This piece reprints the speeches given at a Town Hall hosted by Rank & File Action (RAFA) on May Day (May 1, 2020) over Zoom, with over one hundred attendees. At this Town Hall, we introduced our “Five Demands” for ensuring the safety and stability of CUNY workers, the details of which are outlined below by a range of activists across campuses and titles. Since this event, RAFA launched a concrete grade withholding campaign that asked faculty to withhold their grades until the final hour on May 28th, the grade submission deadline for much of CUNY. If we built 70% support, we would call for a larger wildcat strike along the lines of what UCSC did last semester. At the time of this posting, the 70% is looking very unlikely but hundreds have signed the pledge and we have received widespread support from students and academics alike.
I don’t have to tell you that we are living through an unprecedented crisis. As a result, the global economy, which was already moving quickly toward a recession, has been thrown into chaos. Many economists have suggested that the real unemployment rate is already upwards of 20% and could reach up to 40% before the quarantine is lifted, a figure we have not seen since the Great Depression.
As always, the City University of New York is in the crosshairs. Rather than tax the rich even a tiny percentage more or pass even a small wealth tax, Governor Andrew Cuomo is scrutinizing the state budget to determine which agencies and programs will be cut this year. Administrators at colleges across the CUNY system have already been making noises about necessary cuts, and several campuses have been asked to slash their course offerings– and by extension their payroll– by up to 25%. This would mean the loss of thousands of jobs at CUNY. These cuts will those with the least job security hardest.
Rank and File Action (RAFA) is fighting this unacceptable austerity. RAFA was founded by former members of the $7K or Strike movement. We spent the last two years fighting for wage parity for adjuncts at CUNY. In the process, we have also been fighting to create a more militant union capable of building real work actions and the credible threat of a strike. This commitment to real action is necessary in the face of the many injustices built into the CUNY system, including the continual increase of tuition and fees to fund what is supposed to be a public university. A year ago, we were holding rallies across the university demanding pay equity for adjuncts, but today we are fighting for our very lives and our livelihoods. The crisis has only made those injustices worse, and only made the need for a rank-and-file class struggle union more necessary. This context has produced the five demands that are powering our buildup towards a potential wildcat strike.
All workers have the right to a safe and healthy workplace. All workers have the right to protect themselves without losing pay and without needing a doctor’s note or other documentation. We have been hearing reports that staff are being required to work in the bursar’s office at City College to take student’s money. This puts staff and students at risk, not only from exposure on campus but also commuting to campus. No CUNY worker should have to come to a job site during the pandemic. Necessary supplies, compensation for transportation, and double hazard pay should be offered to those who choose to conduct essential labor on CUNY campuses, and PPE should also be issued to workers who may be amongst the initial wave of those returning.
Imagine trying to lead a classroom when you fear for your own health and the health and safety of the students. Educators, particularly those over the age of 50 or who have underlying health conditions, must have the option of working remotely until the crisis has passed. Staff and faculty should also have unlimited access to paid medical leave for illness or to care for others. Early retirement incentives should be made available to those who might choose to retire rather than risking their lives at the workplace.
Every adjunct at CUNY already understands what we mean by precarity. But now on many campuses CUNY management is demanding departments slash their Fall budgets by as much as 25%. In response, the PSC has affirmed that no union member should be laid off or non-reappointed due to COVID. While this is a great start, there are serious questions about how far chapter chairs and official union leadership will go to prevent the layoffs that have already begun.
So far most of what I’ve heard about campus-based initiatives are requests that union members sign onto a letter to our college presidents & chancellors. That’s well and good, and I signed the petitions. But if college presidents were going to stand up to the funding crisis at CUNY, they would have done it by now, in the decades of austerity that have preceded us. If the Board of Trustees were going to pressure Cuomo to defend us and our students during this crisis, we would have seen it already. When someone shows you who they are, I think you have to believe them.
The real danger is that good faith negotiations on the part of department chairs and PSC chapter chairs will not be enough to extract a minimally sufficient response to the crisis. Given the history of the PSC’s concessionary strategy, there is a real possibility that leadership will cede ground to administration’s demands before it is tactically wise to do so, and even before it is necessary from a budgetary standpoint. We know how much money each campus will receive through the federal CARES act, but we have yet to hear how each campus will use the funds allotted–for Brooklyn College alone, that’s over $8 million dollars after you subtract the funds reserved for student support.
