Workers from eight CUNY colleges speak out against their union’s proposed contract.
The contract includes: inadequate raises for many job titles, workload increases and givebacks on job security for adjunct faculty, and no remote work protections for staff.
The leadership of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC CUNY) union, which represents more than 25,000 faculty and staff at the City University of New York, has once again agreed to a sell-out proposed contract and the membership are none too happy about it. Building a fighting union and winning a good contract begins with rejecting this memorandum of agreement and organizing students, faculty, and staff from the bottom up. Below, we reproduce several statements from members of the PSC CUNY on why they are voting no on this proposed contract.
Nathan Nikolic, Adjunct Faculty, Baruch College
My name is Nathan Nikolic. I am an adjunct at Baruch College and an alum of the Graduate Center’s English PhD program, and I have been an active union member in various rank-and-file initiatives for the past two-and-a-half years. I will be voting NO on the recently proposed PSC tentative agreement (TA) and would like to share why in a few words.
This is a sad and inadequate proposed contract in many ways. Across-the-board raises don’t keep up with inflation over just the past 5 years, to say nothing of the years to come. I know everyone is hurting after two years without raises; the lump-sum payments and back pay will provide much-needed momentary relief, but with our real wages continuing to go down we’ll all find ourselves squeezed again before long. There also seems to have been no push at all to create lecturer conversion lines for adjuncts like myself who want nothing more than to teach full-time at CUNY. We haven’t won adjunct job security or remote-work clauses for full-time staff, to say nothing of bargaining for the common good demands like reduced class sizes and tuition freezes.
But there’s a deeper reason I’m voting NO on this tentative agreement, and that’s because I don’t believe that this is the best we can do as a union, and I don’t believe that our bargaining team made actual good-faith efforts to mobilize and harness our power as workers. Over and over, members of CUNY on Strike and others, seeing the writing on the wall in our own contract struggle and in the labor movement around the country, suggested that we take concrete steps towards achieving real strike readiness. PSC CUNY President James Davis and other PSC elected leaders responded time and again that they weren’t ruling out a strike authorization vote but that the time had not yet come. Well, the time has come and gone because here we are discussing an inadequate TA, making the PSC leadership’s deferral of a strike campaign seem like a cynical dismissal of their obligation to the union membership to use every means within their power to win a fair contract for workers. I believe that a better contract is possible, but more importantly, I believe that a better union is possible, and that is why I am voting No.
Sandra Goldstein Lehnert, CUNY Graduate Center & Queens College, Graduate Assistant and Adjunct Faculty
I will be voting “No” on this memorandum of agreement, which for reasons outlined by many others is woefully insufficient and a sign of capitulation to management. It promises a net pay cut, decreased job security for adjunct workers, complete defeat on graduate student demands such as full funding for all, creates loopholes for increased new job duties without increased pay, and more.
I want to speak from my perspective as a graduate worker. Over the last ten years, graduate workers have unionized and mobilized across the United States and won big gains from strikes and aggressive, dignified contract negotiations, including voting “No” on inadequate contracts. For example, it was only after the membership voted down an initial contract proposal — followed by their ten-week strike — that the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC-UAW 2710) won most of their demands. A “No” vote is an expression of dignity and democratic will on the part of a union’s rank-and-file membership. It shows and enacts solidarity with the most vulnerable and overlooked workers in the membership whose needs were ignored during bargaining and consequently are seeing few meager gains — and some substantial losses — reflected in the contract. And more than anything, a “No” vote says: we deserve better, and we have the power to demand such. It is in our power as workers organized together to force our bosses to pay us a living wage, fund our research, secure our employment, and ensure safe and prosperous working conditions (for us and our students).
Two major unions—the Amazon Labor Union and Starbucks Workers United—went on strike last month. They face the same danger and threats of repression from the impending government administration—as well as the current one—that we do. Teachers, university workers, and graduate workers have been on the forefront of the modern labor movement alongside these unions in the past; can we take inspiration from their power? Can we fight for what we deserve, and what we have the power to demand, despite all the fear we have had instilled in us? I say yes, so I will vote “No.”
Kamran, Adjunct Faculty, Lehman College
My name is Kamran, I’m an adjunct at Lehman, and I’m poor, and I hate it. And if this contract goes through, in 2027, I will still be poor, and I will still hate it. $7K was the minimum I think we deserved — 10 years ago. In 2027, it won’t be enough. I will be enthusiastically voting no.
