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CUNY CONTRACT BLUES

CUNY Contract Blues

Long after most of District Council 37, for better or worse, ratified a contract, and months after the Board of Trustees reportedly gave City University of New York Chancellor Matthew Goldstein and fewer than 30 other CUNY executives raises totaling more than $600,000, several locals including 384 are still waiting for our contract to be negotiated.

It is hard to say what is more sickening: the paltry scraps thrown at us as CUNY management and frankly union executives demand salaries with a true marketplace value, or the fact that we are always made to wait until we are so desperate that the insulting offers look good.

As long as we have been given this extra time to reflect, let us all agree once and for all that a cost-of-living increase, a raise that matches the increased cost of goods and services, is the bare minimum for any agreement. For too long the value of groceries, tuition, gasoline, and of course rent has flown up as CUNY workers are told that our labor is worth almost nothing. The CUNY rank and file get poorer every year in real dollars, while more is demanded of us in every office in every job on every campus.

Once upon a time, labor leaders did not sit politely and ask nicely for what their people needed. Many of us did not see that time, and can barely imagine it now. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that once upon a time being a union leader wasn't so darn profitable, and that boat has become just too sweet to rock. Maybe not; that is just speculation colored by the bitter recent history I mentioned above.

Maybe the leadership and executives of CUNY are not obscenely greedy, thoughtless and financially vicious. Maybe they just have never really thought it through.

The only facts we have to work with are that Local 384 and other CUNY workers still have no contract, and if history is a guide, the contract we get will be a slap and we will be told we are lucky to have a job working for the greater glory of New York and the very nice compensation packages of CUNY management. The only question is whether we will crawl politely into institutionalized poverty, or make a different choice.

EDWARD ELLIS

Editor's note: The writer is chair of the One Member One Vote Coalition