Think about the educators you know, particularly those who might only be on a precarious or short-term adjunct contract. There is a good chance many of those people will not have a job for the fall. There is a good chance that they will lose their health insurance, and that they will be facing long term unemployment. Budget cuts like the ones we’re facing ruin people’s lives.
My job, as I see it, is to pose the question of what you are willing to do, what we’re all willing to do, collectively, to prevent that. The alternative is that we sit back and let these decisions be made for us. I think you know what will happen if we do that.
As educators, it’s our responsibility to protect our students from administrative profit-seeking that puts them in harm’s way. We need to protect them and ourselves whether we stay online or return to campus in the fall. On top of the minimal budget set by the city and state, administration has invoked the usual bogeyman of low enrollment to justify slashing employment.
If we don’t take strong action now, departments will cut courses with low enrollment and force their students into other classes. Our present task is to get the central college administration to commit in a public document to spread out enrollment and enable more course sections. Otherwise they will instead overwork a depleted faculty, causing poor learning experiences for students, and potentially force us to put all our lives at risk.
Regardless of any individual promises made from any department chair, if we do not take a strong stand as a union, many of us will lose work- and union-protections and those who don’t will be further exploited. Cutting sections may seem to be merely a problem for contingent faculty, but that’s not the truth. First of all, injustice to any union member is an injustice to all. Beyond that, we have all been forced into a situation we’re unprepared for. Faculty inexperienced with online teaching cannot be expected to competently lead courses if they must teach an unwieldy number of students. These students deserve to be in a course of reasonable count, providing work for more faculty in need of income and union benefits. Finally, cutting courses for contingent faculty can only lead to further cuts in the future, possibly endangering full-time jobs and weakening the entire system.
If all union members, but especially full-time faculty, stand strong with us and demand enrollment be capped at 15 students and the minimum enrollment be lowered to 7 students, including for summer courses, precarious faculty will get work and students will have more options and a better college experience. All faculty will get a manageable amount of students and our beloved CUNY will maintain its reputation as the college of the people.
At Hunter College, for the past 3 weeks, we have been doing weekly phone banking and reaching out to fellow adjuncts to ask how the transition to online teaching has gone.
We have reached out to over 300 adjuncts and spoke with more than 100. Many expressed how much extra work this transition has been. We asked them to come up with some concrete numbers and people cited a variety of figures from more than doubled, to 5 times as much, to 3-16 extra hours per week. One reported that she spent every minute for seven straight days working on developing her course after she made the transition. Some of the reasons they cited are:
– Lots of hours to give individual attention to students, or tracking and encouraging students
– Video recording and editing the lecture portions for asynchronous courses
– Editing down or dividing the class recordings to smaller segments for students who were absent
Everyone felt they should receive extra pay for extra work, but some also felt that CUNY doesn’t have that kind of money. Some proposed that federal aid available should be distributed to everyone equally, and others expressed their belief that highly paid administrators and the wages of full-time faculty should be cut to retain adjuncts’ jobs.
However, CUNY is receiving $235 million dollar federal aid through the CARES act for this crisis. (You can check how much your college is getting via this link). Hunter has $19M, $9.5M of which will be allotted to students and the other 9.5M unaccounted for.
The American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors issued a statement on March 13 to guide colleges and clearly said transitioning to online teaching “should be compensated at a reasonable hourly rate.” Also, the adjunct union at Columbia College in Chicago succeeded in negotiating extra pay for extra work for their members for the transition. At CUNY, Guttman Community College said they’d pay $750-1000 depending on the budget approval. Here’s hoping other colleges take notice and recognize the hundreds of hours of invisible labor their most precarious workers are donating, many with the implicit but unconfirmed hope that doing so will guarantee their continued employment in the fall.
I did not become an educator to teach online. The sudden shift to distance learning came as a shock to me and all my students, who have had to scramble to gather the necessary devices and equipment which would allow them a decent learning environment at home. This in the midst of sick and dying family members, sudden loss of jobs, crowded domiciles, and all the rampant housing and food insecurity that CUNY students already experience in the best of times: the COVID crisis has magnified all pre-existing problems.
My students confess to me that they miss the physical classroom and are finding the online environment difficult. At Borough of Manhattan Community College, we pride ourselves on a nationally-high student retention rate for a community college, but already more students are considering dropping out, fearful of a future in which all their rising tuition dollars continue to be spent on a subpar online education.
