How Much Can Unions Lift Adjuncts? CUNY Contract Fight Hinges on What’s Good Enough

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The City University of New York’s faculty members are divided over a tentative contract and a longstanding question: Just how much can adjunct instructors expect to gain by belonging to unions?

CUNY’s faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress, says part-time faculty members should celebrate the gains it has made on their behalf in a hard-fought labor agreement. But many part-time instructors and graduate assistants oppose ratification of the new contract, arguing that it represents more of a defeat than a victory.

The agreement, accepted by CUNY’s administration and board last month, would offer many of the university system’s part-time instructors both much more job security and access to health insurance that they previously lacked. It would not substantially increase their pay, however, and would do little to close gaps between their earnings and those of their full-time counterparts.

Barbara Bowen, president of the Professional Staff Congress, last week said her union had “made enormous gains for our members” with the new contract and had “secured an enormous defensive victory” in winning the state’s pledge of enough funds for CUNY to cover it. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, initially had proposed a steep cut in state support for the university system.

While acknowledging that her union’s leaders view the agreement as far from perfect, Ms. Bowen nonetheless argued that “it is strongly in members’ interest to ratify the contract,” because otherwise the union risks losing whatever ground it has gained.

Several groups representing adjunct instructors and graduate students, however, are complaining that the union’s negotiators did not secure nearly enough for its members, and squandered the clout they had gained at the bargaining table when union members in May overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike. They are urging fellow union members to reject the contract in a ratification vote that ends on August 3.

“I just want to tell CUNY ‘No,’” said Ruth E. Wangerin, an adjunct assistant professor of anthropology at Lehman College who is active in a group called CUNY Struggle.

“We took the strike-authorization vote,” Ms. Wangerin said. “When are we going to fight, if not now?”

‘Steady Gains Over Time’

The debate over the New York contract comes as non-tenure-track instructors at a rapidly growing number of colleges are unionizing to try to improve their pay and working conditions. Many such efforts are being led by the Service Employees International Union, which is seeking to organize contingent faculty members throughout entire metropolitan areas in order to force colleges to treat such instructors better to compete for talent.

With such union campaigns have come debates over which major national unions best represent contingent faculty members. Also at issue is the question of whether the instructors are better off forming their own collective-bargaining units or joining mixed units representing several faculty types. Adjuncts sometimes have accused full-time professors of obstructing their progress, and they can experience divisions themselves based on whether they are moonlighting at colleges or making a living off of such work.

The union drives also have raised questions related to strategy and what, exactly, instructors should expect to gain from union membership. Over all, unions appear to be bringing substantial improvements in their lives but have done little to eliminate a two-tiered labor system in which colleges depend heavily on part-time instructors who are paid much less than their full-time counterparts.

“Collective-bargaining contracts are almost never radical,” said Jennifer L. Eagan, president of the California Faculty Association, which represents faculty members throughout the 23-campus California State University system. She said adjunct instructors there had made “steady gains over time,” winning job security, health benefits, and substantial pay increases, and thereby eliminating some of the financial incentive for Cal State campuses to rely on them.

Nevertheless, she said, there is “certainly not parity” between the university system’s part-time and full-time instructors, even though her union has been around more than 30 years.

The problems of adjunct instructors “are not going to be solved without collective bargaining as part of the piece,” Ms. Eagan said, but the effort will also take radical activism and political engagement in state capitals.

Maria Maisto, president of New Faculty Majority, said “collective bargaining has been one of the only proven strategies for improving adjunct working conditions,” but it is important for adjunct instructors to organize themselves within existing unions to make sure those unions take their concerns into account in collective bargaining.

She characterized the debate in CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress as healthy, arguing that a union divided over its strategy on behalf of adjuncts “is far better than a union that is not grappling with those issues.”

‘Crazy, Fierce Lobbying’

The leaders of the Professional Staff Congress say it can hardly be accused of failing to advocate strongly for its members during contract negotiations. The union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, staged protests such as acts of civil disobedience outside CUNY headquarters and Governor Cuomo’s Manhattan office. It gathered hundreds of people outside the Upper East Side apartment dwelling of James B. Milliken, CUNY’s chancellor, for an early morning “wake-up call” that featured alarm clocks and a brass band.

“We amplified collective bargaining with crazy, fierce lobbying in the Legislature,” said Marcia Newfield, an adjunct lecturer in English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College who formerly served the Professional Staff Congress as vice president for part-time faculty. “Every member of the state Legislature was sick to death of PSC,” she said. “We got in their face.”

The union membership’s vote to authorize a strike set the stage for, potentially, the biggest act of civil disobedience of them all. New York law prohibits strikes by public employees, imposing penalties such as stiff fines for unions, potential jail time for union leaders, and the deduction from workers’ paychecks of two days’ pay for every day that the strike lasts. The PSC was considering staging a strike this fall if it had not settled on a new contract by then to replace its last one, which expired six years ago.

The tentative agreement calls for all faculty members to receive a 10.4-percent compounded salary increase, applied both retroactively to the period since 2010 and proactively until November 2017. It would extend health-insurance benefits to about 2,000 of the CUNY system’s roughly 10,500 adjunct instructors, would afford adjuncts new grievance rights and sick-leave benefits, and would establish a pilot program through which more than 2,000 long-term adjuncts could apply for three-year contracts.

‘Divide and Conquer’

Most of the non-tenure-track instructors’ criticism of the agreement centers on the across-the-board pay raise, which would barely keep up with inflation since 2010 and actually would expand the gap between what part-time and full-time faculty members earn.

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“This contract strengthens and widens the two-tier system,” said Jarrod Shanahan, a graduate assistant at the CUNY Graduate Center and an organizer of CUNY Struggle. He is among several activists there who argue that the PSC should reject the contract and seek to mobilize students and working-class New Yorkers around a campaign to demand more.

Sandor John, an adjunct associate professor of history at Hunter College and an organizer of CUNY Contingents Unite, said the agreement’s provision offering some adjuncts three-year contracts would insidiously create a third tier of instructors, a step that “helps management divide and conquer.”

The agreement is supported, however, by part-time instructors such as Blanca Vazquez, an adjunct assistant professor of film and media studies at Hunter College and member of the union’s executive council. She said the agreement offers “significant gains,” especially given how far apart the union and CUNY’s administration were at the beginning of their talks.

The union’s Delegate Assembly overwhelmingly approved the agreement last month. CUNY’s administration, which last month issued a statement in which Chancellor Milliken praised the agreement as containing a much-needed pay increase and provisions that would help CUNY compete for talent, declined last week to provide additional comment during the ratification process.

Michael Batson, an adjunct lecturer of history at the College of Staten Island and a PSC officer representing part-time personnel, said the risks involved in rejecting the document “are quite high” because “the very people who could benefit from more equity and more job security are the people who would be hurt from going into strike mode.”

Clarification (7/26/2016, 11:17 a.m.): An earlier version of this article quoted Barbara Bowen, president of the Professional Staff Congress, describing both her union’s new contract and her union’s success in staving off state budget cuts to CUNY as “an enormous defensive victory.” She says her “defensive victory” characterization applies only to her union’s successful lobbying against budget cuts, not to the contract. The article has been updated to reflect that.

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.