Thirty faculty and staff of the City University of New York were arrested Monday, October 21st, during a union protest. They blocked the 10th Avenue entrance to CUNY’s John Jay College during a hearing of the Board of Trustees and refused to move until management made an offer that would ensure real raises for workers and a quality college education for students. Hundreds more CUNY faculty and staff, students, and labor allies chanted “Real Raises! Job Security! Contract Now!” during the blockade.

CUNY’s 30,000 faculty and professional staff have not received a raise since November 2022. But management’s economic offer is far below what the faculty and staff of CUNY deserve. Their union, the Professional Staff Congress, staged a disruption of the hearing and a protest outside to press management to make an acceptable offer. 

PSC President James Davis, an English professor at Brooklyn College, was arrested with colleagues representing 15 CUNY campuses. Before joining the blockade, he testified at the hearing and led union members in a mass disruption of the proceedings. 

 “CUNY offered unacceptable raises seven months ago, a year after their top executives received 27% and 30% bumps in pay. They haven’t shown faculty, staff and students the respect of a fair economic offer and haven’t put another dollar on the bargaining table since March. We’re demanding real raises, job security, and urgency. There can be no business as usual at CUNY until we get a fair offer,” said PSC President James Davis.

CUNY’s offer to its workers fails to keep pace with inflation, the cost of living in NYC, or with comparable public education contracts. The current offer would leave CUNY unable to compete for the faculty and staff that students need. And it came paired with an unacceptable management attack on hard-won job security for long-serving adjunct faculty.  The PSC-CUNY contract is one of the largest remaining unresolved agreements in the current round of NY city and state public-sector collective bargaining.

“Standing up for ourselves by demanding a fair contract is also standing up for our students and generations of CUNY students to come. Our teaching and working conditions are our students’ learning conditions. We can’t focus fully on teaching and mentorship if we’re constantly stressed about how to afford to live,” said Youngmin Seo, a teaching adjunct at CUNY’s LaGuardia Community College and member of the PSC bargaining teamwho was among the arrestees. 

The largest urban public university in the country, CUNY educates 233,000 degree-seeking students annually. Its student body is 79% people of color and 40% first-generation students. About 60% of CUNY students have annual household incomes less than $30,000. Without the full-time and adjunct faculty who teach and mentor students and the staff who provide academic and support services, CUNY could not fulfill its mission to be a university for the whole people of New York. 

“New York City’s working families deserve a world-class public university system, but CUNY’s dedicated faculty and staff can’t effectively serve our City’s students and communities while struggling to make ends meet,” said New York City Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO President Vincent Alvarez. “The only way for CUNY to continue to successfully recruit and retain the highest quality workers is for the management and trustees to immediately come to the table and offer salary increases that keep up with inflation, pay parity, job security, improved benefits and all of the conditions needed to make CUNY a place where both educators and students can thrive. The entire NYC Labor Movement stands with PSC-CUNY’s members in their fight for a contract that reflects the dignity and importance of their work to our City.”

Timeline and key points:

• PSC represents 30,000 full- and part-time faculty, professional staff and other academic workers across dozens of titles and salary schedules, including low-income teaching adjuncts who are hired and paid per course, professional staff who work in offices and labs, and full-time faculty ranging from lecturers to full professors. They all deserve fair raises that will allow them to afford to live in NYC. For more about the unit, see PSC CUNY 101: Who do we represent?
• November 1, 2022: Last contractual raise for PSC members
• November 2022: Top CUNY Administrators receive 27% and 30% raises ($90,000) 
• February 28, 2023: PSC-CUNY contract expired
• June 27, 2023: Bargaining begins after management’s four-month delay; 
• As of October 21st, there have been 34 bargaining sessions since negotiations began.  March 2024: CUNY management made their one and only economic offer 
• CUNY’s offer of 3% in 2023, 3% in 2024, 3.125% in 2025 and 3.125% in 2026 fails to keep pace with the rate of inflation and the rise in housing costs in NYC. It is below the national average rate of increase for college faculty.  
• Salaries for CUNY professors lag thousands of dollars behind those of professors  at comparable institutions including Pace University, Fordham, University of Connecticut, Rutgers University, and Stony Brook University. 
• Most CUNY adjuncts earn $5,500 per course. In comparison, NYU and Columbia/Barnard adjuncts make $10,000 or more per course, and New School, Rutgers, and Fordham adjuncts all make between $8,000 – $10,0000 per course through recently settled contracts.
• PSC has proposed raises totaling 18% over 4 years, while CUNY’s offer adds up to only 12.25% over 4 ½ years. The union also wants pay parity and job security for adjunct faculty, better benefits, remote and flexible work options for staff, and strong workplace safety and health provisions, among other key items.
• CUNY management is focused on reducing operating costs at the expense of workers and students, and to maximize managerial authority and “flexibility.”

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