Category: Slate

Longtime CUNY activist Conor Tomás Reed penned the following endorsement of CUNY Struggle. We are honored to have Conor’s support, but dismayed to hear about disenfranchisement throughout the Graduate Center chapter. If you feel you have been disenfranchised in this election, contact the PSC immediately (drosato@pscmail.org) and then email cunystruggleinfo@gmail.com to tell us the story.

I just found out that I can’t vote in The Graduate Center PSC election because of a technicality. For those of you in CUNY Struggle and the New Caucus and Fusion Independents with whom I’ve had the honor to struggle alongside for several years, I’m saddened about this disenfranchisement, but I also know that it symbolizes the inadequacies of “democracy” without a liberation framework. In lieu of a secret mail-in ballot, I wish to publicly vote my support for the CUNY Struggle slate.

We all fought hard to get a Professional Staff Congress/CUNY chapter on our campus, even as PSC Central set up technicality roadblocks to delay it. We all fought hard to authorize a 97% YES strike vote in Spring 2016, even as PSC Central then urged many of us to ratify a woefully uneven contract (which I am still proud my subsequent vote rejected). Within the past few years, many new and continuing GC organizers — on both slates and beyond — have broadened our reach and transformed what a union could do and feel like. We’ve also convinced PSC Central to take some risks and defend its members who are regularly on the frontlines.

While both CUNY Struggle and New Caucus and Fusion Independents have advocated new vibrant approaches to CUNY/NYC movement work, we are at a crossroads and must become more daring. As we face the precipice of authoritarianism, attacks and deportations of the most marginalized, automatic-dues dissolution for what’s left of U.S. unionism, and violent inequalities from schools to communities, even the most fiery-tongued of orthodox labor strategies is insufficient — especially when fused with top-down undemocratic union methods that have kept most of PSC’s membership uninvolved. CUNY Struggle presents an explicit break with various failed PSC models, and importantly, does so within The Graduate Center PSC chapter that is best poised to influence and turn the entire union into a fighting force CUNY-wide.

CUNY Struggle’s victory would no doubt be a contradictory transition moment. Even as CS members are more keenly attuned to the kinds of resistance that our union and university must create to survive and thrive, NCFI members helped to shape our fledgling chapter into existence and built trust with a broad layer of new union participants. Even as CS would possibly face isolation or derision by PSC Central’s New Caucus, our GC chapter would need to stand by our decision to support this organizing alternative. Even as both slates have highlighted each other’s flaws during the election campaigns, we’d need everyone to build upon NCFI’s foundations while embracing CS’s vision to (actually) center adjuncts in our next contract, prepare now to take militant strike actions, and directly connect to broader social struggles. Crucially, we’d need to make top-tier calcified leadership irrelevant by activating the entire PSC base to create a democratic and liberatory union. Leadership in a union matters, but leaders without a genuine rank-and-file movement are just toy generals, no matter what their politics.

From California to Chicago to Seattle, and from Chile to Mexico to Puerto Rico to Quebec to South Africa, we see how education upheavals can precipitate wider social changes — not through charisma or coercion, but in the words of Paulo Freire, through “education as a practice of freedom.” Our position in CUNY is no less strategically profound. I’m eager to continue practicing freedom with my comrades on both slates. Our longtime CUNY movement is worth all of your continued organizing efforts, no matter the election results.

I welcome CUNY Struggle to aptly seize the moment in leading alongside us all in a new movement direction, and I urge The Graduate Center PSC chapter to also vote for a radical grassroots CUNY Struggle.

Last night, on the eve of our chapter elections, members of CUNY Struggle debated the Graduate Center’s New Caucus slate. Two distinct visions for the future of the CUNY movement were on display: one bold and daring, another timid and technocratic. Ballots are in the mail this week, and we encourage everyone to cast their ballot for the CUNY Struggle Caucus. But whether we win or lose, CUNY Struggle will continue to push the envelope inside and outside the PSC, building toward the horizontally organized, autonomous mass movement that is our only hope in this moment of unprecedented social crisis.

Watch our debate here. (Note: you need to provide an e-mail address to view this video, but it need not be a real one.)

