Class Struggle and the PSC
by TSmith
The contract recently negotiated by the PSC leadership gives part-time employees less than nothing and actually increases the inequality in the two-tier CUNY adjunct labor system. Certainly, we must vote this contract proposal down. Beyond that, however, there are broader political questions at stake. What should we do about the New Caucus? Many of us welcomed their victory against the old CUC and against the CUNY Alliance. None of us would, nor should, support these right-wing, anti-adjunct alternatives to the current leadership. But how do we deal with this betrayal?
I have seen two strategies offered on the CUNY adjuncts listserv, strategies which I consider deeply flawed. The first is to push the New Caucus leadership to the left by merely recruiting more adjunct members to the union: a reformist strategy which ignores the structural roots of this recent betrayal. The second is to divide up our workforce into a multitude of segments, either into separate unions via a decertification campaign, or into separate bargaining units. This strategy only weakens the PSC as a whole, and “contingent” employees in particular. What I propose instead is to create a functional unit representing part-time workers at CUNY, and at the same time, to form a class-struggle trade-union tendency with a coherent program to mobilize labor’s power that can challenge the PSC leadership which has gotten us into this fix.
The basic problem at CUNY is a university administration that responds to budget cuts by repeatedly raising tuition for students and hiring a temporary teaching workforce. This austerity program, which they have pursued for decades, may help their bottom line. It will not, however, provide quality higher education for working people.
The New Caucus won the leadership of the union after kicking out the old-line business unionists who went along with this austerity program. The old CUC didn’t give a damn for those of us who work for poverty wages, with no job security and in many cases without any health insurance. Once in office, however, the New Caucus has not defended the interests of those denied full-time employment. The New Caucus follows a liberal/social-democratic program of pressuring the state, via the Democratic Party, whose candidates it regularly endorses (including ex-governor Spitzer). It actually hopes to “unite” with the university administration in pushing for more funding for CUNY. What are the structural roots of this program? We need to understand that.
Those who argue that the leadership will move to the Left if we bring more dissatisfied adjuncts into the union ignore even the possibility that this recent betrayal has structural roots. Naïvely, they feel that the New Caucus actually looks forward to such massive adjunct recruitment. For this will give them the backbone they both want, and need, to challenge CUNY management. This is akin to the “realignment” strategy of the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America, such as the late DSA leader Michael Harrington, and Frances Fox Piven. It is also pursued today by a wing of the old New Left, like ex-Students for a Democratic Society honcho Tom Hayden. If we can pull enough people into the Democratic Party — or so the argument goes — the Democrats will sit up and take notice, and give the people more of what they rather than what the fat cats want. As a result, more people will come into the Democratic Party, etc.: a virtuous circle of rewarding recruitment with good political deeds, and good deeds with greater recruitment.
What both of these strategies fail to recognize is the structural basis of each of these leaderships. The Democratic Party leadership is bound hand, foot, money, and blood to the monied elite. Thus they are not interested in supporting or encouraging movements that threaten the power and profits of that class. With its antiwar position, and (sometimes grudging) solidarity with teachers’ struggles in Oaxaca and Puerto Rico, the New Caucus has sought to position itself as a progressive union leadership. It is still, however, only on the left margin of traditional business unionism. It emphasizes its ties to the Democratic Party, and its lobbying efforts, at the expense of our interests, particularly the interests of adjuncts, but also of full-time faculty (although this leadership does favor the latter as its most supportive stratum within the union).
Though it may not be explicit about this, its recent repressive actions (rushing through this contract proposal, manipulating the DA meeting, repressing dissenters’ rights to address the membership), indicate ever more strongly that the “silent partner” in all this is this leadership’s reliance upon what the old CUC leadership called its “organic” relationship with CUNY management. Thus, while the New Caucus would certainly not object to an upsurge in the recruitment of members, even adjuncts, loyal to itself, it fears an increase in intensity and number, of rank and file militants. Witness its lack of organizing efforts around the current contract, from the October 2007 meeting at Cooper Union up until ratification. Above all, it fears a strike, led by the adjuncts.
The PSC leadership is deathly afraid of a strike, which could mean the end of their tenure as union officials and the loss of their relative privileges, and send some to jail. So they refuse to utter the “s word,” and instead they use management’s intransigency as an excuse for ramming through a contract that was the product of their own capitulation.
