CUNY Union Says Negotiations Resolved Major Contract Disputes
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The head of the City University of New York’s faculty union has told its membership that negotiators this week resolved the major remaining issues in a four-year contract dispute with university management.
The union president, Barbara Bowen, said in an e-mail message sent on Tuesday to the 20,000-member Professional Staff Congress that “much progress was made toward a contract settlement” during a 12-hour bargaining session on Monday. Negotiators “were able to resolve most of the remaining issues,” she wrote, adding that the two sides would meet informally throughout the week to finalize the agreement.
The union’s last contract expired in 2002. Ms. Bowen said the contract now being finalized would last four years and 10 months. The contract would include “across-the-board” salary increases of 8.48%, and union members’ base pay would be boosted by $800.
A union spokeswoman, Sharon Toomer, said those figures had been on the table since February. Previously, Ms. Bowen had stated in membership reports that the union was demanding at least 10% in salary increases.
The two sides are closing in on a settlement as CUNY faculty vote in a hotly contested union leadership election. The CUNY Alliance has put up a full slate of candidates to oppose Ms. Bowen’s New Caucus. The rival candidates have criticized Ms. Bowen’s stewardship of the PSC, citing a steep decrease in the union’s welfare fund and the prolonged contract talks.
The CUNY Alliance candidate for treasurer, Howard Ross, lambasted the proposed contract, saying that because the salary increases were lower than the rate of inflation over the last four years, members would end up losing money on the deal. He also said he disagreed with Ms. Bowen’s statement that the salary increases match those attained by the faculty union at the State University of New York. Including discretionary and other increases, the SUNY contract amounts to a pay boost of more than 15%.
Ms. Toomer said the CUNY deal would include yearly increases that would bring the total to more than 16%, but Mr. Ross said those add-ons had been built into previous union contracts and thus were not comparable to the SUNY agreement, which was signed in 2004.