Stuart Chen-Hayes, Professor, Lehman College
In my 26th year as full-time faculty at CUNY, I am appalled at this proposed memorandum Of agreement. It is nowhere near what all ranks need in the United States’ most expensive city. Our adjuncts cannot live on 7K a course — a demand we’ve had for 12 years and would only reach at the end of this contract. We demanded inflation-beating raises and didn’t get them. We demanded remote work time and didn’t get it. We demanded $8,000 per three-credit class as the floor for adjuncts and didn’t get it. Our horribly paid graduate workers got only $2,000-4,000 more. It costs $65,000 to break even living in New York City. They don’t make half of that. With adjunct course compensation converted to per course from hourly wages management will abuse that, as well. We deserve so much better and we need a willingness to do job actions and strike. Leadership refuses. A “new” caucus is forming to fight the New Caucus’s unwillingness to fight harder. Struggle continues.
-Stuart Chen-Hayes, Professor, CUNY Lehman & co-founder of RAFA/7Korstrike.
James Dennis Hoff, Associate Professor, English, Borough of Manhattan Community College
The PSC President James Davis and the entire leadership of our union are urging us to vote yes on the proposed contract agreement they settled with CUNY management last month, claiming that this proposal is being recommended by the Delegate Assembly.
But what they fail to tell us is that this memorandum of agreement was not in any way unanimously supported by the delegates of our union. On the contrary, the proposed memorandum of agreement actually faced historic opposition in the Delegate Assembly.
Indeed, more than 40 delegates voted against sending the contract to the membership. In my 23 years in this union, that is the highest no vote I’ve ever witnessed on a proposed memorandum of agreement in the Delegate Assembly. For reference, last contract, the total number of no votes was 20, which was seen as a victory for those of us delegates who voted no on that contract.
The reasons for this historic opposition are many, but I’d like to share just a few that came up in debate at the Delegate Assembly.
First of all, this memorandum of agreement is a pay cut, plain and simple. The proposed across the board wage increases for the life of the contract will equal only 2.82 percent per year. This comes after historic levels of inflation close to twenty percent since 2021. The proposed retroactive wages will do little to make up for that loss and probably will not even keep pace with inflation going forward. Even in the best-case scenario, this contract will actually bake in a nine percent pay cut across the board for all PSC-CUNY members. This comes on top of the lost value that our salaries have suffered since the New Caucus took power in 1999.
Unfortunately, this proposed contract also does not do nearly enough to help the most exploited members of our union. Like previous contracts, this proposal once again fails to create real pay equity for adjuncts. Worse, if approved this contract would actually erode adjunct job security, forcing them to have to work even longer to receive even shorter re-appointments of just two instead of three years after six years of service. This means that many of our adjunct colleagues will continue to live semester to semester never knowing whether or not they will have a job from one month to the next. While adjuncts will receive equity increases above and beyond the minimum across the board raises (which is a progressive development), these increases will still leave adjuncts earning far less than their FT counterparts for performing the same work. But even by the end of the contract, in 2027, these raises will be nowhere near the standard adjunct rate at other universities and colleges across the city.
The proposed contract also does nothing to secure remote work options for our HEO colleagues. This was the biggest demand for HEOs this contract round, and no progress was made on this question at all. This means that CUNY can end or limit remote work for HEOs anytime it feels like it.
Lastly, this contract proposal is being pushed through our union in an incredibly undemocratic manner. Not only are the leadership spending thousands of dollars of our union dues on mailers and advertisements urging our members to vote yes before they’ve even had a chance to carefully read, much less discuss or debate the proposal, but they are also asking us to vote on this during the winter break when the vast majority of union members are not even on their campuses. This means that any frank and honest debate and discussion of the problems with this contract with our colleagues is impossible.
For all of these reasons and many others I voted against this proposed contract in the Delegate Assembly last month, and that is why I am asking all of my colleagues to do the same.
A no vote not only tells the New Caucus leadership that we are tired of settling for crumbs, it also sends a message to the administration and the city and state that we are actually ready to fight. Most importantly, it lays the ground for us to begin to organize the entire union, from the bottom up, for a real contract struggle that includes building toward a strike authorization vote and to be prepared to strike by the end of the spring. That is the only way we will be able to break the chains of pattern bargaining that have eaten away at our wages and those of our fellow city workers, for so many years and to begin to build the fighting union we need to struggle for the kind of university and city and world that we all deserve. Such a struggle would not only allow us to win decent wages for all and pay parity for adjuncts, but has the potential to reinvigorate the public sector labor movement in NYC, which makes us all stronger.
