Brooklyn College PSC-CUNY

Press Release Brooklyn College Faculty, Staff and Students launch #RespectCUNY Postcard Drive Thursday, October 15 th 12:30-1:30 PM Bedford Ave. gates to Brooklyn College near Campus Road Contact: Alex S. Vitale, 917-293-4862, avitale@brooklyn.cuny.edu A coalition of Brooklyn College faculty, students, and staff officially launched a postcard drive today calling for State elected officials to fully support Brooklyn College and CUNY without relying on additional tuition increases. Tuition has gone up every year for the last 5 years, but state funding has not kept pace with growing enrollments. This year state failed to fund $51 million in mandatory cost increases CUNY wide. This has caused significant budget shortfall at Brooklyn College, leading to larger class sizes, fewer available classes, and diminished student services. Employees at the college from maintenance workers to painters to professors have been without a contract for over 5 years and most employe...

Brooklyn College faculty breaks with CUNY:  votes to retake control of curriculum Brooklyn College. Photo courtesy CUNY Has 'no confidence' in CUNY Board of Trustees By Mary Frost Brooklyn Daily Eagle The full-time faculty at Brooklyn College passed a resolution on Wednesday to “retake control of curriculum decision making” and demand that the Brooklyn College and CUNY administrations “respect the faculty’s historic role in designing courses,” programs and degree requirements. Professors are rejecting CUNY's move to “override faculty decision making” to implement the “inadequate” Pathways general education program, according to the Brooklyn College Faculty Council. Pathways implements a set of course requirements that every student must complete to earn an undergraduate degree from CUNY, making it easier to transfer one CUNY college to another. But professors complain th...

Address to the Stated Meeting of the Faculty By Alex S. Vitale Chair Brooklyn College Chapter PSC-CUNY April 8, 2014 The de Blasio administration has expressed interest in getting bargaining started with the over 150 municipal unions without contracts. Right now there is haggling over whether cost savings in health care should be tied to contractual raises. The Municipal Labor Council, which represents all municipal unions and the City have said they want to avoid increasing premiums. In addition, the MLC leadership has said that city nurses, teachers, and professors should be the first to bargain with the City, since they have gone the longest without a contract. The City hasn’t agreed to this idea, but hopefully this will move us up on the list. The PSC continues to talk with management about a number of non-financial issues, and is ready to begin bargaining in earnest at any time over a full contract. I’m sure you will hear more on the budget from President G...

At our Chapter Meeting on Thursday we had a good discussion of the problems with HEO and CLT times sheets. This will be a major topic of discussion in our "Labor-Management" meeting next month. We will be calling on the administration to sign off on time sheets that acurately reflect the time worked by HEO's and CLT's even if extra hours haven't been preauthorized.  Union members in HEO, CLT and Research series titles are organizing a university-wide petition campaign pressing CUNY to negotiate with the PSC on the implementation of the new time-sheet system. The drive started in early November at BMCC and City Tech and was launched CUNY-wide at a joint meeting of the HEO and CLT chapters held last week at the PSC Union Hall. The petition calls on CUNY to negotiate about the timesheets and demands that any new time-sheet system for HEOs and CLTs reflect the complexity of our jobs and the variability of our schedules. To volunteer for the workplace petition drive, ...

The PSC represents thousands of professional staff across CUNY, including over 100 here at Brooklyn College. These members serve as Higher Education Officers (HEO’s). HEOs work in the registrar’s office, financial aid, run programs, advise students, and perform a variety of administrative roles such as managing outcomes assessment and international study. As with many other people working at CUNY, they have been subjected to overloads, speedups, and low pay over the last few decades. More recently they have been on the front lines of implementing the two   major CUNY Central initiatives, Pathways and CUNY First, while chronically understaffed. About 10 years ago some HEO’s began to complain that they were being forced to work beyond their contractual obligation of 35 hours a week. There have always been periods, such as registration time, when people were expected to temporarily work longer hours in exchange for comp time. More recently, however, these expectations have grown...