Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to the Fall 2024 semester! I hope your summer was filled with joyful and fulfilling experiences – time with family and friends, time for your research, scholarship, and creative projects, time to gaze at the stars or gaze into the future you want to see on the other side of the November election!
This message is about our contract, but please note that the PSC’s get-out-the-vote actions start Tuesday, September 3, and a series of urgent Decarbonize CUNY town hall meetings begins Thursday, September 5. Watch your email and the website psc-cuny.org for these and other union activities.
For the PSC bargaining team, this summer provided an opportunity to press CUNY management in negotiations, and we made real strides. We succeeded in shifting management from their initial opposition to extending multi-year appointments for our longest serving and most relied upon teaching adjuncts, but we are still not done with those negotiations. We have persuaded management that anyone who receives a promotion or reclassification in title at CUNY should get a raise along with it, but we still have not won the salary increases our members deserve. We are in constructive negotiations on remote work and flexible scheduling, workplace safety and health, paid parental leave, promotional opportunities, equity for adjuncts teaching large enrollment courses, and many other issues, but many open issues remain. We are not there yet, but we believe we can win a strong contract with your support and engagement.
That is why the return for fall semester is so critical. It took more than a year after the expiration of our last contract in February 2023 for management to put an economic offer on the table! That initial offer, presented to the bargaining team on March 27, has not been improved since. It would not meet our real needs, as we have said at the table and as PSC members have told the Board of Trustees. So we spent the past several months increasing member pressure on CUNY management to do better, even disrupting the last Board of Trustees meeting in the Bronx and picketing outside Board Chair Bill Thompson’s Wall Street investment bank. That pressure is working. We believe management can improve their initial economic offer. But it is going to take all of us to move them.
There is a lot you can do in September to help achieve the contract and raises that we deserve. Mark your calendar and make a plan to participate in some or all of these early fall actions:
March with the PSC in the NYC Labor Day Parade – Saturday, September 7, 12:00PM. RSVP for the parade.
Attend the Contract Now! Fall ’24 Mass Online Meeting – Monday, Sept 9, 6:30PM. Register for the mass meeting Zoom.
Observe contract negotiations. PSC members can attend a bargaining session after attending an online orientation. The next orientation is Wednesday, September 4, 6:30PM. Register for the orientation Zoom.
Attend an in-person PSC Civil Disobedience Training – Thursday, September 12, 6:30PM. Register here for the latest in a series of CD trainings that began last spring. If we don’t see significant movement toward the contract PSC members deserve, the PSC will take our demands directly and dramatically to the chancellor. If the bargaining team determines that an action that includes civil disobedience is necessary, we’ll be prepared.
In solidarity,
James Davis, President
PSC/CUNY
Published: August 28, 2024