To challenge the status quo. We are running to overcome the entrenched, apathetic central leadership of our union that has been in power for 17 years. If we win, CUNY Struggle will have ten delegates at the PSC delegate assembly, and we will work to pass resolutions that empower adjuncts and graduate students, as well as hold democratic, participatory chapter meetings.

To democratize the union. Empowering the rank and file is the only way to combat the imminent attack on public sector unions. We want to hold leadership accountable by instituting open bargaining and proportional representation in governance, so that members from all titles are able to play a meaningful role in our union. CUNY Struggle rejects the New Caucus’s reliance on lobbying and instead proposes a more militant strategy based on direct action and preparations for a strike to ensure we get $7,000 per course in the next contract. (Read the rest of our platform here.) The last contract, which our opponents supported, distributed most of the gains to the top tier of our union and kept CUNY adjuncts in poverty, making a measly $3,300 per course, which is less than $30k working full-time. This only continued the trend of CUNY setting the low bar for adjunct contracts city-wide, and it must stop now!

To fight for a broad social-justice-based union. Unions can and should fight for more than wages and job security. Working conditions like class size, control over GTF assignments, and diversity in hiring,to name a few, should be a part of bargaining negotiations. We also want a union that stands in solidarity with our students and with all New Yorkers, fighting for free tuition and against deportations & policing.

The incumbent slate, the New Caucus and Fusion Independents (“NCFI”, a rebranding of the New Caucus) have accused us of opposing “cross-title solidarity” with HEOs by misrepresenting an email we wrote about room capacity, in an effort to sidestep our debate challenge. It is clear that NCFI, much like the New Caucus, would rather not discuss the issues. They want you to take their progressive credentials at their word — but their record speaks for itself. They’ve had abysmal attendance at the delegate assembly, they’ve refused to take bold action against central leadership (even adopting the New Caucus name), and they’ve failed to put forward concrete democratic reforms. In an effort to cut through the mudslinging, we issued a public challenge to a debate open to all, which they’ve since accepted. Join us tomorrow, March 5th, at 5pm in room 9207 at the Graduate Center for a debate.

Ballots that include pre-paid postage were mailed to your home address on Monday: make sure you drop them in the mail by April 24th to ensure they get counted. Vote CUNY Struggle!

So what’s the difference between CUNY Struggle and the NCFI?

They are proposing a half step when only a full step will do it.

As unpaid rank-and-file members of the union, we have made many contributions to the chapter, to adjunct organizing within the union, and to uniting our struggles with that of CUNY students. Here are a few examples:

• In March 2016, we organized a Popular Assembly that brought together over 100 activists from across CUNY, including undergraduates and CUNY workers, to link the fight for a new contract with student struggles for free tuition and against campus policing.
• We wrote and published a back-to-school zine called “CUNY at the Crossroads: a history of the mess we’re in and how to get out of it,” which tackles austerity at CUNY, the rise of contingent academic labor, policing and the suppression of free speech on CUNY campuses, and a brief history of resistance. This document serves as the basis of our strategy and we have distributed almost 500 copies.
• We organized a workshop on building an intersectional movement for free tuition at CUNY at the BLM occupation of City Hall Park against broken windows policing and then-police commissioner Bill Bratton.
• We organized with long-term adjuncts to mount a spirited “Vote NO” campaign against the last contract, featured in the Huffington Post, Politico New York, The Chief, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Jacobin.

• We helped build X-Campus Rank and File, a citywide network to foster solidarity among academic workers, with graduate workers from other NYC universities.
• We built the CUNY Struggle listserv as an open, CUNY-wide, multi-tendency forum to help coordinate the efforts of the PSC rank-and-file, especially adjunct-led efforts to put pressure on the union leadership.
• We organized a series of open meetings culminating with a public speak-out at Hunter College last spring, with wide participation from both PSC rank-and-file and undergraduate social justice clubs.
• We regularly participate in the PSC-wide Committee of Adjuncts and Part-Timers and organized meetings on the campuses to mobilize adjuncts, including establishing the Hunter Adjunct Committee.
• We participate in a coalition with the Adjunct Project and the GC Chapter of the PSC to determine non-negotiable contract demands for adjuncts and ways to ensure these demands are heard, which produced this text, now central to contract discussions.
• Many of our candidates work as PSC shop stewards to deepen the union’s connections to graduate students, expand the grievance process, and sign up new members.
• CUNY Struggle members actively participated in the chapter’s efforts to sign up 700 fee-payers, including tabling in the lobby and reaching out to agency fee payers in their departments.
• Four of our candidates have served as elected DSC steering officers and department representatives.
• CUNY Struggle co-sponsored a multi-day Verizon picket in Herald Square along with the GC Chapter of the PSC.
• CUNY Struggle agitates at GC chapter meetings and at the Delegate Assembly against the perpetuation of failed incremental strategies and for the democratic restructuring of the union.

