We need a radical labor voice in the PSC Delegate Assembly

Tough times call for a fighting program

We need a radical labor voice in the PSC Delegate Assembly

From adjunct and union activist Sándor John On the April 2017 Hunter PSC chapter elections

Dear fellow adjunct/contingent or tenured/tenure-track faculty and staff: Please keep an eye out for the PSC (Professional Staff Congress) union election ballot which will be mailed on April 3, so you can vote in the Hunter PSC chapter elections.

Facing off vs. Fox News "ambush interview," September 2013

We are facing an onslaught against our most basic rights and hard-won gains. Immigrant students, workers and their families face escalating threats of deportation; unions are under existential attack; public education is on the chopping block. These are tough times, and we need a fighting program – not business as usual.

I am running as an independent candidate for Delegate to the PSC’s Delegate Assembly, which is the union’s principal governing body. I am an adjunct asso­ciate professor in Hunter’s History Department, and have taught at CUNY for 14 years. From 2008 to 2014, I served as an inde­pen­dent delegate and member of the Hunter union chapter executive committee. In 2008, I helped found CUNY Contingents Unite as a voice within the union for adjuncts and others in CUNY’s contingent majority. I’ve helped build speak-outs with CUNY campus workers when Gov. Cuomo excluded them from his promised $15 minimum wage; and with students from the Internationalist Club against the unending killings of black people by police, in solidarity with the Mexican teachers strike, and against Trump’s “Muslim ban,” ICE immigration raids and deportations (escalating the record number of deportations carried out under Obama); and building support for the inspiring organizing drives by immigrant workers at the Hot and Crusty bakery restaurant near Hunter and at B&H Photo.

New York is a union town – New York is an immigrant town: Use our power to defend the rights of us all. The capitalist social and political crisis brings new dangers every day. As a long-time union activist and socialist, I have fought to strengthen the union movement so it can serve as a genuine organizing center to defend all workers and all those targeted by the reactionary offensive. Defending our rights means opposing all of the employers’ divide-and-conquer tactics, from CUNY’s two-tier system of adjunct poverty to the nationwide anti-immigrant and xenophobic offensive. I am a member of Class Struggle Education Workers, a left opposition tendency in NYC education unions, which has been front and center in efforts to mobilize labor’s power in defense of immigrants, Muslims and the rights of us all. We point out that chaining the working class and oppressed to the Democratic Party paved the way for Trump. To defeat Trump’s attacks, it is crucial to unchain the power of labor from its decades-long subjugation to the bosses’ parties. An initiative I enthusiastically support is the vote by the Painters Union in Portland, Oregon, to “call on the labor movement to break from the Democratic Party, and build a class-struggle workers party.”

Equal pay, rights and benefits for adjuncts – this is key to strengthening the PSC as a whole in the face of anti-labor attacks. In 2014, the international Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor approved CUNY Contingent Unite’s call for a minimum starting salary of at least $7,000 per 3-credit course (which is the Modern Language Association’s minimum standard), together with a seniority system and real job security for all contingent faculty. I’ve fought to unite tenured/tenure-track and adjunct faculty, grad students, TAs, HEOs, CLTs and others in our union, together with the cafeteria, clerical, janitorial and maintenance workers who keep the university going. Real solidarity is key to real unionism. Thus, I’ve called for a “No” vote on contracts repeatedly negotiated by the PSC’s New Caucus leadership that keep increasing inequality between the tiers, and led the “We Demand the Right to Vote” campaign when they excluded all but “full-time” faculty from the 2013 Pathways referendum. Last year I worked hard in favor of the union strike authorization vote (arguing against those in the adjunct milieu who balked at this basic step), and proposed concrete measures to lay the basis for a real strike.

In this period of hardline attacks on the most fundamental rights of labor, I believe it is more crucial than ever to have a radical labor voice in the PSC Delegate Assembly. We’ve never won anything by bowing down to injustice.

March 10, 2017      For more information: s_an@msn.com

Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed rather than, as it is at present, an instrument for the disciplining of labor in the interests of capital. See the CSEW program here.