BC adjunct faculty, joined by full-time faculty and student supporters, conducted a public Grade-In on Dec 11, the last Tuesday of Fall '18 classes. Nearly 60 people lined the hallway outside the college President's office, grading student papers and exams. In a quiet but poignant spectacle, they expressed solidarity and support for the $7K demand for adjuncts and a fair contract for CUNY employees. Reporters from the Brooklyn Eagle and the Brooklyn Paper covered the action.
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Grade-In Contract Campaign Action @BC
BC adjunct faculty, joined by full-time faculty and student supporters, conducted a public Grade-In on Dec 11, the last Tuesday of Fall '18 classes. Nearly 60 people lined the hallway outside the college President's office, grading student papers and exams. In a quiet but poignant spectacle, they expressed solidarity and support for the $7K demand for adjuncts and a fair contract for CUNY employees. Reporters from the Brooklyn Eagle and the Brooklyn Paper covered the action.
Tuesday, December 11, 2018
Arrests made at BoT demo
BC Chapter Chair, James Davis, was among the 17 PSC elected leaders arrested outside the Dec 10 CUNY Board of Trustees meeting for civil disobedience. They were participants in a 200-person demonstration against the Board's inaction on the State budget request and collective bargaining.
Tuesday, November 20, 2018
Brooklyn College Chapter Statement on “$7K or Strike”
Passed at Nov 20, 2018 PSC Chapter meeting.
Whereas $7K per course is still a poverty wage in New
York City but is at least closer to parity
with what a full-time lecturer makes at CUNY for the same work;
Whereas adjuncts make up 61%
of the faculty at CUNY and teach 53% of classes, at an average rate of $3,500
per three-credit class with no compensation for research or advising, amounting
to an annual salary of $28,000 for the same courseload as full-time professors,
who make $47,000 at the lowest step;
Whereas adjunct poverty is
detrimental to student success since adjuncts, who teach the majority of
required courses, are forced to work additional jobs and consequently do not
have the time they need and want to dedicate to their students;
Whereas devaluing adjunct
labor is the principal means of devaluing the labor of CUNY education workers
across all titles;
Whereas the PSC
has rightly put adjuncts at the center of the current contract campaign by
demanding an adjunct minimum wage of
$7,000 per three-credit course in the next contract;
Whereas $7K per course is a
bigger demand than what the PSC has won in past contracts, which rarely keep
pace with inflation, and thus requires more than collective bargaining
supplemented by occasional demonstrations to win;
Whereas the PSC leadership has
admitted in the 26 March 2018 bulletin This
Week in the PSC that “the campaign to more than double adjuncts’ pay will
be waged not at the bargaining table”;
Whereas the inefficacy of
lobbying is exemplified by the PSC’s persistent lobbying year after year for
the $200m Maintenance of Effort bill, which failed to stop Cuomo from vetoing
it and failed to convince state lawmakers to override the veto despite having
enough votes;
Whereas educators across the
country, especially in West Virginia where striking teachers won 5% raises for
all state workers, have shown the power and necessity of striking as an
alternative means to achieving significant victories for workers;
Whereas the acts of striking
teachers in West Virginia and elsewhere have been acts of self-care, community
care, and care for students, and, analogously, a strike at CUNY would also be
an act of care for ourselves, our community, and our students, whose lives are
deeply impacted by our viciously low pay;
Whereas striking would be a
significant step toward defeating the Taylor Law and would thus further not
only our interests but also those of all public-sector unions in New York
State;
Therefore be it resolved that the members of the PSC assembled at the November 20th,
2018 Brooklyn College chapter meeting support going on strike if CUNY
management does not offer $7K per course at the bargaining table; and
that we pledge to attend next PSC Chapter meeting and bring one
or more colleagues to discuss plans to prepare for a strike; and
that we will organize our colleagues to support a strike for the
$7K per course demand.
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Resources for $7K Conversations
The PSC has been organizing contingent and tenure-track faculty and professional staff around a contractual demand for $7,000 minimum per 3-credit course. You can participate by using the resources below.
"Press the Presidents" petition to Michelle Anderson
Share your story / tell us why you support this demand
PSC Fact Sheet on 7K
CUNY Changes Lives
Some important stats:
"Press the Presidents" petition to Michelle Anderson
Share your story / tell us why you support this demand
PSC Fact Sheet on 7K
CUNY Changes Lives
Some important stats:
* In 1975, CUNY had 250,000 students and 11,500 full-time faculty. Now it has 274,000 students but only 7,500 full-time faculty.
* NYS funding per student at CUNY senior colleges has been cut by 18 percent since 2008.
* There are now over 12,000 adjunct faculty in the CUNY system, up from 7,000 in the year 2000. That’s a 71% increase.