Sonam Singh is an Adjunct Lecturer in English at Barnard College and a member of the Bargaining Committee for Barnard Contingent Faculty-UAW Local 2110 (BCF-UAW), a union for part-time and full-time non-tenure-track faculty at Barnard College. BCF-UAW was certified in October 2015, commenced bargaining in February 2016, passed a strike authorization in December 2016, and settled its first contract in February 2017, a few days short of a February 21 strike deadline. Over the five years of the contract, per-course minimums will rise from $7,000 to $10,000 for part-time contingent faculty and annual salaries from $60,000 to $70,000 for full-time contingent faculty. 

1. So, how did you get so much money?

A really important part of it was making clear—to ourselves, to our members, and to the administration—that we didn’t think it was a lot of money. In every case, from our initial demands down to the amounts we settled on, contingent faculty will be paid less than tenure-track faculty for the same work. I think it’s crucial for contingent faculty to start negotiations at pay parity. The existing paradigm for adjunct pay has to be rejected from the outset.

“I think it’s crucial for contingent faculty to start negotiations at pay parity. The existing paradigm for adjunct pay has to be rejected from the outset.”

Beyond that, the success of our campaign, in the face of a hostile administration, was to pass an overwhelming strike authorization and mobilize actively for a strike. A strike authorization without a credible show of an ability to strike does not accomplish much. For example, the modest health care benefits we won for part-time faculty and the administration’s acquiescence to our wage demands happened only because of setting and mobilizing for a strike deadline. If the administration thought striking was unlikely or most members would cross the picket line, they would have been happy to drag out the process indefinitely. If all we had done was bargain, all the negotiating acumen and rhetorical savvy in the world would have made little difference.

2. How did BCF-UAW mobilize members?

Our contract campaign was only going to be as successful as the Bargaining Committee’s ability to credibly speak on behalf of the membership and the administration’s awareness that they weren’t bargaining with a group of pragmatic professional bargainers but with a unified group of their employees demanding fundamental fairness in working conditions. The biggest problem with classic closed door bargaining is that management knows the union bargainers—especially if they’re long-term bargaining professionals—are willing to settle faster and settle for less, especially if they haven’t put in the organizing work outside the bargaining room unifying membership around core demands. We updated membership regularly (typically after each session), solicited feedback, invited members to observe bargaining, and held informational meetings. The administration knew our demands in the bargaining room were continuous with our organizing outside it, that our members were unified behind us.

“The administration knew our demands in the bargaining room were continuous with our organizing outside it, that our members were unified behind us.”

The other piece that’s important to mention is student support. It was crucial to make sure that students understood our issues and heard about bargaining from us as often as from the administration. Barnard has some amazing student activists who were powerful allies and helped create pressure on the administration. Ultimately all colleges and universities are teaching institutions and unions have to work to win students to an understanding that teaching and learning conditions are intimately connected, that our issues are shared issues.

 3. Aren’t CUNY and Barnard very different institutions?

In many ways, yes. I think the main thing I’d emphasize is that Barnard is not Columbia; it is not a subsidiary or branch of Columbia. It is a completely separate institution with its own President, Board, and a quite small endowment. Barnard depends on tuition dollars and government grants for the majority of its budget. We were bargaining with a school with limited resources and large fixed commitments. But we grounded our campaign in the college’s core teaching mission and demanded fairer allocation of those limited resources.

It’s also important to note that there are many faculty who adjunct at both Barnard and CUNY, as there are many people who adjunct at some combination of Barnard, Columbia, CUNY, NYU, The New School, etc. Each of these institutions draws from the same labor pool and each of these institutions looks to the others to determine pay and benefits levels for contingent faculty. CUNY, as the lowest-paying employer for adjuncts, depresses the market for part-time faculty across the city. Personally, I was extremely discouraged by how the last PSC contract actually increased the gap between part-time and full-time faculty and how unwilling the PSC leadership was to own up to this basic fact.

