PSC-CUNY Memorandum of Agreement 2023-2027

Our contract expired on Feb. 28, 2023. Two of the raises we just negotiated have taken place in these past two years so you are owed the difference.  In the coming months, you will receive in your paycheck the amount of our past raises in one lump payment that is called retroactive pay.

Retroactive pay (back-pay) is the difference between what you were actually paid since our last contract expired and what you would have been paid if the new contractual higher rates had been in place at the time.  Full-time and part-time faculty and staff who have worked at CUNY after March 1, 2023 are due back pay.

We expect retroactive payments to be made in the Spring 2025 semester.

*Compensation for courses other than three hours will be adjusted proportionally by the teaching contact hour. For adjunct lecturers, that will mean an increase of 37.7% from $6,875 to $9,467 per four contact hour course

The proposed contract includes a new pilot provision for multi-year adjunct appointments  The vast majority of adjuncts at colleges around the country have no access to job security. This provision is a victory achieved in the face of management’s persistent efforts to undermine any stability for adjunct faculty and their refusal to renew the adjunct job security pilot agreement established and continued in the last two contracts. The new multi-year appointment is not the full job security that CUNY adjuncts deserve, but it is a binding, contractual bulwark against management’s vision of a vastly more precarious CUNY teaching force. There have been changes that benefit affected adjuncts and changes that acknowledge departmental needs. 

The proposed contract would allow two-year appointments that may, after the first year, be extended to three-years at departments’ discretion. The number of semesters an adjunct must teach in order to qualify was extended by two semesters. But all adjuncts who qualified under the terms of the previous agreement, including in the year of its lapse, are grandfathered in.  Adjuncts working under the provision will be able to look to other departments or colleges if their home department cannot offer a course they need to stay eligible. They will have more stable access to health insurance, too, thanks to a provision providing temporary COBRA payments from CUNY if an adjunct in a multi-year appointment is not assigned credit hours needed to stay eligible for health insurance.  The union will keep pushing for a real certificate of continuous employment and job security for all adjuncts.  

In securing continuation of adjunct job security, PSC members rejected management’s efforts to set us against each other. We mobilized ourselves and our allies in State and City government and in the labor movement to decisively reject management’s demand to more than double the time-to-qualify for a multi-year appointment from 5 years to 12 years. 

Teaching adjuncts remain hourly employees through Spring 2027, and the minimum rate for teaching a 3-contact hour course (Adjunct Lecturer) will increase to $6,750 in Spring 2026 and $7,000 in Fall 2026. Beginning in Summer 2027, teaching adjunct pay will change from an hourly to a per-course/contact hour basis, and the minimum will increase again to $7,100 for a 3-contact hour course and $9,467 for a 4-contact hour course, with course-related professional activities and required trainings incorporated as professional expectations rather than compensated per-hour or deducted from office hours, as Article 15.2 currently stipulates. Per-course salaries will depend on the number of contact hours and the adjunct’s title. Workload requirements to qualify for health insurance, tuition reimbursement and other workload-credit-based eligibility requirements will remain the same despite this change to the compensation structure in 2027.  

The minimum pay for an adjunct teaching a three-credit course will be $7100 by 2027. That represents a 29.1% raise, and brings the base pay of an adjunct lecturer who teaches the same annual course load as a full-time lecturer within a few thousand dollars the full-time lecturer’s annual salary, depending on their salary step. Note that full-time lecturers, unlike teaching adjuncts, also have a service obligation on which they are evaluated.  The PSC Bargaining Team has  again prioritized equity raises for adjuncts and our other lowest-paid colleagues. Combating the crisis of contingency, winning pay parity, expanding access to full-time jobs, and defending adjunct jobs in periods of instability are fundamental to our union’s mission. 

Equity raises are increases in pay that are in addition to the “across-the-board” raises.  One of the major economic victories of the proposed contract is that it provides equity increases in salary for Teaching Adjuncts, Non-Teaching Adjuncts and other hourly workers, Graduate Assistants, and full-time employees including the CLT series, Assistants to HEO, and CLIP and CUNY Start Instructors.  See the chart below for a summary of equity raises:

• Beginning March 1, 2027, NTAs I & II, Adjunct CLET, Adjunct Senior CLT, and CET-H will receive an additional equity increase of two dollars per hour. 

The University’s remote work policy has not changed as a result of the contract negotiations. The current Remote Work Agreement remains in effect. Renewed annually since the start of COVID, it provides a framework for arrangements between workers and their supervisors about the schedule and duration of remote work and guarantees certain protections when we are working remotely.

PSC fought hard to win something on remote work but we did not succeed. No New York state public-sector union has achieved contract language establishing an entitlement to remote work. It is very disappointing but it became increasingly difficult to move CUNY and NY State government to make PSC an exception to other state contracts and allow us to include anything about remote work in our contract. The Remote Work Agreement will continue to be in effect so we do have this benefit now and we will need to continue to emphasize to CUNY how important this issue is to us.

Remote work is embedded in modern workplace culture and is essential to CUNY’s staff recruitment and retention. It will remain a PSC priority. We have as strong a policy on hybrid and flexible schedules as any New York State union, but we know CUNY staff deserve more. We think we’ll be in an even better position on this issue in three years, when many of us will have been working remotely for nearly a decade.

For the first time, HEOs who have accumulated compensatory time may, through a defined process, either utilize the time or, by mutual agreement, receive pay for the extra hours worked.

HEOs assigned to work more than 35 hours per week will be able to 1) carryover of unused comp time for up to 60 days beyond the current deadline of 30-days beyond the end of the quarter in which it was earned,  or 2) payout of unused comp time by mutual agreement of the employee and the college.