Inside the Current Issue

Proposed Contract Bittersweet for Long-Suffering CUNY Employees

Dan Skinner

After several (long) years without a contract, Professional Staff Congress (PSC)/CUNY has reached a tentative agreement with the powers that be at CUNY. The contract, which still remains to approved by both the PSC rank and file and the CUNY Board of Trustees, includes several important provisions which will affect GC students adjuncting at the colleges. The agreement also provides some insight into the general trajectory that CUNY is likely to take if the current labor climate remains unchanged.

In her April 28 communique announcing the deal, PSC president (and lead negotiator) Barbara Bowen characterized the final contract as a pragmatic victory. "The PSC bargaining team believes that we negotiated the best settlement possible within a hostile political environment that we have not yet succeeded in changing. This is a principled, imaginative agreement that maximizes the available funds for CUNY faculty and staff," she said.

The contract includes modest salary increases, increased pay for sabbaticals, and increased benefits (including dental) for full-time faculty and staff, as well as the following provisions for part-time/adjunct faculty:

Pay increases. Currently, CUNY adjuncts receive $2,843 per three-credit course taught. If the contract is approved, this would increase to $3,084 (retroactively to May 1, 2006) and, on September 19, 2007, it would increase further to $3,113.

The creation of a new $500,000 fund for professional development grants for adjuncts. This includes an Adjunct Professional Development Fund, with a $3,000 maximum grant.

The contract would establish 100 new full-time lecturer positions "for which only experienced CUNY adjuncts would be eligible to apply." As Bowen's communique noted, "Nationally, this will make our contract one of the few in higher education that creates new full-time positions and goes against the grain of increasing contingent labor." Pay for this position, the PSC told THE ADVOCATE, would be at the fulltime lecturer rate.

Paid sick days for non-teaching adjuncts and adjunct CLTs.

Ability for adjuncts to claim back pay from the beginning of the semester in case of underpayment.

Adjunct access to college e-mail and voicemail and listings in college faculty directories.

Bowen seems to recognize that, for adjuncts, this contract is picking meat from already ravaged bones - not much of a victory at all. Bowen said, "There is still a long way to go before CUNY offers anything like parity to the thousands of part-timers whose underpaid labor has kept the university afloat as funds were being slashed. CUNY's abusive reliance on part-time labor hurts all of us; it's clear that we will need an even greater level of mobilization in future contracts to break them of this bad-employer habit."

In evaluating the contract, many have pointed to the fact that, despite a strong show of support and solidarity at rallies and meetings, the so-called Taylor Laws (which prohibit state employees from striking) were successful in reducing the PSC's leverage. CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein's repeated threat of penalties for such job actions, which included steep fines and even the possibility of reconsidering tenure, was said to have a chilling effect on the rank and file.

Although Bowen seems satisfied with what her negotiating team accomplished, she also understands that broader structural questions must now move front and center if real gains are to be made. Securing CUNY's future as an institution that respects both its full and part time employees, she notes, lays not necessarily in the negotiation of contracts such as this, but in changing the environment in which bargaining takes place.