On December 10th a small group of PSC leaders were intentionally arrested outside a CUNY Board of Trustees meeting at Baruch College as the meeting continued uninterrupted. They demanded increased funding—including to fund a $7K per course minimum wage for adjunct faculty—in the Trustees’ budgetary request to the State. The staged arrests were the culmination of a semester of lobbying, including a campaign to pressure university presidents to in turn pressure Trustees. These activities drew significant time and energy from adjunct activists who picketed Wall Street, collected signatures, and spoke out at public Trustee meetings—despite the knowledge that the Trustees scarcely attend these meetings and are accountable to the Governor and nobody else.
This week, with significantly less fanfare and no comment so far by PSC leadership, the Trustees released the text of their budgetary requests through the 2020 Fiscal Year, to be ratified next week after another perfunctory hearing. The document contains not a single reference to adjuncts. CUNY gets nothing it wasn’t already getting, and tuition is going up yet again. The budget does not even provide funding for the course release for full-timers, which PSC leaders claim was won in the last contract. (It wasn’t.) In the end, all the petitioning and testifying and letter-writing and scripted protesting yielded the same predictable result: nothing.
Nonetheless, just yesterday members of the Graduate Center Chapter received a message from their chair wishing a “7K New Year” and unveiling yet another lobbying trip to Albany to accomplish it. But the Trustees’ budget request is testament to how little can be accomplished by speaking truth to power without wielding the power that comes from our ability to withhold our labor and shut the city down. It’s time to stop addressing the powerful with moral suasion, and focus on building some real power of our own. The sooner we face reality, that preparing for a strike is the only way forward, the better our chances will be. We cannot afford to be backed into this necessary militant action—we need to begin preparing now.
Campus by campus, adjunct activists are leading the way. Join us!
#7KorStrike
cunystruggle.org 