"Strong arguments for our demands are important, and we’ve made them, but the struggle at this point is not about arguments.  It’s about an effort to discipline and punish the public sector, to destroy the services on which working people rely.  We’re up against a well-developed agenda of dismantling the public sphere, in part by steady erosion of the salaries and benefits of public servants."

"Mayor Bloomberg makes no secret of his anti-labor agenda, and neither should we.  He has explicitly demanded contracts from City workers in which salary increases even below the level of inflation have to be “paid for” by givebacks that save the City money.  And this is in a year in which the City has a record $3.5 billion surplus and the State has higher than predicted revenues."

three choices:  "One, accept the concessionary pattern—below-inflation raises, continued problems in the Welfare Fund, and onerous givebacks.  Two, submit our contract to arbitration and then try to reach a settlement based on the fact-finding that would result.  And three—organize to break through the anti-labor, anti-public-sector, anti-education political agenda."

"the dirty little secret of  CUNY’s labor structure: under the pressure of shrinking budgets, CUNY cut costs in the time-honored corporate way—by replacing a more expensive labor force with a cheaper one.  Step by incremental step CUNY has become an institution where the majority of teaching is done not by full-time faculty with benefits and expectations of research and protections of academic freedom, but by part-timers paid a fraction of the full-time rate with few or none of these provisions. "

"That’s exactly the experience they want to deny our students.  At heart, the austerity agenda for CUNY is an expression of contempt for our students.  It’s a declaration that a real university, one where faculty don’t have to worry about how they’ll pay their dental bills, one where young scholars are not fleeing for other jobs and senior scholars retiring in disgust—a real university is too good for them. "

"After nearly three years of negotiations and firm resistance to an austerity contract, we may have reached the limit of what can be accomplished by rallies, faxes and letters alone.  These tactics are good, and every time we have used them, management has shifted its position, but they may not be enough to break through to a settlement with the elements we need and without the concessions management seeks. " 

"The referendum, if we hold it, will be conducted by secret ballot among the entire membership by a neutral third party.... A yes vote would mean that you authorize the union’s Executive Council, if necessary, to call for a job action.  A yes vote would enable the negotiating team to press harder, armed with that expression of support, for the contract we need.  Only if necessary would we call for a strike or other job action. "

"Already, something transformative is sweeping across the University—and management is taking notice.  Hundreds of members have volunteered to be grassroots organizers—picket captains—committed to talking to other members in person about the contract.  The member-organizers run the gamut from Distinguished Professors to first-year faculty, from long-serving adjuncts to new lab technicians.  Three hundred people have already signed on for this work, and as a result, the conversation in this union has changed."

Good evening, PSC members, students, supporters and guests.  I am honored to speak to you tonight as your union president.  Thank you for making all the different kinds of efforts you made to be here, from rearranging tough schedules to rethinking your own positions.  As one of my colleagues said, “I’ll come with an open mind, an open heart and possibly an open mouth.”  What meeting could ask for more than that?  I also want to thank personally the students who came to show their support—your courage and curiosity and hope are why we do what we do.  Thank you, too, to the many supporters of the PSC who have pledged to stand beside us as we stand up for what we and our students deserve.  And a special thanks to the PSC staff, whose extraordinary efforts have been essential to making this historic night possible. 

 I will talk tonight about why this contract has been so difficult, what is at stake in winning a good settlement, and how the union plans to consolidate the power to win.  You will hear the union’s timeline and strategy for bringing the negotiations to a successful close. I also want to talk with you about the way PSC members’ new level of engagement in this fight has begun to transform the union and holds the key to the power we need. 

DISMANTLING THE PUBLIC SPHERE

What has made this round of contract negotiations so difficult is politics.  As academics, we’ve organized our lives around logic and argument, and we can sometimes find it hard to believe that negotiating a contract is not just about who makes the better arguments.  Strong arguments for our demands are important, and we’ve made them, but the struggle at this point is not about arguments.  It’s about an effort to discipline and punish the public sector, to destroy the services on which working people rely.  We’re up against a well-developed agenda of dismantling the public sphere, in part by steady erosion of the salaries and benefits of public servants.  I sometimes hear members say that if the union just had more lawyers at the bargaining table or if we could just make our argument differently, we would have a contract by now.  We might have a contract, but we wouldn’t have a good one. 

