Inside the CUNY Union
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Wonder where your tax or tuition dollars are going at the City University of New York? Check out the documents that recently crossed our desk from the union that represents professors there, the Professional Staff Congress, which is part of the American Federation of Teachers. The local’s leadership unanimously resolved on January 27 to prepare its members for “the increasingly militant actions that may be required to win a contract that meets our needs.” Those preparations include, according to the resolution, discussion of “job actions up to and including strikes.”
A strike by public employees is unambiguously illegal under New York State’s Taylor law, which provides draconian penalties for such a strike. That doesn’t seem to deter some of the professors. An associate professor of English at Queens College, Anthony O’Brien, replied to a mention of the Taylor law by writing, “couldn’t have a civil rights or anti-apartheid movement that respected racist laws, and can’t have a labor movement that respects anti-labor laws.” Mr. O’Brien, an official of the union, suggested, further, that the union add to its demands “ending the war in Iraq which so obviously via the deficit and the right-wing racist climate it helps create drains resources from CUNY and from the whole social budget. It would be a political strike, in other words, something students and intellectuals have historically been good at.”
We don’t mean to trash CUNY, which has undergone some important improvements in recent years as a result of fine leadership by trustees and a president appointed by Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki. That leadership deserves public support in its negotiations with this union. But when professors who under the current contract make between $35,000 and $93,507 a year express such views, one starts to wonder whether the students would be better off if the teachers did go on strike. And one starts to understand why the professors have been working without a contract since October 31, 2002. After all, it must be hard for management to negotiate with an adversary that proudly announces that it won’t respect the laws governing the negotiations.