* Adjunct faculty now teach 53% of CUNY courses, and as much as 65% at campuses like Hunter and John Jay.
* The average annual salary for a CUNY adjunct lecturer teaching 8 courses is just $28,000 per year - far below an adequate standard of living in NYC.
* Starting pay for a CUNY adjunct is now a mere $3,222 per course - far less than adjunct faculty compensation at Barnard, Fordham, New School, NYU, Yeshiva, and neighboring public university systems, such as Rutgers and UConn.
Saturday, October 27, 2018
CUNY Trustees Hear from BC Faculty & Staff
Brooklyn College
Faculty & Staff Testimony
CUNY Board of
Trustees hearing
Baruch College, October 22, 2018
Coverage, including a photo of BC faculty holding a banner with thousands of signatures, is here.
Heidi Diehl, Adjunct Lecturer, English
Dept
My
name is Heidi Diehl, and I am an adjunct lecturer at Brooklyn College, where I
have taught in the English Department since 2010. Thank you for your time
today.
I speak on behalf of the 900 adjuncts at
Brooklyn College and the 12,000 adjuncts who teach across CUNY. Indeed,
adjuncts teach the majority of classes at CUNY. And although a CUNY education
is advertised on the subway as a ladder to the middle class, the bitter irony
is that we adjuncts, the bulk of CUNY’s teaching staff, are not part of the middle
class because of CUNY’s poverty wages. I urge you, the Board of Trustees, to
use your power to end this crisis of austerity. Request additional funding in
your budget to increase adjunct pay to 7 K per course.
As
an adjunct teaching the maximum load of classes allowed by the contract—a
course load equal to a full-time professor’s—I can expect to earn at most
$25,000 a year. Although I am working full-time as an adjunct, I cannot meet
the cost of living in New York City on that income, and so I have a second job
to subsidize CUNY’s austerity.
Most
CUNY adjuncts I know have second and third jobs. This hurts our students; we
simply do not have time to give students the support and guidance they need to
succeed, for their education to truly serve as that engine of opportunity
advertised on the subway. Adjuncts have no choice but to cut corners—fewer
written comments on papers, less time to plan lessons tailored to students’
needs. It is painful not to be able to give our students what they need and
deserve.
As I hope you know, the work of an adjunct
extends beyond the classroom hours; though CUNY pays us for only three hours of
work per class per week, we devote additional hours to developing syllabi,
planning lessons, and grading papers. We respond to student emails, support
struggling students, and write recommendation letters—all of this is unpaid
labor.
The
image of the adjunct as a moonlighter with another career outside academia,
someone who is just popping in to teach a class for fun, is outdated and does
not reflect the current situation at CUNY. I urge you to take a close look at
the numbers—the majority of classes at CUNY are taught by adjuncts who are
struggling to make a living on poverty wages.
In
this very rich city and state, CUNY is starving because of gross underfunding.
Austerity is a crisis—for CUNY’s adjuncts and full-timers, and for our
students. I call on you as
trustees to oppose austerity for CUNY. Take a public stand for a contract that
is fully funded, includes real raises for all, and increases adjunct pay to 7K
per course.
Thank you.
Stephen Margolies, CLT, Art Dept
My name is Stephen Margolies and I’m a Chief
College Laboratory Technician in the Art Department of Brooklyn College. I
probably don’t have to tell the Trustees that CLTs are the lowest-paid
full-timers in all of CUNY. Many of us cannot even afford to live in the New
York area on our salaries and spend hours commuting from New Jersey or Long
Island. We’ve received no raises in years except the
across-the-board percentage raises everyone got, which, from our low salary
base, were pitiful. Part of the problem is that the CUNY administration,
perhaps to rationalize our low pay in their own minds, hires us as only
high-school graduates who do no teaching and nothing particularly important
except wash bottles and clean rat cages. On most campuses they require us to
sign demeaning time sheets designed for assembly-line factory workers that
pretend we take a real lunch hour instead of gulping down a sandwich at our
desks or never stay late to clean up dangerous chemical spills. In want ads
I’ve seen to fill CUNY vacancies, starting with presidents and descending down
through the ranks, we’re listed dead last––below janitors. Nothing could
be further from the truth, as chairs and faculty of science and arts and other
departments would testify, knowing they cannot run their classes, labs, studios,
theaters, etc., even libraries and language labs, without us. Almost all the
CLTs I know have advanced degrees––masters, and even two doctorates I know
about––and the few that don’t have been here long enough to have mastered it
all from experience. As you know, we live in an age of complex and rapidly
advancing technology; as education utilizes more and more of it, CLTs play a
major role in researching, purchasing, developing, learning, installing,
maintaining, repairing, and operating it, not to mention often instructing
faculty and students in its use. CLTs in fact also do much teaching (although
they don’t grade); when students have questions or problems concerning what
they’ve learned in class or a lab, who do you think helps them when faculty is
busy elsewhere or has left? And, as full-time faculty diminishes, chairs have
no choice but to transfer much of what they did to CLTs, who, with their
advanced skills, take on more responsibilities and find themselves constantly working
beyond title. I myself have sat on and even chaired many committees and written
grants and public relations material and studio rules and alumni newsletters
and much else for the department. For years I graded the graduate applicants’
French-language exams because no faculty knew French well. Once, when I
authored a large part of the decennial report every department produces, my
name was removed from its collective authorship because it was “unseemly” a CLT
should have participated. Others have their sad stories. So our qualifications
and responsibilities go far beyond high school and bottle
washing, but our salaries in no way reflect this. I can tell you a certain
demoralization has set in among us. Hiring CLTs with today’s necessary
qualifications will become more and more difficult, and teaching and learning
at CUNY will certainly suffer.
