There is no CUNY without the work we do.
Dozens of PSC members testified about CUNY’s inadequate draft budget request for Fiscal Year 2020 at a last-minute Board of Trustees hearing on Wednesday, January 9. The trustees’ request does not call for full funding for our contract by New York State, does not name an acceptable level of funding for the new teaching load reduction, and never mentions the word “adjunct.” Instead, it boasts about programs whose success is entirely dependent on our labor but makes only vague references to how the funding for our contract will be resolved.
The conditions described by faculty, staff and students at the hearing are indefensible. Adjuncts spoke about hundreds of hours of unpaid work, about losing their health, about being evicted because of their near-poverty pay. Full-time faculty described the damage done to the colleges by the lack of public funding. The PSC called on the CUNY Board to stop accepting poverty funding for CUNY and instead to demand the funding the University needs.
