Emergency: 3,000 Layoffs at CUNY
The Union Must Prepare and Organize
an All-Out Strike for the Start of School
July 2020
The mass layoffs
of almost 3,000 adjuncts (so far) at the City University of New York, the loss
of health insurance for hundreds, the cuts in hours and the threat of even more
drastic cuts – all this represents a genuine emergency for all of us who work
and study at CUNY. This head-on assault must be answered, now.
That means bringing out the power needed to defend our jobs, our rights and our
lives – and public education itself – against the devastation being wreaked by
the CUNY tops and the ruling class.
Our
union, the Professional Staff Congress, is quite rightly suing management for
its gross violation of the terms under which CUNY received CARES Act funds. Yet
we cannot rely on the “justice” system – and certainly not on the Democratic
politicians that run the state and city.
Nobody
will do it for us. CUNY faculty, staff and students must mobilize, now, in our
own defense. We in the PSC must actively unite with our sisters and brothers in
DC37 (among them College Assistants, cafeteria workers and others hit with layoffs)
and other unions. And as CUNY Contingents Unite (CCU) has emphasized, to be
effective – particularly when up against New York State’s anti-strike Taylor
Law – faculty, staff and students must do this together with workers and the
oppressed throughout New York.
This
basic point is clearer than ever today, amidst mass upheaval against police
brutality and racist oppression. And now ICE says international students will
be thrown out if their classes are all online! As part of the struggle, we must
raise hell, far and wide, against what CUNY’s brutal slashing of its teaching
force will do to its students, almost 77% of whom are African American, Asian
and Latino. This is an assault on the hard-earned rights, sacrifices and hopes
of the whole multiracial working class that makes this city run – and can bring
it to a halt.
Mobilizing
together to stop this attack, we must link this to the fight not just against
tuition hikes but to end tuition, as well as evictions (including from
university housing) and the presence of cops of all kinds on campus; and for
widescale recruitment and advancement of black, Latino, Asian and immigrant
grad students, faculty and staff at CUNY.
What needs to be done in the face of the mass
layoffs emergency? Neither
toothless “moral suasion” nor flash-in-the-pan gimmicks will do it. The union
as a whole and all of us, its members, must prepare and organize an
all-out strike to STOP and REVERSE the layoffs and cuts. We must do
this together with large numbers of students at this, the largest urban public
university in the U.S. And this strike should be launched at the start of
school this Fall.
Management
began pre-emptive layoffs as the school year wound down, calculating that we
would be unable to react. But we must use the summer to escalate
organized, well-planned disruptive actions that use collective power and call
major attention to the emergency at CUNY, building for a strike at the
beginning of the school year.
Mass
layoffs began with 450 adjuncts axed at John Jay – and have now hit a fifth of
CUNY’s adjunct workforce. Even before Gov. Cuomo announces cuts of his own
aimed at CUNY, against which he has long displayed an especially venomous
antagonism, the CUNY tops have carried out this assault. While pleading
poverty, the university pays its chancellor $675,000 a year, plus a $7,500
monthly housing stipend; college presidents rake in hundreds of thousands.
Meanwhile, at least five CUNY campuses ordered students to move out of dorms,
with almost no notice, in early April.
In
May, management agreed to give the union “detailed college budget information.”
Weeks later, they have reportedly provided no such information. We must demand
that CUNY, and each of its campuses, open the books to committees
of workers, faculty and students, so we can inspect them to see for ourselves
where the money is going.
Facing the emergency of mass layoffs and cuts, the
PSC leadership now says it’s “time to talk seriously about whether the
union needs to consider disruptive job action during the fall semester in order
to save lives, save jobs and save CUNY.” But that’s too late. The threat
is indeed beyond serious, and we indeed need to be serious, not just talking
about job action but preparing and organizing to shut down CUNY with an all-out
strike when school starts this Fall. A CUNY-wide strike preparation
committee, elected by and responsible to the union membership, should
be set up now.
* For
in-depth discussion on what it means to build for a strike, see the CCU site:
cunycontingents.wordpress.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. See the CSEW program here.