William Hampton-Sosa, Associate Professor, Business
Management Dept
Members of
the Board, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you directly today. My
name is William Hampton-Sosa. I am an associate professor in the Department of
Business Management at Brooklyn College.
I was
motivated and inspired to work for the City University of New York because of
its mission and values. For example, I have read and heard many statements
regarding the importance of maintaining a comprehensive teaching, research, and
service institution dedicated to excellence in undergraduate and graduate
education that is affordable and accessible to students regardless of
background or means. Indeed, these ideals are reflected in the mission
statements of CUNY and the various colleges in the system. (http://www2.cuny.edu/about/history/)
However, in
the many years that I have been here, I have come to seriously question whether
the leadership of CUNY and the State of New York is sufficiently committed to
these ideals. It is very easy to say all of the right things, but it is more
important to focus on the decisions that are actually made and reflected in the
budget.
Among the
many problems that I see is a persistent refusal to properly compensate faculty
and to maintain facilities.
·
Faculty
salaries are unreasonably low when compared to peers in the New York
Metropolitan area.
·
Faculty
salaries are unreasonably low when compared to professionals with similar
amounts of education and training in other sectors of the economy.
·
Faculty
salaries are unreasonably low given the cost of living in New York City. When
the most recent contract was settled, it included a 10.4% raise covering a
seven-year period between 2009 and 2016. The Economist Magazine analyzed
cost-of-living increases in cities around the world and found that it had risen
23% in New York City between 2009 and 2014, a shorter time frame. Essentially,
the faculty pay raise amounted to a salary cut in real terms.
(https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2015/03/02/uptown-top-ranking)
(https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2015/03/02/uptown-top-ranking)
To be clear,
no one comes to CUNY to become rich. However, no one comes here to financially
struggle either. My rent, which is below the median, consumes half of my take
home pay.
A second
serious problem that I see is an unwillingness or inability to halt the decay
of facilities around the system. I am particularly troubled by repeated
statements in advertising and on the CUNY website touting the 25 modern
campuses. The authors of this content must never have stepped foot on the
Brooklyn College campus.
Today, as we
speak, there are holes in ceilings, exposed wiring, falling tiles, leaks,
broken seats, faulty elevators, and bathrooms in various states of disrepair.
We have air conditioners that run so loudly when they do work that students and
professors have to raise their voices in order to be heard in the classroom.
This is a shameful and embarrassing state of affairs for a world-class
institution of higher education. (https://www.instagram.com/cuny_brokelyn_college)
In
conclusion, I call on you as trustees
to oppose austerity for CUNY. Take a public stand for a contract that is
fully funded, includes real raises for all, and increases adjunct pay to $7K
per course. I call on you to take steps to halt and reverse the decline
of facilities around the system.
Wednesday, September 26, 2018
Wednesday, June 27, 2018
Thursday, April 26, 2018
BC PSC Participates in Albany Lobby Day for $7K for Adjuncts
BC Faculty were among the nearly 100 PSC members who made the trip to Albany on April 24, 2018, to meet with 26 members of the NY State Assembly and Senate, urging their support for a major salary increase for CUNY adjunct faculty, who currently teach roughly 60 percent of our courses. The demand is $7K minimum per 3-credit course, and the message was simple: Wage justice for the faculty, Educational justice for the students.
After lobbying visits, the PSC contingent rallies in the State Capitol Building |
Gearing up for lobbying visits, BC faculty members Ramsey Scott, James Davis, Ken Estey, and Naomi Schiller. |
Monday, April 16, 2018
CUNY Rising Alliance BC Event April 25
Brooklyn College PSC collaborated with NYPIRG, NY Communities for Change, AFT, and other members of the CUNY Rising Alliance to host a public hearing on April 25, 2018, at the BC Library. CUNY Students testified for over an hour and heard remarks from elected officials, including NY State Assembly Member Rodneyse Bichotte, City Council Members Inez Barron, Robert Holden, and Jumaane Williams (who sent remarks via community relations director Ernest Skinner), and NY City Public Advocate Letitia James.
