We are all Workers
When Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona signed SB1070 (“Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act”) into law on Friday, April 23rd, I felt like many of us had the morning after Obama won the presidential election: I went to sleep in one United States and woke up in a different one. Of course, with Obama’s election—for many of us—this was a feeling of elation, waking up the next morning and suddenly remembering that we, as a nation, had elected a (relatively) progressive, (definitely) Black president. Waking up the Saturday morning following Brewer’s signing of SB1070—a law that requires law enforcement officials in Arizona to stop and detain anyone they “reasonably suspect” might be an “illegal immigrant” until they produce papers proving they are in the country legally—I was devastated and living in a country where it is now legal to stop people on the street and detain them for looking Mexican.
Undocumented workers form a large part of the workforce in this country. They are a class of workers not offered any protections in their daily lives and are completely at the mercy of their employers; they are reliant on the kindness of those who hire them to do any number of their very necessary jobs. I have seen justices brought about by employers who do right by their undocumented employees. I have seen horrors brought about by those employers who do not.
Undocumented workers cannot continue to rely on the kindness of strangers as they continue to live and work in the United States. Labor unions, including the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY), have already begun to come forward to speak for immigrant workers. As we saw at the recent May Day march in New York City, and other actions around the country, May Day is increasingly and quickly becoming a day of action for workers in solidarity with immigrant workers. Labor unions need to remain aggressively at the forefront of this fight, demanding comprehensive federal immigration reform that gives amnesty to those already living here and allows for freer movement between arbitrary borders. Many national unions, such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), already have demonstrated commitment to, and forward momentum in, organizing these communities.
Every other national and local union—both the leadership and the rank and file—needs to continue large and vocal shows of solidarity with all workers and point out the obvious: this does not begin or end with the oppression of “illegal immigrants.” Illegal immigrants form an unpopular class of workers in our nation. We must also recognize that all of us who work for a living are an unpopular class of workers. We are all human, and we are all workers. We must fight together to end the injustice perpetrated against Mexicans in Arizona, and immigrant workers everywhere in this country, if we want to remain at all credible as a movement.
At CUNY this translates to rallying with cafeteria workers at Hunter and child care workers at other campuses. Right now, we must stand in solidarity with contingent instructors, as we are beginning to find out just how disposable we really are. We are faced with an epidemic of layoffs. Contingent employees—people who work with no job security—cannot be laid off, though. Rather, those of us who are not being asked back to our current schools, schools that we have been at for one semester or ten, are simply “non-reappointed.” This is an administrative whitewash of reality. The fact is that we are being let go in large numbers.
The worst report those of us organizing at the Adjunct Project and CUNY Contingents Unite (CCU) have heard is at John Jay College, where fifty-two adjuncts in the sociology department alone were laid off. Mass layoffs are also rumored for the fall semester in the computer science and psychology departments at John Jay. As we heard at a joint emergency meeting of the CCU and the Adjunct Project on Friday, April 30, adjuncts are being let go at every single campus. With updates from almost every CUNY campus, adjuncts and graduate fellows expressed concern over both their job status and their class size should these layoffs go through. This joint emergency meeting passed a motion demanding that the administration stop layoffs, that the PSC immediately begin organizing a protest, and organizing our own protest at John Jay, where we have seen the most egregious offense.
There is one huge stumbling block in showing solidarity with laid off workers: CUNY is not required to tell anyone of these “non-reappointments” except the victim. The PSC-CUNY need not be informed, so there is no way to compile data about just how many contingent workers are being let go. Therefore, we must do what we do best as academics and compile the data ourselves. For that reason, please send any information you have about layoffs to [email protected]
As we approach contract negotiations in the Fall, the CCU and the Adjunct Project have included job security as one of our four keys demands, asking that contingent instructors be offered a three-year contract. These layoffs indicate that we are completely devalued as a class of workers (and graduate students are not immune, though many department chair choose to treat us a “protected class”) and job security will never be offered unless we demand it.
Our petition regarding these four key contract demands is being circulated on campuses (and can be found online at http://www.petitiononline.com/demands/petition.html). In addition to job security, we are asking for significant pay increases for adjuncts and graduate fellows that move toward pay equity, equal health insurance plans for employees across the board, and a promotional series and due process for higher education officers. Meeting these demands, we believe, will move the PSC one step closer to striking at the heart of the two-tier system, as contingent employees were promised in our last round of contract negotiations.
Graduate students have a unique struggle in this, as we fight simply to be recognized as workers at all. In the year 2000, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that teaching assistants at private universities had the right to unionize. Many schools began this process, New York University perhaps being one of the most prominent cases. In 2004, the NLRB reversed this landmark ruling, stating that the main role of teaching assistants at universities is as students. It is integral that we stand in solidarity with students at NYU, as the school administration fails to recognize their union. The administration has not offered them much hope, and the students will then have to again take this to the NLRB, now dominated by Obama appointees, to reverse the 2004 ruling.
What ramification does this conflict between our roles as students and workers have on our careers? Primarily, the teaching experience we accrue as graduate students is completely discounted. Certainly, it is used to in the hiring process, but when determining pay for new instructors, tenure-track and contingent alike, the three, or four, or five, or six years you spent in the classroom while taking classes and writing your dissertation do not count. This is an affront to the work that we have done over our graduate career and completely ignores the fact that universities rely on us for this labor. We must fight to see that this is corrected. More and more graduate students at universities across the country are asked to teach their own classes, but we are treated as children in the paternalistic system.
Even amid all these struggles, I have decided to resign as Adjunct Project co-coordinator. Having served in this position for two years, my reasons are manifold. First and foremost, I feel that the fight for a contract that truly destroys the two-tier system is too great to be restricted by a formal position that is largely kept in line by the DSC. In this position I never truly felt responsible to anything but a set of baffling, unclear, and sometime arbitrary rules.
Additionally, the DSC Plenary recently approved a new bylaw that added a third co-coordinator position. Though many may view this as a further investment in the Adjunct Project, I voiced concerns that it was, in fact, a misguided one. Dividing the Adjunct Project into three discrete positions, with limited overlap, creates further bureaucracy in an already overly bureaucratized system. It becomes difficult to listen to the needs of students, and adjuncts, when there are so many “professional” voices speaking up. I encourage you to continue to speak to the Adjunct Project about whatever problems and concerns you have, and I encourage the new co-coordinators of the Adjunct Project to work under the unified vision of allowing graduate student needs to guide their work. Anything less than that would serve as proof that the DSC’s investment in the Adjunct Project did not, in any way, serve a student body clearly in need of representation.
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