When everyone from auto workers to port workers to amazon and Starbucks workers are all walking off the job and winning, the time for a strike at CUNY has never been more ripe.
Chad Kidd, Associate Professor, City College
Is this contract a win? The PSC leadership’s argument takes the following shape: CUNY administration set the terms of the negotiation with a proposed contract that would cut costs and, in the process, gut CUNY. But we didn’t let them have anything in that initial proposal! So, we won!
The obvious problem with this narrative is that it loses sight of the fact that a contract negotiation is a negotiation. Anyone who knows how negotiations work knows that you do not start with what you are willing to settle for, but rather with a position significantly lower (or higher) than that. So, this is not a win for PSC, rather it is the playing out of a well-planned and executed negotiation strategy by CUNY administration to get significant budget cuts out of us, sustaining their program of austerity for CUNY.
But if PSC wants to call that a “win,” so be it. However, we should not expect the contract negotiations that are to happen again in two years to be any different or any better for us.
Why?
The answer is simple. The PSC employs a failing strategy, CUNY administration a winning strategy (for their respective aims). The PSC principal officers tend to operate like bureaucrats, and neglect thinking like organizers. In other words, they tend to think about numbers (numbers of members signed up, numbers of dollars in our operating budget, numbers of “satisfied” stakeholders), instead of building community and power and training up organizers in the membership of campus chapters.
And this strategy of bureaucratic top-down thinking and strategizing will continue to yield failed contracts, which PSC has to then try to convince its members are actually “wins,” getting us nowhere while we continue to tell ourselves that things are getting better.
Making our union strong does not require an ideal world. It does not require waiting for things outside our control to change, although many delegate assembly members in the PSC (as, indeed, many American liberals these days) seem to believe. Those thoughts are poison.
Instead, we should listen to Malcolm X, who observed “We are not outnumbered, we are out-organized!” We should take responsibility for our own lack of power and for the dire state of CUNY. Administration will not help us, rather we the faculty, staff, and students of CUNY must organize ourselves, even if the PSC leadership won’t. We must do it for our good, and theirs.
Olivia Wood, Lecturer, City College
I am a co-director of the first year writing program at my school, and most of the faculty who teach in the writing program are adjuncts. This contract does very little to improve their wages, it harms their prospects for job security, and it increases their workload by adding new responsibilities into their job expectations, including “and other departmental teaching instructional staff responsibilities that may be assigned by the colleges.” Because it’s the college that might be assigning these responsibilities, not the department, my co-director and I might be limited in our ability to protect our colleagues from this workload increase, if management issues new directives about what instructors are expected or required to do.
I am a former CUNY graduate assistant, and the so-called “equity increases” for GAs in this contract are minimal. It is likely CUNY GAs will remain the lowest-paid GAs relative to local cost of living in the country among so-called “fully funded” programs, after this contract. Because most GAs at CUNY are on 5-year fellowships, and our union’s constitution requires workers to be union members for 4 months in order to vote, first year GAs who joined the union immediately upon starting school in August will be prohibited from voting on the contract that will govern their working conditions for most of their fellowships. This is incredibly undemocratic. And because the equity increases are scheduled for the end of the contract, many current GAs will no longer be on fellowship by the time they kick in. They will never see those raises.
I am a current CUNY lecturer, and rather than fighting against tiered labor — a demand we’ve seen during the Teamsters contract campaign at UPS, in the Big 3 automakers strike, and in the Rutgers faculty strike, among others — this contract further solidifies my job title as a lesser tier than my tenure-track colleagues, with less respect, lower pay, and fewer advancement opportunities. Lecturers are supposed to be teaching-only counterparts to our tenure-track colleagues who also do research, but this contract sets my promotion title (Senior Doctoral Lecturer, which I will be eligible for after working 8 years in my job) as equivalent in pay to the entry-level tenure track rank, a job I am already qualified for. The top salary step for Senior Doctoral Lecturer (the promotional rank) in 2027 will only be $136 per year higher than the top salary step for the pre-promotion rank. Almost nothing.