 4. What advice would you give to PSC rank and file members who want to democratize the union?

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that large unions can be anywhere from wary of to outright hostile towards genuine rank-and-file engagement. But without such engagement unions cannot thrive and be effective forces for change; the best they can do is fight to maintain an often inadequate status quo. We need unions that have visions and competencies far beyond the (albeit important) cards-certification-contract-grievances routine that bureaucratized unions manage. I don’t have advice to give, but as an academic, union member, and New Yorker, I support all PSC members who demand transparency, accountability, and robust democratic procedures in their union.

 Why We’re Running

To challenge the status quo. Since the New Caucus, the union’s main political party, came to power in 2000, the gap between adjunct and full-time pay has widened; class sizes, tuition, and the proportion of adjunct labor have increased; and there have been no meaningful improvements in job security for anyone who doesn’t already have tenure. At the same time, the New Caucus has failed to organize and empower rank-and-file members, democratize the union, or mount a militant fight against CUNY management and New York state. Voting for the CUNY Struggle Caucus this April is a powerful first step in turning the tide of this inaction.

To democratize the union. The CUNY Struggle Caucus is committed to increasing the participation of all members of the union in all union matters. This should be accomplished through the enactment of concrete democratic reforms, such as proportional representation in the governing bodies of the union; an open, transparent, democratically controlled bargaining process; and term limits on principal officers of the union. This also means a withdrawal of funds from the failed strategy of lobbying Democratic politicians in Albany and investing those resources in building the grassroots power of our union.

To prioritize the needs of adjuncts and graduate assistants. The CUNY Struggle Caucus, in coalition with the Adjunct Project and the adjunct committee of the GC chapter, is committed to ending the multi-tier system of faculty labor at CUNY, and we will center adjunct and graduate worker demands in the next contract, including tuition remission and fully funded graduate assistant positions for all GC students and $7,000 minimum per course for adjuncts.

To fight for a broad social-justice-based union and bargaining agenda for the next contract. Unions can and should fight for more than wages and job security. Our contract should include provisions for affordable housing; the protection of immigrant and undocumented students and faculty; stronger mechanisms to address sexual harassment; accountable measures to diversify the faculty across CUNY and the GC student body; and non-cooperation with NYPD, ICE, and other law-enforcement agencies, among other needs. Moreover, our union should actively participate in organizing across a broad range of social-justice and labor issues facing our communities and other NYC unions.

To build a militant movement to transform CUNY. CUNY Struggle came together to support a renewed CUNY movement, and we will continue to push for uniting our workplace efforts with the perennial student-led struggles for free tuition, based on a strategy of direct action, including preparing this semester for a strike by students, faculty, and staff.

Primary Contract Demands

Graduate Center Student Workers/Adjuncts

• A pro-rata salary schedule for all part-time faculty in proportion to the full-time lecturer salary schedules, with a minimum salary of $7,000 per three-credit course.
• Genuine job security in the form of a seniority system based on date of original appointment and the number of credits taught over time.
• Tuition remission and minimum funding of $25,000 per year for all GC students for the duration of their studies.
• Adoption of all suggestions in Recommendation II of the 2015 Graduate Center Diversity Task Force, with accountability mechanisms in place.
• Subsidized housing for all GC students at a maximum cost of 30% of their total annual funding (for example, $625 per month for a student with total funding of $25,000 a year).
• Contractual provisions to preserve the admission and fellowship status of students targeted by changes in immigration law.
• The demands crowdsourced and submitted to the union president by the Adjunct Project for the last contract.
• Contractual provisions to reverse the downward trend in the number of graduate students  admitted in each successive cohort of each program.
• Paid pedagogical training for all students in their first year.
• Limits on and standardization of graduate-assistant workloads.
• Contractual provisions for the grievance of all forms of harassment and discrimination.
• Department-by-department labor-management committees to support GC student workers negotiating directly with Executive Officers on departmental issues.

GC-chapter wide

• Adoption of all suggestions in Recommendation I of the 2015 Graduate Center Diversity Task Force, with accountability mechanisms in place.
• Full accessibility to GC facilities for people with mobility issues and visual disabilities to be developed based on the participation of those directly impacted, and fought for by the union at the bargaining table.
• Close consultation with HEOs and other titles to formulate demands and maximize both participation and cross-title solidarity.

