Some cash-strapped CUNY adjuncts demand ‘$7K or Strike.’ Others aren’t so enthused
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A PSC demonstration at Baruch College in fall 2017. Eagle photos by Jonathan Sperling.
By Victoria Merlino
Rebecca Smart, an adjunct professor at two CUNY schools and Fordham University, has gone to housing court at least four times.
Smart said that she struggles to pay her rent after August each year, and it has become something of a tradition for her landlord to take her to court. She ultimately pays with a One Shot Deal, an emergency housing grant provided by the city.
“I really would just like a full-time lecturer job,” Smart said. “That's like my dream. And that would mean that I don't have to get housing assistance every summer.”
Smart, a Bay Ridge resident, has a master’s degree but did not complete her Ph.D. She said the lack of a doctorate has affected her hireability in the tough university job market.
“So I had a bad couple of years and now I deserve to be poor for the rest of my life with no pension?” she said. She has been working as an adjunct at CUNY since around 2010.
Thousands of adjuncts across the CUNY system are in similar financial straits, earning low pay with little job security. Even with a full course load of eight classes — four in the fall semester and four in the spring — it’s difficult for many adjunct professors to cope with the high cost of living in New York City.
Starting pay for a CUNY adjunct is $3,200 per course, with average adjunct pay reaching around $3,500, according to the Professional Staff Congress, CUNY’s staff union. The PSC’s contract expired in November 2017 and the union has tried to negotiate with CUNY officials for what members call a “life-changing” raise that would earn adjuncts $7,000 per three-credit course.
But as CUNY faces budget cuts, the university system has been reluctant to agree to a $7,000-per-course wages and some adjuncts, like Smart, say they have become disillusioned with the process.
These professors have started organizing independently of the PSC union. They call their movement “$7K or Strike.”
“I think $7K or Strike is lighting a fire under the [union] leadership and lighting a fire basically among the membership that we have to go out and win something real with this,” said Jane Guskin, an adjunct professor at Queens College and founder of the advocacy group QC Adjuncts Unite. “I think that you can't energize the membership with the sort of usual tired tactics when we're dealing with such dire situations right now.”
Adjunct professors demonstrate at Baruch College in 2017 after their contract expired.
Guskin is also an organizer for the $7K or Strike movement, which includes rank-and-file adjuncts who call for a strike-authorization vote. The $7K or Strike members say they would vote “yes” to strike if CUNY refused to pay adjuncts $7,000 per course and union membership were to call the strike vote.
Since the beginning of this year, the movement has gained some traction, conducting “grade-ins” and other forms of protest across the CUNY campuses.
Adjuncts account for a sizable chunk of the CUNY workforce. There are 11,590 adjuncts compared to 7,527 full-time faculty, according to a 2016-2017 report from CUNY’s Office of Human Resources Management. Adjuncts make up the bulk of the teaching staff at Queens College in particular: Adjuncts provided 59.5 percent of instruction time over the 2017-2018 school year, according to CUNY’s most recent performance review.
“Many of the people I've met at Queens College have been working as adjuncts for well over 10 years, some of them working for 20 or 30 years as adjuncts at Queens College, which is kind of incomprehensible,” Guskin said. She called adjuncting a “dead-end job,” and has personally heard stories of Queens College adjuncts with doctorate degrees who have one bedroom apartments and sleep on their couches so their kids can sleep in a bed.
‘This contract is about everyone’
Despite the growing influence of the $7K or Strike protests, the PSC has not been so gung-ho about a strike vote.
“We're working on this contract very hard to raise adjunct pay in a dramatic and necessary way. And it's difficult. I mean that's the is the most difficult issue in the negotiation,” said Barbara Bowen, president of the PSC and a professor at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Bowen and other leaders within the PSC posted an open letter to $7K or Strike asking the movement not to misrepresent the larger union, as union members were beginning to get confused about whether the movement was an official PSC campaign.
Bowen told the Eagle that $7K or Strike has used Bowen’s image to promote the movement and made signs that are similar to official union signs with their own slogans, among other activities that PSC leadership says are not backed by the union.
In their letter, PSC leadership wrote that if they needed to consider a strike, they would make a decision by putting the proposal before the entire union. Bowen stood by this position in her interview with the Eagle.
“Yes we are prepared to do that if we need to,” she said about considering a strike authorization vote. “But this contract is about everyone. It's not a one-issue contract. It has one very difficult and transformative issue. And that's adjunct pay.”
"We have been negotiating in good faith and that process is ongoing,” a spokesperson for CUNY commented to the Eagle for this story.
Bowen mentioned that during negotiations for the PSC’s previous contract in 2016, union leadership ran a strike-authorization vote campaign with 92 percent of the membership voting “yes” before they received a new contract.
The perils of a potential strike
Preparing for a strike is hard for any worker, but it’s especially tricky for public employees.
New York’s Public Employees’ Fair Employment Act, commonly known as the Taylor Law, prohibits public employee unions from striking and can result in major penalties, including imprisonment for the union president.
Many rank-and-file union members say they are hesitant to believe in the $7K or Strike movement. Young-Min Seo, an adjunct at LaGuardia Community College who worked on the 2016 strike authorization vote campaign, said he has reservations about the movement, especially when it was so difficult to make the first campaign happen.
A demonstrator marches in the Baruch College plaza.
“I think it’s a bit too early to start saying strike,” he said, though he supports activism. He himself has been very active in the union, even getting arrested twice during union actions.
While the PSC does not support the $7K or Strike movement, it is difficult to deny that the movement is bringing energy to the conversation, said Carly Smith, an adjunct who represents CUNY’s roughly 12,000 adjuncts on the PSC’s contract bargaining team.
“This is undoubtedly so: there is a lot of really powerful rank-and-file organizing going on and some real anger at our working conditions,” Smith said. “People are desperate. We are feeling the crisis every single day.”
No matter their position on a strike vote, professors who spoke with the Eagle said that the lack of pay for adjuncts ultimately impacts the education of the 274,000 students enrolled in CUNY. About 42 percent of the students come from households that earn less than $20,000, according to CUNY enrollment data.
“We're only at CUNY because of the students, because we believe in the students. We've chosen to be at CUNY for that reason,” Bowen said.
When professors have non-competitive salaries, the whole campus suffers and adjuncts have to rush from the classroom to their second job, like babysitting, she said.
“That is hurting students,” she said.