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
CUNY Board of Trustees Met by Student-Led Rally
On Monday, the CUNY Board of Trustees visited Brooklyn College for its annual Public Borough Hearing. They got an earful inside and outside the Student Center on issues from campus facilities to adjunct salaries to control of student activity fees.
NYPIRG President Smitha Vargese inveighs against unilateral action on student activity fees by Board of Trustees.
Brooklyn College students make plain their demands, accompanied by Conservatory musician Allan Randall.
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
National Workers Day of Action
The PSC was out in full force at the February 24, 2018, National Workers Day of Action demonstration of solidarity at Foley Square, downtown Manhattan.
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Adjunct $7K/course resolution to go to NYSUT in April
The PSC Executive Council approved the following resolution, to be voted on at the April 2018 annual Representative Assembly of the New York State United Teachers:
NYSUT Members Support
PSC’s $7K Campaign
And All NYSUT Locals’
Campaigns for Fair Adjunct Pay
Whereas,
teachers’ unions were formed in order to demand and win professional pay and
treatment for work that had previously been undervalued and viewed as non-professional;
and
Whereas,
as teachers’ unions have multiplied and grown, they have expanded their work,
winning better pay and treatment for other educational workers, for paraprofessionals
and for others in service of the public good; and
Whereas,
in higher education, however, the past 40 years have seen a slow but
devastating hollowing out of the profession, as public funding has been
systematically reduced and universities and colleges have responded not by
challenging the premise of austerity but by accommodating to scarcity: they
have cut costs by replacing full-time tenured faculty with part-time contingent
faculty, who are paid at a fraction of the full-timers’ rate; and
Whereas,
more than 70 percent of faculty appointments in higher education nationally are
now held by non-tenure-track, part-time and/or contingent employees; and
Whereas
the City University of New York, whose academic employees are represented by the
Professional Staff Congress, a NYSUT local, employs an exceptionally large number
of part-time—or “adjunct”—faculty, currently more than 13,000, and whereas,
CUNY is able to attract outstanding adjunct faculty despite low pay because of
its location in New York City and the power of CUNY’s mission to draw
committed, progressive teachers; and
Whereas,
the starting pay for CUNY adjuncts is $3,222 for a regular 3-credit college
course; and
Whereas,
several thousand CUNY adjuncts rely for their entire paycheck on their adjunct
teaching at CUNY, cobbling together multiple courses for an annual income of
about $25,000 for a full teaching load; and
Whereas,
given the number of hours required for teaching a course, $3,222 per course
barely amounts to $15 an hour, forcing some CUNY adjuncts to rely on public
assistance and others to be evicted from their apartments; and
Whereas,
CUNY adjuncts typically have advanced degrees, including multiple Master’s
degrees and Ph.D.s; and
Whereas,
PSC has made major improvements for adjuncts during the last 17 years,
including winning health insurance, paid office hours, three-year appointments
with guaranteed income, professional development grant funds, improved sick
leave and bereavement leave, and the conversion to full-time, salaried
positions of more than 300 adjuncts and part-time instructors; and
Whereas,
PSC is now attempting the hardest and most important adjunct improvement of all—fair
pay—the goal of its collective bargaining demand for a minimum of $7,000 per
3-credit course for adjuncts; and
Whereas,
other higher education locals in NYSUT are also pressing for fair adjunct pay, including
United University Professions, which has made the demand for a substantial
increase in adjunct pay a major part of its collective bargaining agenda; and
Whereas,
New York State prides itself on espousing progressive values and supporting
working people, and whereas New York State has the highest union density in the
country, and whereas New York State recently passed breakthrough legislation on
a $15-per-hour minimum wage; and
Whereas,
it is in the interest of all education workers to fight for professional pay
for other educational workers because the persistence of substandard pay
devalues the education profession and creates an incentive to maintain low pay
throughout education employment; and
Whereas,
it is in the interest of all union members in New York State to demand that no
unionized employers be allowed to persist in paying substandard wages; therefore be it
RESOLVED
that NYSUT supports PSC’s campaign for $7K and all other NYSUT locals’
campaigns for fair adjunct pay, and that the NYSUT leadership will call on
NYSUT members across the state to join the PSC in actions, demonstrations and
advocacy for $7K, because a victory on $7K at CUNY would be a victory for every
teacher, professor, education worker and student in the state; and be it
further
RESOLVED
that the NYSUT leadership will call on the NYS AFL-CIO to make fair pay for
adjuncts throughout the state a major budget priority in 2018.
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