Adjunct faculty, graduate assistants who teach, lecturers, and tenure-track faculty all do the same work, even though the latter two categories have other subsequent responsibilities as well. Yet we are paid completely different rates per course, and receive very different benefits. Apart from the unfairness, this tiering out of teaching labor also breeds resentment between job titles, which creates fractures within our union and makes solidarity between titles more challenging. Adjunct faculty and graduate assistants often resent their higher-paid colleagues — who have higher rates of union membership and are more likely to run for elected positions within the union — and feel like they don’t fight hard enough for their issues, which leads them to be less engaged in union activities, while full time faculty sometimes feel like the union unfairly prioritizes adjunct faculty while the spending power of their own wages are eaten away by inflation. Many staff members feel that their issues are poorly understood compared to those of faculty and are routinely deprioritized too. The result is distrust among coworkers, lower levels of engagement within the union, and frustration on all sides. A strong union requires equity, true democracy (not this top-down push to manipulate workers into voting yes), and structural equality.
Lucien, CUNY Graduate Center
I’m voting no on the proposed memorandum of agreement because CUNY students and workers deserve living wages and a fully funded public university. This contract fails to deliver above-inflation raises or wages that meet the cost of living in New York City for the lowest paid CUNY workers. The demands raised by Graduate Assistants—living wages, funding for all students, and tuition parity for international students—were not even raised by the bargaining committee which only spent one hour bargaining on Graduate Assistant issues in a nearly two-year-long contract campaign. While the living wage in New York is $69,000 for a single adult with no children, and our peer institutions will all pay graduate students over $40,000 in 2025, this MOA only brings our wages up to $37,000 in 2026, and the lack of retroactive raises means that half of the current GAs will see no raises from the MOA. Additionally, I’m very concerned about the lack of remote work, poverty wages for adjuncts, and no real path to job security for our most vulnerable faculty and staff. We must break the pattern of austerity that is slowly killing CUNY and demand that the state fund public higher education! In the richest city in the world, there’s always money available to fund cops to harass Black unhoused people and migrant vendors on the subway, but never funding for the greatest working-class university in the nation. I urge my fellow PSC members to vote No on this Memorandum Of Agreement and join the struggle to win the contract that we deserve!
A Library Faculty Member, CUNY Senior College
Library faculty again feel like this contract would have been stronger had there been a member of the library faculty on the bargaining team, that maybe our issues would not have needed to be pushed to committee. We have been fighting for many contracts for parity with other faculty in leave time, and we will continue to fight, while also arguing for fully staffed libraries.
Tatiana Cozzarelli, Adjunct Lecturer, Hunter College and Brooklyn College
Over the summer, I had a dream that we had gotten a contract at CUNY. It was a sense of relief, of happiness, and the feeling of a sigh of relief deep from inside of me. But when I woke up, the reality was so different: I had 30 dollars in my bank account and was borrowing money from friends in order to make ends meet. I needed emergency dental surgery and I had to make a gofundme to pay for it. I’m not the only one. I know adjuncts who are on food stamps, especially over the summer. While CUNY President Felix Matos Rodriguez makes nearly $800,000 a year, adjunct professors just cannot make ends meet.
After two years we finally have a memorandum of agreement (MOA). It’s been a long time coming and I know a lot of us really need the raise. But this MOA is a pay cut. It won’t change any of the structural issues affecting our lives, and next summer, I can expect to be in a similar situation as I was last summer: being terribly broke.
The PSC leadership is going to say this is the best we can get. That’s untrue.
These limits are the product of an austerity framework imposed by the Democrats in power in Albany and adopted by CUNY management with the total acceptance of our union. Our union leadership has refused to prepare our membership to fight for more and has systematically, over the past two years, lowered our expectations.
All over the country, workers are elevating their expectations and fighting for more — from Boeing workers who voted down two Tentative Agreements, to Starbucks and Amazon workers who recently went on strike. While our union leadership wants to lower our expectations, we know we deserve so much more — real raises, a fully funded university, the end of tiered labor, a free CUNY and more. In the wealthiest city in the world, in the wealthiest country in the world — in a country that spends billions on the military, on supporting genocide in Israel and on a police force armed to the teeth — we know that the money is there. When they say there is no money, it is a lie. The money is there, but we have to fight for it.
And our fight will not end at raises. We demand a different kind of university — one that doesn’t have investments in Israel and doesn’t run like a business. One that is free and public, offering stipends for everyone to attend so students don’t need to work multiple jobs while going to school. A university that is run not by an undemocratically-appointed Board of Trustees and a disconnected and over-paid Chancellor, but by the students, the workers, and the community who attend CUNY.
Vote no, let’s dream bigger and fight for more.