To ignore the political nature of our negotiations is fundamentally to misperceive the process and thus to misjudge the strategy we should use within it.  We are public employees, paid with public funds; both the City and the State must sign off on our contract.  The union has come to the point in negotiations when what must be shifted is a political agenda, not just the perspective of individual negotiators on the other side of the bargaining table.  It’s because of the magnitude of what we’re up against that PSC Delegate Assembly voted on May 26 to authorize the union to conduct a referendum on job action.  I’ll say more about the referendum later, but the union’s policy-making body took this step because we recognized that we would need more than rallies, phone calls and faxes to shift an agenda this deep.  The other side is using all their power to advance their agenda and we would need to use all of our power to advance ours.   

THE MAYOR'S ANTI-LABOR AGENDA

Mayor Bloomberg makes no secret of his anti-labor agenda, and neither should we.  He has explicitly demanded contracts from City workers in which salary increases even below the level of inflation have to be “paid for” by givebacks that save the City money.  And this is in a year in which the City has a record $3.5 billion surplus and the State has higher than predicted revenues.  The demand for austerity is not about a lack of money in the City or the State.  It’s about curtailing what are seen as the outrageous luxuries of a salary, health benefits and a pension for public-sector employees, and it’s ultimately about dismantling the public sector and endangering those who depend on it.  That’s exactly the agenda that was exposed in the catastrophe following Hurrcane Katrina, but it still has currency in Pataki’s and Bloomberg’s New York.    

As PSC members, you have had the courage to say you find that premise unacceptable.  We are now at a turning point in negotiations because after the series of increasing offers from management since the disastrous 1.5% of last December, we have hit the limit of the economic framework the City has sought to impose on public-employee contracts.   I continue to have intensive meetings with management to try to reach a settlement, and we will be back at the bargaining table on October 6^th, but the current offer from CUNY management, unchanged since last May, is essentially a reduction in salary (because the total offer falls below inflation), a reduction in health benefits (if not this year, then within the next few years) and reduction in the quality of our working lives.  That’s why I call this a concessionary contract: not just the outright givebacks on summer annual leave, the removal of department chairs from the union and other issues, but a complete concessionary framework. 

That framework was established in the 4.17% contract settled with District Council 37, but it also, less obviously, underlies the 10% contract settled with the police union.  The same framework is also visible in the fact-finding decision that the teachers’ union, the UFT, is now trying to hammer into a settlement that works for them.   Here’s the math: the City offer is 4.17% over three years; anything over that must be “paid for” by givebacks that save the City money.  In the DC 37 contract, worth over 5%, that meant introducing a new, lower salary scale for incoming workers.  The police union contract starts with that same 4.17%, adds a small differential for the additional risks of uniformed workers, and then reaches 10% with larger givebacks.  Each new recruit will lose $48,000 in salary over the first five and a half years at work; plus the police give up their one personal day.  Larger increases, but larger givebacks.  The fact-finding decision for teachers included an increase of 11.4%, but also demanded additional days of work, additional minutes each day, and changes in contractual protections.   

THREE CHOICES

Faced with this political landscape, the PSC had three choices.  One, accept the concessionary pattern—below-inflation raises, continued problems in the Welfare Fund, and onerous givebacks.  Two, submit our contract to arbitration and then try to reach a settlement based on the fact-finding that would result.  And three—organize to break through the anti-labor, anti-public-sector, anti-education political agenda.      