We adjuncts are the actual majority in this union, working at poverty wages, insecure about our jobs, lacking benefits. There is a big gap between the level of potential militancy between part-time and full-time faculty: the latter may worry about their tenure, the former have none. This is true of any multi-tier workforce. The bottom rungs will tend to be (not all or always, of course) more militant. The higher rungs will tend to be less so (but with, of course, notable exceptions), and the union officials will, as we have seen this year, tend to pay only lip service to traditions of union militancy.
Certainly, we ought to, and we have been, recruiting our fellow adjuncts to join the union. Will this be an easy task, however, if we offer no alternative to the present capitulatory leadership? Will adjuncts dissatisfied by this slap-job contract the current leadership is offering us, feel excited about joining the union, if we argue that they should support these people — no matter how awful their right-wing opponents are?
More importantly, the idea that the New Caucus will respond to such massive recruitment — even if it were likely to occur under the present leadership — by moving to the Left, is deeply problematic. Again, we definitely ought to recruit as many people as we can to the union. But we must also, simultaneously, oppose the current leadership: For they will do their best to use our recruitment as a means of co-opting adjuncts into their legislative lobbying game.
Therefore, I argue, it is an error to support these people in the hopes that they will serve us if we merely recruit more of us.
Some grad students have taken the seemingly opposite tack. They not only give up on the current leadership of the union; they give up on the union, itself. They would have us carve up the workforce into ever smaller slices, by creating more and more specific bargaining units, to secure themselves representation during contract negotiations, and thus, supposedly, cut a better deal for themselves. Behind this argument, however, is the same flawed conception as in the previously discussed position: that there is some basic unity of interests between at least the majority of the rank-and-file members of the PSC, and the current New Caucus leadership. This is nothing but a recipe for rulers or ruling classes or individual managements, and/or bureaucratic union leaderships to play us off against each other: to divide and conquer. In fact, those who argue this position, have justified it by saying that it is in accordance with “what CUNY management wants (Yes, indeed! Of course it does!)”
This position is a threat to everyone in the union. We need to thoroughly reject it, and take to heart the opposite: “In unity there is strength.” This is not just a hoary old labor slogan. This is the reality, especially when facing a determined opponent. We must all join together to reject such calls to rip up the union while simultaneously building unity and solidarity with the rest of the city’s working classes.
What are our real, practical alternatives? First, we must ask what it is that we need. A union becomes really powerful, on behalf of all its members, only if it can organize concerted job actions. As I indicated earlier, adjuncts have less to lose, but a losing strike could mean the crushing of the union, which would be terrible for all of us. So in rejecting the insulting contract negotiated by the PSC leadership, we must begin laying the basis for a winning strike.
Certainly, a strike, prohibited for us as public employees by the Taylor Law, would be no cakewalk. We would need to carefully prepare for it. We need to build a Left wing opposition. Right-wing witch-hunters, such as the CUNY Alliance, see the NC as “far left,” because they denounce the war. That’s good: but it’s not nearly enough. A genuine left-wing opposition would need to draw upon the potential for militancy and solidarity latent among all job strata at CUNY. It would seek to unite the membership of the PSC with staff and students, and with more powerful sectors of the New York City working class, in particular the transit workers, as well as with students and the black, Latino, Asian and immigrant working-class communities from which the large majority of them come, to challenge the bosses, their state and their repressive Taylor Law.
Therefore, we need to create a functional unit within the PSC for all part-timers, who now have no representative body that defends their interests. While membership would be open to New Caucus members, the not-so-new caucus is now the incumbent union bureaucracy, and thus an obstacle to the formation of such a body. Why? Because the PSC leaders seek a partnership with CUNY administration, which by their own account is intransigent in opposing every single demand for adjuncts’ rights and interests. So time after time, the New Caucus caves in. In voting for the New Caucus, you vote for support by this union for a party of the bosses, the Democratic Party, as our main strategy to fight (but not really fight) the bosses. And you vote for a leadership that opposes and seeks to foil our own organizing efforts, as adjuncts.
Thus, we also need a genuine class-struggle tendency, drawing upon support from other, more powerful unions, organizing among public school teachers and transit workers, with the political program and determination to fight the bosses, their parties, their government, and their agents in the unions down the line.
These will be difficult tasks. But to rely upon the current leadership for change — let alone upon CUNY management itself — is naïve, to say the least.