Primary Union Reforms

• Proportional representation of adjuncts, full-time faculty, HEOs, graduate assistants, and other titles on the PSC Executive Council, Delegate Assembly, chapter executive committees, and bargaining team.
• A transparent, democratically controlled contract-bargaining process with bargaining sessions open to all.
• A two-term limit for the PSC president and all principal officers, and a reduction of the total salary of the PSC president to the mean salary of the bargaining unit, with any extra income donated to the PSC.
• All union elections and votes conducted electronically to ensure maximum democratic participation.
• An end to the four-month window between when a member joins the union and can vote, and an end to the one-year window between joining and running for office
• A shift in funds and strategy from electoral politics and legislative lobbying to a strategy of grassroots organizing and developing member power that includes release time for rank-and-file organizers, more paid full-time organizers, more member education and outreach from the union about the political situation at CUNY, and an overall more substantial presence on CUNY campuses.

For more info on CUNY Struggle and our campaign, go here: https://cunystruggle.org/category/slate/

#VoteStruggle

 

A Joint Statement by the PSC GC Adjunct Committee, the Adjunct Project, and CUNY Struggle

In the Fall, members of the CUNY Struggle Caucus teamed up with other GC activists to draft a list of invariant demands for the coming contract. Now we are mounting a challenge to the New Caucus in the Spring election to make sure they’re backed up by a winning strategy. 

January 30, 2017

Adjunct parity can mean either a complete end to the multi-tier system of faculty labor (such as in the case of Vancouver Community College, where all faculty do the same work, have the same working conditions, and are on the same salary schedule, pro-rated for those working less than full time) or a pro-rata salary schedule for “part-time” faculty so that their wages are in proportion to that of full-time lecturers (as in the case of the California State University). Although many of us would like to see the “Vancouver model” in place at the City University of New York, where adjuncts make roughly 29% to 38% of full-time salaries, have little to no job security, and are largely sidelined from service and research, we recognize that the U.S. labor context and the much-larger scale of CUNY complicate the achievement of that goal.

Nevertheless, as we—a group of graduate students at the Graduate Center working as both graduate assistants and adjuncts—have discussed adjunct parity over the last few months, we have come to agreement on the following bottom-line, non-negotiable demands for the upcoming round of bargaining vis-à-vis the expiration of the current PSC-CUNY contract in November 2017:

1. A pro-rata salary schedule for all part-time faculty in proportion to the full-time lecturer salary schedules, with a minimum salary of $7,000 per three-credit course;
2. Genuine job security in the form of a seniority system based on date of original appointment and the number of credits taught over time;
3. Representation of part-time faculty and graduate employees on the bargaining committee in proportion to their numbers in the overall bargaining unit.

Although the first two demands would not end the multi-tier system of faculty labor at CUNY, they would produce substantial movement toward parity between the salary and job security of part-time and full-time faculty. The last demand, meanwhile, would produce parity in the bargaining committee, which we hope would help the overall bargaining committee hold fast to the first two demands.

In solidarity,

Graduate Center Graduate Assistants and Adjuncts of:

the PSC GC Adjunct Committee

the Adjunct Project

CUNY Struggle

Everyone knows these are turbulent times for academia. Full-time positions are scarce, student debt has ballooned, and per capita funding for public education has shriveled. You could try elbowing past your colleagues to make your way in the world, but by now we all know that there won’t be room at the top for even the most ruthless among us. The other option is to see these issues as related and unite to transform our working conditions, and in the process reimagine what a university could look like when faculty, students and staff come together to reject the austerity of the administration and the state.

Collective bargaining, when backed by broad-based support, can compel such a transformation. Under the current New Caucus leadership, most PSC members have no control over who bargains or what they bargain for, and almost none of us have any idea what happens behind the scenes. The PSC’s bargaining team is mostly made up of full-timers representing full-timer interests, even though adjuncts form the majority of the union. And while the New Caucus leadership likes to performatively solicit suggestions from its membership about contract demands, they are not held accountable for following through on pressing most of these demands. And so they don’t.