I don’t think I need to say why we didn’t choose option one; no one to whom I have spoken has said that 4.17% is even thinkable. Option two, arbitration, may seem more promising, but what may not be at first apparent is that arbitration is conducted in the same political environment as negotiations.  I sympathize with those of you who imagine arbitration and fact-finding as an airy, neutral process where our cause would prevail, but the truth is that arbitration too is subject to the pressures of political policies.  Of the three arbitrators, one is chosen by the city or the state, and the decision that results typically bears the imprint management’s demands as well as the union’s.  We could expect that an arbitration decision for us might hold out one or two percent more than we’ve been offered so far, but at the price of concessions even more onerous than those currently on the table.  Remember, one of the union’s first major victories in this round of negotiations was the withdrawal of management’s demands to weaken job security for Higher Education Officers, demands that would ultimately weaken job security for everyone.  We held firm on that, and we have also said that we will not even entertain a discussion of lower starting salaries.   

Guided by you, the union leadership chose option three: organize and fight.  Your commitment  was clear from our first major rally, in April 2004, where the theme was “no austerity contract.”  You showed up in your hundreds every month at the CUNY Board of Trustees meetings to protest the lack of a fair contract, you sent thousands of postcards and faxes to the Chancellor, you rallied outside Benno Schmidt’s office and, finally, you made your voices heard at Matthew Goldstein’s house.  You didn’t do all of that to accept a concessionary contract.   

 "Since 1990 the real-dollar value of CUNY’s
public funding has been slashed by 40%"

Our collective aversion to another round of concessions is so strong, I believe, because a series of poor contracts in the late 1980s and the 1990s has been compounded with a history of under-funding of CUNY.  The combination is lethal.  Just as our contracts were providing below-inflation increases—in other words, decreases—public funding for CUNY was being eviscerated.  Since 1990 the real-dollar value of CUNY’s public funding has been slashed by 40%--nearly in half.  We all live that history every day, in the thousands of silent accommodations we make to a culture of scarcity: no chalk in classrooms so you bring your own; no time to spend with individual students when there are forty in a class so you do additional e-mail office hours after midnight; no funds for quality lab equipment so you fish the unbroken test tubes out of the box of discount supplies; no money for adequate staffing in the financial aid office so you stay till two in the morning to serve all the students waiting in line.  We can all recite our own lists—or we could if we allowed ourselves to admit how we subsidize the university.    

And then there’s the dirty little secret of  CUNY’s labor structure: under the pressure of shrinking budgets, CUNY cut costs in the time-honored corporate way—by replacing a more expensive labor force with a cheaper one.  Step by incremental step CUNY has become an institution where the majority of teaching is done not by full-time faculty with benefits and expectations of research and protections of academic freedom, but by part-timers paid a fraction of the full-time rate with few or none of these provisions.  There is the fiction about CUNY, displayed in subway ads with happy faces, and then there is the hollowed-out reality.   CUNY’s reliance on cheap labor hurts us all, and undoing it must be one of our major goals as a union.  It won’t happen in a single contract and it will take all of us together—full-timers as well as part-timers—but it will be essential in reclaiming CUNY as a serious university.   

As resources for CUNY dwindled, we also experienced the losses of a decade-and-a-half of concessionary contracts.  The first contract in ten years to include increases above inflation was the 2000-2002 agreement, the first negotiated under our leadership.  That contract brought real raises, additional Welfare Fund contributions, and creative ideas such as a full semester of paid research time for junior faculty, paid office hours for adjuncts, a professional development fund for staff.  But a single contract cannot reverse decades of decline in the real value of our salaries.  If our salaries had merely kept up with inflation since 1972, the last time the PSC took a strike vote, the top salary now would be $147,000.  Instead, it’s $93,507.  The median salary for assistant professors and HEO assistants would be $79,208; now it’s $48,162.  I don’t have to explain to you how that affects each one of us and undercuts CUNY’s ability to recruit the best faculty and staff.  I’m sure every person in this room knows of a colleague who left CUNY or a job candidate who wouldn’t come because of the embarrassing lack of competitive salaries.   