Some understandably fear that a call to return to the classroom as soon as possible would undermine the safety of our working conditions. But I am not here to talk about rushing back. Rather, I am concerned about what some have called the “shock doctrine” of online education which this crisis might produce: with thousands of professors suddenly forced to adapt to remote teaching and take training and webinars for online certification, higher education could take a wholesale shift toward a cyber-based future, fulfilling the neoliberal dream of streamlining students through the system while slashing labor costs and, in the process of corralling more students into fewer courses, firing more adjuncts and endangering all of our jobs in the future.
As we’ve outlined in our first demand, it is only when the public health crisis is over that we can begin to consider returning to the classroom. But once it is safe, we need to fight to defend the sanctity of face-to-face instruction, vigorously challenging the capitalist logic that turns educational buildings into potential sites of private revenue. The physical classroom, in all its messiness and disorder, can be a space of community and possibility that can’t be replicated in an online setting. The solidarity formed there is crucial to build networks capable of challenging the power structures that profit from keep us alienated and divided.
Now is not the time to sit idly by and expect others to solve your problems for you. Capitalism will not solve this crisis for us, the state will not solve this crisis, and the union won’t solve this crisis on their own. We need every working person affiliated with the people’s university and higher education to get engaged and take action now to help build the organizations necessary to protect ourselves and eventually win a better university for all. The Spring 2020 grades withholding pledge is just a first step towards a range of future potential strike actions as we continue to feel the effects of this crisis, including a fall tuition strike, a student strike, a full grade strike, and eventually a strike across the entire university system.
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Four University of California graduate workers – who themselves went out on wildcat grading and teaching strikes in 2019-2020, and are now members of the Rank and File Action (RAFA-UC) caucus in the UC Student Workers’ Union (UAW-2865) – talked to members of C-AWDU to get a frank assessment of the dynamics at play, and some of the prehistory, of this ongoing, important strike.
A year ago, we were holding rallies across the university demanding pay equity for adjuncts, but today we are fighting for our very lives and our livelihoods. The crisis has only made those injustices worse, and only made the need for a rank-and-file class struggle union more necessary. This context has produced these five demands that are powering our movement.
The pandemic has dissolved the sustaining myth of grad school itself: that if you play along for long enough, you’ll get yours. The COVID crisis demands that we think bigger than a return for the “Golden Era” of universities, or concessions to extend the status quo. How do we want to imagine what the university could look like in the 21st century, after so many years of defunding and corporatization? If the crisis has introduced the certainty that the university will be transformed, how can we bend its potential toward a fundamental reversal of its long neoliberal course?
Mass eviction from university housing in the coronavirus crisis has shown students what communities being gentrified have known for a long time: in most cities, the university is first and foremost a landlord. As student tenants, it’s up to us to organize towards collective actions that reflect the interlinked realities of work, tuition, debt, and rent.
In late December 2019, graduate workers at UC Santa Cruz began a wildcat strike to secure a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). In one of the most expensive housing markets in the US, graduate workers at UCSC are paid poverty wages, leaving many unable to afford basic necessities. The UC administration has responded brutally to the student action.
A wave of militant action has swept across UC Santa Cruz, based on the demand for a cost of living adjustment. Danielle Carr spoke to the wildcat strikers to learn more.
The recent wildcat action at UC Santa Cruz arose out of a long history of organizing against concessionary contracts. Shannon Ikebe gives a history of the strikes in terms of the 2018 University of California contract.
Jarrod Shanahan recently sat down with two strike organizers to discuss their experiences at Rutgers and why they needed to found the Rutgers Rank-and-File Caucus.
Nick Caverly reflects on Rubin and Bobroff’s pamphlet and the struggles of rank and file union members at the University of Michigan in the 1970s.
Gayle Rubin and Anne Bobroff distributed this essay in a pamphlet during a graduate student strike at the University of Michigan in 1975. In it, they argue that bargaining must be underwritten by strong rank-and-file power.
A former Cornell Graduate Students United Organizing Committee chair reflects on the union’s narrow recognition election loss, transactional unionism that instrumentalizes workers, and the challenge to build enduring democratic structures.
For years, CUNY’s two tier union system has colluded with public austerity to sell out adjuncts. A new militant movement has emerged to change that.