As we approach a new contract fight, the New Caucus slate at the Graduate Center wants you to vote them back into power by advertising the contract demand of $7k per course for adjuncts (which many in the CUNY Struggle caucus have been pushing for years!). Yet they are prepared to make the same mistake that sold out the adjuncts last time: giving all their power over to the PSC leadership, while keeping the vast majority of our union out of the loop. Indeed, they do not support making bargaining sessions open, so that everyone in the CUNY community can know what’s going on behind closed doors. They have also refused to support efforts to make the bargaining team proportionally representative of the bargaining unit, which would dramatically increase the number of adjuncts present at the negotiating table. Without these basic democratic reforms to hold the PSC leadership accountable, it is very unlikely that the next contract negotiation will yield anything different than what we’ve gotten already: a contract negotiated in secret that yields below-inflation flat-rate raises, yet again increasing the gulf between adjunct (and graduate assistant), and full-time pay. This is not a reform. This is the status quo, and it has failed us .

When the bargaining for our next contract begins, the CUNY Struggle Caucus demands all contract negotiations be open to all members of the CUNY community. We reject the idea that bargaining requires ‘experts’ that must operate in secret. We think that demands should be made at the bargaining table and backed up in the street. We also want the bargaining team to reflect the bargaining unit, through proportional representation, empowering adjunct and graduate assistant leaders to make their demands in the room, rather than be continually represented by full-timers who claim to know what’s best (and what’s possible) for them.

Further, we demand that key CUNY grievances like diversity in hiring and admissions, the quality of CUNY’s facilities, class size, accessibility issues, tuition remission, and yes – $7k for adjuncts – should be on the table in these negotiations. Indeed, collective bargaining is not just about bread and butter issues: as a union, we can put forward a broad social justice agenda that includes enforcing CUNY as a sanctuary campus, ensuring recourse in cases of sexual harassment, etc. Nothing is off the table until the union takes it off the table. Whereas the New Caucus has understood bargaining in a very narrow way, CUNY Struggle sees bargaining as a vehicle for expressing the demands of members as a collectivity. And that is why if elected, we will mount a campaign to challenge the Taylor Law, which was designed to put our union and others like it in exactly the position we are in — isolated, dependent on elected officials, and stripped of its only real weapon.

In other words, collective bargaining is about more than sending in your most experienced and savvy negotiator and trusting they do their best: it’s about ensuring that that the team of negotiators speak at the behest of “the collective,” not just on their behalf. This can only be achieved by mobilizing our members and forging ties with other unions, with our students and with the working families of New York City.

Transparency, proportional representation, a broad-based social justice bargaining agenda, and a renewed CUNY movement built on the model of horizontalism are not simply abstract principles or slogans to us, they are a practical necessity, and the difference between winning or continuing to lose. These are the ingredients of an invigorated strategy which will enfranchise thousands of members in our union to participate and to contribute their perspectives and power to the contract struggle, and beyond.

We demand a change in how we fight and what we fight for. The CUNY Struggle Caucus is challenging the status quo.

 

A CUNY Struggle caucus slate is running in the Graduate Center chapter election, and one CS caucus member is running solo in the Hunter chapter election. Meet the candidates!

Graduate Center slate:

Andrew Anastasi, delegate

Andrew is a second-year PhD student in Sociology at the Graduate Center and teaches social theory at Queens College. He is also a member of the Viewpoint Magazine editorial collective. Before graduate school he worked in D.C. public high schools and supported youth-led campaigns to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline.

Jarrod Shanahan, delegate

Jarrod (Environmental Psychology) is an activist-scholar, author, essayist, zinester, and political agitator. Jarrod has published over a dozen literary and political zines, co-edits the creative nonfiction journal Hard Crackers, and is a member of the Insurgent Notes collective. Jarrod has also published over two dozen essays and articles, translated into at least four languages, in venues including Vice, The New Inquiry, and Gothamist. Maximum Rocknroll called Jarrod’s “Satan Was So Over it” zine “witty, well executed, and still very punk” and The Industrial Worker called Jarrod’s novella It’s a Tough Economy! “a commendable contribution toward what working class literature could and should aspire.” Jarrod is a founding member of CUNY Struggle.