The PSC faces an additional challenge in this round of bargaining: a decade and a half of austerity contracts have left our Welfare Fund in crisis.  The simple arithmetic is that drug costs, the major expense of the Welfare Fund, have been going up by 18% or so a year, and our Welfare Fund contributions from CUNY have not.  In the last contract we negotiated several million additional dollars annually for the Welfare Fund, and even still the Fund has had to reduce the dental benefit and make other difficult changes to survive.  CUNY management’s response at the bargaining table so far has been: choose between benefits and salary.  They say, you can have some money—though not enough—for the Welfare Fund, but it will have to come out of the amount that for other unions goes to salary.  We have said that is not acceptable.  A primary goal in this round of negotiations, one the union cannot settle without, is a substantial and permanent increase in Welfare Fund contributions.  That’s a tough position to take in this environment of (false) austerity, but we are determined not to accept less. 

"the austerity agenda for CUNY
 is an exPRESSion of CONtempt
for our students."   

What we’re fighting against when we refuse substandard wages, benefits and conditions for ourselves is a substandard future for our students.  Do you think Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Pataki and Chancellor Goldstein would be content to send their children to a college where the faculty had no time to spend with individual students, no support for research?   The governing class that advocates austerity for us and our students would never dream of visiting it on their own children.  Like many of you, I imagine, I had that one-on-one attention as a student in college, and I know how it can change you, open you to lifelong pleasures and powers.  That’s exactly the experience they want to deny our students.  At heart, the austerity agenda for CUNY is an expression of contempt for our students.  It’s a declaration that a real university -- one where faculty don’t have to worry about how they’ll pay their dental bills, one where young scholars are not fleeing for other jobs and senior scholars retiring in disgust—a real university is too good for them. 

Let’s be clear about it: our conditions are substandard because a substandard college education is considered good enough for the people we teach by the powers that control the City and State budgets.  Our students are overwhelmingly working class, poor, people of color and new immigrants.   And in an unforgiving country like ours without a social safety net, a good college education is not a luxury, it’s close to a requirement for a decent life.  What’s at stake in the impoverishment of CUNY are the life-chances of a whole population of New Yorkers.  “We were never meant to survive,” the poet Audre Lorde said about black people in this country.  Our fight as CUNY faculty and staff is so hard—and so important—because in a certain sense, our students were never meant to survive either.     

The PSC has made tremendous progress in the last five years in beginning to reverse the pattern of budget cuts for CUNY, but ultimately we don’t control the State and City budgets.  Nor do we control the national political agendas that lie behind them.  There is one thing we do control, however, and that’s the contract.  We have the power to say no to one more round of deepening poverty for CUNY by refusing to agree to a poverty contract.  In my view, this union accepted the unacceptable for too long, believing it didn’t have the power to resist.  I sought this office because I believed that the history of accepting the unacceptable could be changed.  We have been mesmerized into thinking we have less power than we have.  I am far from underestimating the obstacles we face, having spent much of the last five years in the belly of the beast, but I am confident that we have the support and the strategy and the power to win.   

So how do we do it?  The only answer is, we organize.  But the question demands a fuller response, given our particular position as university workers, the entrenched politics we’re up against, the lack of mass labor resistance to the austerity agenda for New York’s employees.  We know what we’re fighting against, but also what we’re fighting for: a contract worthy of our work—salary increases of at least 10%, a solution to the Welfare Fund crisis, and long-overdue improvements in equity and working conditions.  It’s a comment on the regressive political period we live in that that’s an ambitious agenda, but in this climate it’s extremely ambitious.  And not nearly as ambitious as it must be in the future if we are going to reclaim this university.   

"we may have reached the limit of
WHAT can be accomplished by
rallies faxes and letters alone"

After nearly three years of negotiations and firm resistance to an austerity contract, we may have reached the limit of what can be accomplished by rallies, faxes and letters alone.  These tactics are good, and every time we have used them, management has shifted its position, but they may not be enough to break through to a settlement with the elements we need and without the concessions management seeks.  We have come to the point where we are forced to consider our most potent weapon as a union.  Just as we have the power to say No to an unacceptable contract, we have the power to withhold the labor on which the University depends.   

