Facing management’s continued drumbeat of attacks, it is important that our union, the Professional Staff Congress, has organized a protest demonstration outside CUNY’s central office on Monday, February 15. CUNY Contingents Unite (CCU) says this should be a springboard for intensifying, union-wide militant action.
Specifically, we call for the union as a whole to organize a “Day of Action” against CUNY management’s anti-worker, anti-student, anti-education onslaught of layoffs, contract violations, cuts, course cancellations, growing class sizes, bursar holds and the rest of it. This Day of Action should be held on a workday, instead of classes or other work. The purpose: to help build and show our collective power against the bosses’ attack.
Such a Day of Action should involve the maximum numbers possible of faculty and staff, together with members of other unions at CUNY – and large numbers of students. Systematic work should be done to extend it to other sectors: the CUNY crisis is part of the overall capitalist devastation wreaked against the working class and oppressed. To win, we must bring our struggles together with those of the multiracial working class that keeps this city running.
This is especially crucial given threats from the anti-labor Taylor Law, which both Democrats and Republicans have wielded against public workers’ labor actions.
The Day of Action that the CCU is proposing would be an important and concrete part of the union ramping up preparation for a strike to stop and reverse management’s continuing attacks.
List Keeps Getting Longer
Sometimes it can seem overwhelming just to keep up with the list of those attacks on our jobs, our rights, our income and our students’ education. Since last spring’s mass layoff of 2,900 adjuncts, the CUNY tops have continued to test how much they can get away with. They carried out the mass layoffs while sitting on huge amounts of CARES Act money. They withheld the contractual 2% raise. Now they’ve gone after our coworkers in the Assistant to HEO title, holding back the “equity raise” they were supposed to get this week – and they plan to do the same to Lecturers.
Those adjuncts not laid off were supposed to feel lucky to have a job at all – while many have had our income brutally slashed with course cancellations. Some lost health care. With the workforce cut, management has been pushing class sizes up, skyrocketing in some cases to truly insane levels. (This despite all the evidence that “remote learning” is doubly impossible without class sizes being made much smaller.)
Advisors are placed under unbearable strain, while students suffer. Yet students are not only expected to keep paying tuition (which should be abolished completely) but in some cases are being refused registration because of bursar holds for monies owed.
Fighting to reverse all the layoffs, cuts, cancellations, bursar holds and the rest of it is part of the overall struggle for the basic interests of everyone who makes this city run and CUNY students whose families are so often workers deemed essential but disposable by the racist rulers. It is we who must wage and win this struggle (which means no illusions in capitalist politicians).We invite all who agree that the union should call a CUNY-wide Day of Action in defense of our jobs, rights and income, and our students’ education – to be held on a workday instead of classes or other work – to join in efforts for this proposal to be adopted and put into effect.
CUNY Contingents Unite 