Shelley Buchbinder, delegate

Shelley is a PhD candidate in environmental psychology. She teaches in urban studies at Queens College courses including Political Economy of Food and Trashing the Global City. Her dissertation focuses on economically restructured small places, contracted social services, and training as dispossession. Previously she worked for contracted nonprofits focusing on housing, training, and informal education.

Jakob Schneider, delegate

Jakob Schneider is a second-year doctoral student in the Environmental Psychology program. He teaches at Hunter College in the Urban Policy and Planning Department, and is a research associate at the Housing Environments Research Group at the Graduate Center. At present, he is conducting research in Chicago with a group that is employing a movement-based strategy to protect residents from eviction and reclaim bank-owned abandoned properties to provide housing to homeless families on the city’s South Side.

Wilson Sherwin, delegate

Wilson Sherwin is a PhD candidate in sociology. Her dissertation focuses on unemployment, social movements and welfare. She currently teaches at the Murphy Institute and has also taught courses at Brooklyn College, Queens College and Hunter College. She has previously worked as a freelance writer, documentary film producer, translator, and an electrician . Born and raised in New York City she is a proud product of the New York City Public School system.

Jeremy Randall, delegate

Jeremy Randall is a PhD candidate in history. His dissertation focuses on the intersections of leftist political thought and culture during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). He currently serves as the Officer for Library and Technology for the Doctoral Students’ Council and is one of the program representative’s for history and has previously been an adjunct instructor at John Jay College. Currently he is a WAC fellow at Hunter College.

Amelia Fortunato, delegate

Amelia is a Doctoral Fellow in Sociology at the GC whose research focuses on the intersection of race and class in the American Labor Movement. After spending four years as a union organizer with Unite Here in Chicago, her most recent project looks at unions’ responses to the movement for black lives, examining actions taken by unions since 2014 to address anti-black racism as an issue that both impacts working class people’s lives broadly and plagues unions internally. Amelia lives in Brooklyn and teaches Sociology at John Jay College. She is an active member of the New York chapter of SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice).

Nicholas Glastonbury

Nicholas Glastonbury is a PhD student in cultural anthropology at the Graduate Center and an instructor in the anthropology department at Hunter College. His dissertation research focuses on Kurdish-language radio broadcast infrastructures during the Cold War. He works as a freelance literary translator and currently serves as a co-editor of the Turkey Page for the e-zine Jadaliyya.

Running solo in the Hunter chapter election:

Andy Battle, alternate delegate

Andy Battle is a PhD candidate in the History Department whose research focuses on how and why New York City became deindustrialized. He is also an adjunct who teaches US History to hundreds of students each year at Hunter College. He is an editor of cunystruggle.org and co-author of CUNY at the Crossroads: A History of the Mess We’re In and How to Get Out of It. Movement experience includes anti-police, anti-prison, and anti-gentrification work. In the real world he has worked as a book publicist, furniture mover, barista, shoe salesman, golf caddie, and a bunch of other jobs he can’t or won’t remember. He believes in democracy, militancy, and putting the “movement” back in labor movement.

Sean M. Kennedy was running as chair on the GC slate, but he has stepped down.

The Graduate Center chapter of the PSC is holding an election this April, and the CUNY Struggle Caucus is challenging the status quo.

Our union has been controlled by the same caucus, the New Caucus, for 17 years. We are running a full slate against the New Caucus at the Graduate Center. Vote for us, and together we’ll transform the PSC and prepare for the fight ahead.

We stand for:

• A broad social justice bargaining agenda
• Democratic control of the union & university
• Prioritizing graduate student and adjunct issues

Trump is threatening the very existence of public education, as well as the safety of many people in the CUNY system, our loved ones, and our neighbors. If you’re feeling scared, lost & alone, and have vowed to fight but aren’t sure where to start, get involved with your union, the PSC.

Democratically run unions help workers (that’s you!) secure better working conditions, and by virtue of bringing people together in struggle, they can form the basis for broader social movements.

The PSC is currently run in an undemocratic way, which is bad in its own right. But in the current political climate, it also makes us vulnerable to the impending assault on public sector unions. The longtime central leadership consists of a small group of people who have decided to double down on their losing strategy (begging politicians to give CUNY more $) rather than reckon with the gravity of the situation and build rank and file power. Under their leadership the salary gap between adjunct and tenured profs has widened (with adjuncts still making less than 30k working full-time), and both tuition and class sizes have gone up.