That’s not a step any union would take lightly, and the PSC Delegate Assembly understood that in the resolution it passed in May.  The resolution first mandates that the union leadership continue to do everything it can to reach a good settlement at the bargaining table.  And we are doing that, through intense and productive discussions throughout the summer, now with a return to the formal bargaining table.  The two sides will meet across the table on October 6^th, with a series of sessions scheduled throughout the month.  By being here tonight, you give us power at the table; you have made it unmistakable that hundreds of PSC members are deeply engaged in this issue.  But if we are not able to reach a settlement when negotiations resume, the union’s Executive Council now has the authority to conduct a referendum on whether to authorize the leadership to call for a strike or other job action.  Why so many steps?  Because we want to make this decision as democratic and authentic as we can.  In many unions the leadership would simply call a strike and demand that everyone support it.  We don’t think that’s the way to build support or to honor the seriousness of our members.  If the union leadership holds a referendum, all PSC members in good standing will have the chance to vote yes or no.  You will be voting not on an immediate action but on whether to authorize the union leadership to take the next step and call for a withholding of labor.   

I am announcing tonight, and I will call CUNY’s chief negotiator immediately after this meeting to tell her, that we will work tirelessly over the next month to achieve a settlement before November third.  On that night, the union’s Executive Council will assess whether we have the framework for an acceptable settlement or whether and when we will hold a referendum.  We chose November 3 because it is a strategic date.  It gives us one month to complete the project of talking to every union member one-on-one about what a referendum means.  It also comes right as the UFT is scheduled to make a similar decision on calling a strike vote and on a day that may see a massive labor rally.  November third is also days before the mayoral election, when the city’s attention will be most sharply focused on Mayor Bloomberg’s policies.  And it coincides with the beginning of a wave of labor actions that we are about to see in private universities, where graduate employees have had to strike even to be recognized as a union.  We want to have a settlement or the basis of a settlement by November third; if not, we will decide on whether and when to hold the referendum. 

"I will be asking you to give the negotiating
team the power we need to show management
we are serious about this contract"

The decision on whether to authorize the leadership to call for job action, however, will be made not by the Executive Council, but by the membership.  The referendum, if we hold it, will be conducted by secret ballot among the entire membership by a neutral third party, just as we conduct a contract ratification vote.  I hope that we can reach a settlement without conducting a strike or job action, and I am doing everything in my power, including working directly with the Governor’s office, to achieve that.  But if we don’t achieve it, we will know by November third.  If the Executive Council then decides to hold the referendum, I will be asking you not just to vote, but to vote yes.  I will be asking you to give the negotiating team the power we need to show management we are serious about this contract.  A yes vote would mean that you authorize the union’s Executive Council, if necessary, to call for a job action.  A yes vote would enable the negotiating team to press harder, armed with that expression of support, for the contract we need.  Only if necessary would we call for a strike or other job action. 

What is a job action? It’s typically defined, at least in US usage, as a collective withholding of labor.  Unions have used anything from an indefinite strike to a one-week or one-day strike to a rolling series of strikes in different places. Other unions have used work-to-rule tactics, sick-outs or withholding of specific, strategic forms of labor, such as grading.  Some academic job actions have turned the community into a classroom and held thousands of classes off-campus in churches, synagogues and community centers.  If we do hold a referendum and if we do get a yes vote, we would first use that vote to pressure management to settle, and only if that failed would we plan for a strike or other action.  It’s a sign of the leadership’s trust in you and confidence in our own position that we are willing to come to you for a vote.        

