Pact Goes to Members: PSC Reaches Deal For 9.5% Increase

Pact Goes to Members
PSC Reaches Deal For 9.5% Increase

By HOWARD MEGDAL

The Professional Staff Congress, which represents City University of New York faculty and staff, reached a tentative agreement April 25 with CUNY management on a new 58-month contract that will provide members with a 9.5-percent pay increase if ratified by the union's members.

MATTHEW GOLDSTEIN: Deal helps both sides. Members would receive raises of 2.5 percent retroactive to May 1, 2004 and 2.75 percent as of May 1, 2005. A 3-percent raise would take effect this May 1, with an $800 salary increase for full-timers on Sept. 19, 2007, the final day of the contract. That increase would be pro-rated for adjuncts.

Long Time in Coming

The agreement followed a lengthy, difficult negotiating process, which has left PSC members working under an expired contract since Nov. 1, 2002.

Union President Barbara Bowen noted that the deal did not require any salary givebacks, as many other recent city contracts have.

"There was serious pressure from CUNY to do so, and we resisted," Ms. Bowen said in an April 27 phone interview.

CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein said that "the agreement is responsive to our faculty and staff while providing efficiencies and savings that allow us to enhance academic programs, research and student support as we build upon CUNY's renewal."

In addition to the salary hike, CUNY will be providing an additional $5.2 million dollars to the PSC Welfare Fund, a 20-percent increase, which Ms. Bowen noted will both stabilize the fund and allow for improvements in the previously-slashed dental plan. Other key provisions of the deal include an increase from 50 to 80 percent of salary for Professors on sabbatical, along with the option of a year's paid leave time for untenured faculty.

"We support high standards of scholarship - and our membership is eager to be doing research," Ms. Bowen said. "Together, those things change the academic landscape. They make it a different place."

Adjuncts would have access to a grant fund provided by CUNY, and 100 additional full-time lines would be added, with part-timers functioning as the hiring pool.

"Our goal is to create equity for part-timers, and provide equal pay for equal work," Ms. Bowen said. "We did not achieve that goal in this contract - CUNY was adamant in [its] opposition to additional salary increases for adjuncts. But this is a start."

Ms. Bowen sighed when asked about the delays in reaching a deal, noting that CUNY did not offer any raise until December of 2004 - and that proposal was for 1.5 percent over four years.

"We started with that very low number," Ms. Bowen said. "CUNY's tactic of putting an insulting number on the table after two years of bargaining upset the members. We were also determined to get money above and beyond any raise for the welfare fund."

PSC's only givebacks within the deal would be an increase in the tenure clock from five to seven years, and moving the start of the academic year from Aug. 30 to three weekdays prior to that date.

Better Than SUNY

She noted that while the basic raises are identical to those achieved by the United University Professions in its April 2004 agreement with the State University of New York, CUNY's salary steps - which provide automatic raises to staff - are not present in SUNY's agreement with UUP. The steps were valued at 1.4 percent annually during negotiations. The PSC contract is more than 10 months longer than the UUP's, however, evening out the cost of the two deals.

Ms. Bowen now has the task of selling the pact to her members, who will be voting on it over the next several weeks. "This can be a discussion of the microeconomic, as well as larger political issues," Ms. Bowen said. "What I look forward to is the discussion - to be engaged with the members."