The PSC members who gathered outside CUNY Central’s office in Midtown Manhattan on April 15 had a simple message for the university’s bosses: Pay us, and pay us now.
The faculty and staff at CUNY had overwhelmingly ratified a new contract with the University in January after an intense, two-year-long contract campaign. With ratification sealed, members eagerly awaited their raises, signing bonuses and back pay – while the contract was ratified in January, the previous pact had expired in February 2023. It seemed to CUNY’s faculty and staff at the beginning of the semester that with the contract victory behind them, the winter of the university’s discontent was made glorious summer, the union’s bruised contract picket signs hung up for monuments.
PSC members bring the message straight to the CUNY Board of Trustees. (Credit: Erik McGregor)
Alas, members waited for contract obligations that seemed never to arrive. Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. Faculty and staff began asking themselves: Would the semester actually close with the University simply pretending that a new contract was not in place?
TARGETING THE BOARD
The spirited picket line outside the Central office took place right before a CUNY Board of Trustees meeting, with hundreds of chanting members on the sidewalk. PSC President James Davis marched into the meeting with a group of members demanding that the University stop dragging its feet and pay members their new wages, along with the back pay and signing bonus they were owed.
Not long after that, CUNY Central announced a firm schedule for the implementation of the economic agreement ratified in January. Eligible full-time employees paid by the state should have received their $3,000 ratification bonus on May 15 – and for those paid by the city, on May 23.
The other pay dates are as follows:
- July 24: Prorated ratification bonus for eligible part-time employees paid by the state.
- 1: Prorated ratification bonus for eligible part-time employees paid by the city.
- 7: Wage increases (including retroactive pay to 2023) for all eligible employees paid by the state.
- 15: Wage increases (plus retroactive pay to 2023) for all eligible employees paid by the city.
- 4: New salary increases (from Sept. 1 on) for eligible employees paid by the state.
- 12: New salary increases (from Sept. 1 on) for eligible employees paid by the city.
“It is great that these increases, for which the PSC fought hard in bargaining, are locked in, but outrageous that it took so long for CUNY to complete the necessary preparations for the state,” Davis said in a message to the membership. “The credit goes to PSC members for moving management to complete the work needed to produce a schedule. Your pressure on the central administration yielded results, and it’s a shame that it took a large, boisterous picket outside last week’s Board of Trustees meeting on April 15 and an intervention by the union president to finally receive the timeline. Inside the meeting, joined by rank-and-file PSC members, I shared directly with the Board the deep frustration PSC members felt.”
He continued, “The implementation schedule was determined by CUNY management, the Office of State Comptroller (OSC), the NYC Financial Information Services Agency and Office of Payroll Administration (FISA-OPA). When CUNY management failed to show appropriate urgency, the PSC continually pressed, and I have been on the phone with both management and Comptroller DiNapoli regularly for the past two months.”
COMPLEX AGREEMENT
The PSC-CUNY contract is, indeed, a more complicated agreement than many other labor contracts in New York’s public sector. The PSC-CUNY contract involves both full-timers and part-timers, faculty and staff, with some people paid by the city (community colleges) and others paid by the state (four-year colleges).
“Some factors are out of our control and are genuinely complex,” Davis said. “For example, a teaching adjunct’s prorated bonus is based on their individual service record of teaching contact hours in Spring and Fall semesters in 2024. The bonus is a proportion of 24 teaching contact hours, the total workload of a full-time lecturer. However, if the adjunct’s total is 18 or more contact hours, that qualifies as full-time for purposes of the $3,000 ratification bonus. If a teaching adjunct also performed non-teaching adjunct service during the two semesters in question, that work also counts toward the calculation of the prorated bonus.”
He added, “Of course, many CUNY teaching adjuncts work at multiple campuses, including some who teach at both a community college and a senior college. None of this excuses the delays reflected in the implementation schedule, but it illustrates the level of complexity that the staff at the state and city navigate as they try to implement our contractual raises accurately and without errors.”
