Dear Colleagues,
Both CUNY and the State have now released their proposed budgets for the University. You should have received our chapter’s analysis of CUNY’s proposals in two emails sent during the Winter Sessions.
Briefly stated, the State’s allocation of new funding for CUNY comes nowhere near to what CUNY has said it needs for the senior colleges; in fact it barely covers expected mandatory cost increases (infrastructure/employees under expired contracts) and has no provision for paying the raises already agreed to for DC 37, let alone any of our current contract demands, including basic raises and our extremely important demand for $7K per course for adjuncts. I will not even mention that there’s nothing for the outstanding issue of promised, new full-time hires to cover the bulk of the full-time faculty teaching load reduction.
In short, we have a massive fight ahead of us if we are to avoid another prolonged period without a contract and keep the University from gutting, through its weakness, our work conditions to pay for our contract. It’s a fight we can win. But it will take all of our efforts.
The PSC Lehman Chapter is therefore calling two meetings next week to discuss the implications of the current budget picture for our contract negotiations and what we need to do between now an April.