We are many steps away from a strike, but I want to be straight with you about what a strike means.  How many of you here have been on strike?   A strike forever changes a union and can be the beginning of a totally new level of strength.  Don’t underestimate the visibility and moral force a job action at the country’s largest public urban university would have.  But a strike can also be very, very hard.  It’s too early to talk about a strike or other job action, but you are entitled to know as you think about it that the same political climate that brings us austerity for union contracts and CUNY students brings us a labor law that contains severe penalties on public-employee unions that strike—and almost no penalties on employers that refuse to settle fair contracts.  That law needs to be changed, and we are currently working with NYSUT and the state labor affiliation to change it, but in the meantime it’s the law of the land.  If the union moves to a referendum, we will provide you with full information about the Taylor Law.  We will inform you about your rights, the protection the union offers, the financial assistance available to those who need it, and the political context that influences how the law is applied.  A strike or other job action is serious business; there is no way to do it without sacrifice, at least short-term sacrifice, and risk.  This union leadership will not soft-peddle that risk—but nor will we soft-peddle the power we have if we organize.  Nothing has been won by the labor movement without risk—not the eight-hour day or the weekend or the right to form a union.  We are doing everything we can to win a good contract before November 3 without having to consider of that step, and tonight I’m asking for your support. 

"Already, something transformative is
sweeping across the University—
and management is taking notice"

The way we will win is to make an unprecedented effort in the coming month. I want us to leave this room with a commitment to reorder our priorities for the next few weeks and make the contract fight primary. That may mean putting a writing project on hold for a while or getting up an hour earlier to grade papers every day, but we will not win this if you leave it up to a handful of die-hards. If this is worth fighting for – and I think you believe it is – we can’t do it through business-as-usual. Already, something transformative is sweeping across the University – and management is taking notice. Hundreds of members have volunteered to be grassroots organizers – picket captains – committed to talking to other members in person about the contract. The member-organizers run the gamut from Distinguished Professors to first-year faculty, from long-serving adjuncts to new lab technicians. Three hundred people have already signed on for this work, and as a result, the conversation in this union has changed…. In thousands of individual encounters, we have begun to grapple with the hard questions – as rich as any we consider in our scholarly work – about power, education and collective struggle. The attention management has paid to our resolution making a referendum a possibility should convince us that we command a new kind of power when we consider collective action. We start tonight with these seven points of action:

1.       We will return to the bargaining table on October 6 and call on management to move beyond their current offer.  We will do everything we can to reach a fair settlement at the table. 

2.       I will communicate to CUNY management that we have set a deadline of November 3 to assess whether we have the framework of the settlement we need.  If not, we decide on that night whether and when to hold a referendum. 

3.       The union will continue its plan to reach every member for a conversation with a member-organizer, a picket captain, about the contract and a possible referendum.

4.       We will hold loud, angry but informational pickets across the University on October 19 and 20.   The picket captains, together with the chapter leadership, will take the lead in organizing these pickets.  This is not a job action, but it will show CUNY management what it looks like to have the entrances to our campuses filled with picketers. 

5.       We will work to develop student support, which would be essential if we did have to act.  The fight for our contract is a fight for our students.  Our students are working people, and they understand this.  We will do everything we can to avoid taking an action that would disrupt our students, but we should trust out students to understand that when we say No to more concessions, we are fighting for them.  So in the next month the union will be asking you to distribute to your students a leaflet addressed to students, their families and their communities explaining what we are fighting for and why we need their support.  We will also be asking students to join us in the informational picket. 

6.       We will step up our campaign to make our case to the public, including taking out a full-page ad in the Chronicle of Higher Education calling on CUNY to provide a fair contract.  The text of that ad is on the blue sheet; read it and be ready to sign it right here tonight. 

7.       We will call on you tonight to join the three hundred people who have already signed on as picket captains.  Our goal was 200 picket captains by September, and we’ve far exceeded it, but we need several hundred more if we are to succeed in our project of speaking to every member.  

This is a powerful moment in the history of this union, and perhaps the city. We will expand what it means to be an academic if we imagine ourselves in an intellectual and political alliance with those whom CUNY’s founders called “the children of the whole people.” When this leadership was elected to PSC office, our promise was that we would fight, and we would organize. Tonight I pledge that I will give everything I have to this fight – and I ask you to do the same.

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