members immobilized and in the dark.
In recent meetings of the Delegate Assembly and CAP, PSC President Barbara Bowen and Vice President Andrea Vasquez have insisted that the union is in a position of strength to press CUNY management and secure a winning contract, but remain unable to explain how bargaining alone will tip the scales. Indeed, the routine “Contract Updates” emailed to union members from their president contain no information about actual strategy. Members are told that slow-going negotiations are the result of deadlock between the union, management, and legislators. They read that the union sees opportunities “to push for an agreement,” but encounter no specifics as to what that agreement might look like. Members are invited to run their eyes over a long list of demands, but not one concrete strategy for securing those demands. The most recent “Contract Update” dispatch closes with a section titled “What can members do this summer?” Members can, in short, “Be alert for further updates,” be aware of meetings on their campuses, and “Be ready to consider and vote on ratification of a proposed settlement whenever one is reached.”
Rank-and-filers are evidently not entitled to any concrete information on contract bargaining, nor real engagement in the process. They are instead expected to sit back and wait, ready to authorize whatever contract should fall into their laps, whenever that should happen.
SOCIALISM OR BARBARA-ISM
In stark contrast to such business unionism as usual, the $7K or Strike campaign has built worker power at the university and city levels, holding demonstrations, canvassing campuses to bring adjunct workers into the union, and showing picket line solidarity with other New York and New Jersey unions, as well as immigrants’ and workers’ rights organizations.
Most recently, the campaign came out in support of the Rutgers Rank-and-File Caucus, a dissident group fighting a similar struggle against occupational chauvinism within the AAUP-AFT at Rutgers University. $7K or Strike has also drafted and passed resolutions at the citywide CAP, an official union body, outlining clear, CUNY’s $7K or Strike movement on fire union-wide strategies for building a credible strike threat, securing funding for part-time and underpaid faculty, and preventing further tuition hikes for CUNY students. PSC leadership has either ignored these rank-and-file resolutions entirely, or been careful to remind members that these bodies, and the local chapters adopting $7K or Strike resolutions, are in fact “not decision-making groups.”
In the face of official resistance, however, $7K or Strike’s organized push to delay a rushed contract agreement during the summer, when union members are least engaged, has proven successful. This most recent victory is particularly poignant in light of the 2016 contract, which passed over the summer, with little opportunity to publicize opposition. Many members voted to approve that contract simply because they thought voting “no” wasn’t a serious choice. This time around, the message of adjuncts, students, and staff behind $7K or Strike is clear: they would rather struggle hard and win real gains than give in to yet another austerity contract. They hold that New York State’s anti-strike laws are only as strong as their union is weak, and that broad rank-and-file involvement is the key to building a strong union.
These rank-and-file members have absorbed, rather than cautiously avoided, the obvious conclusions to be drawn from the recent public sector strike wave in the US, and have proven that $7K or Strike is the only demand that catalyzes CUNY’s far-flung and exhausted adjuncts. As a new academic year approaches, $7K or Strike stands poised to assert union democracy, to break the grip of business unionism on CUNY, to build a real strike threat, and win transformative gains for CUNY and New York City’s working class.
“The lesson was clear: we had to present a viable alternative, or, in a practical sense, become one.”
Zachary LaMalfa is an activist, educator, and Ph.D. candidate at CUNY. He is a member of CUNY Struggle.
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