FOR THE RECORD

Workers at the Research Foundation of City University of New York approved a strike in a Sept. 24 vote, firing their final warning shot in a process that has dragged on for 10 months with an offer of only a 6.5-percent raise over three years from RF-CUNY.

The 85 employees are represented by the Professional Staff Congress. They manage the Federal, state, city and private grants received by CUNY faculty. While CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein is the chairman of the Foundation, it is technically a private organization and is thus not governed by Taylor Law rules.

The workers have been organized since the 1970s but this is the first time they have taken such a vote, prompted by tense negotiations in which RFCUNY has demanded higher health insurance premiums while offering pay raises below the rate of inflation.

The offer on the table is for one 2-percent raise and two of 2.25-percent, with a 2-percent hike in health premiums.

“The mystery is that [RFCUNY] is not in financial hardship; this is not an institution that has been impoverished in the recent financial downturn,” said PSC President Barbara Bowen in a phone interview. “They received $17 million in Federal stimulus money. They are currently hiring. In 2006 they gave their President a 44- percent increase in salary.”

The last RF-CUNY contract expired Dec 31 2008, a threeyear pact that raised wages 12 percent but also upped healthinsurance premiums by 6 percent. The average worker makes about $40,000 per year.

“They feel that they have no other recourse but to take the vote. They have bargained, they have rallied, they have done a walkout, and still management’s offer amounts to a salary cut. There is no reason that the RF cannot afford a decent contract,” said Ms. Bowen.

Fisner Antoine, the vice-chair of the PSC’s RF-CUNY chapter, said he was baffled by the foundation’s behavior. “They have no justification,” he said. “We asked them if the foundation is having a hard time, which could be very understandable, but they’re not answering that question.”

A CUNY spokesman did not respond.



The New York Post might be described as Mayor Bloomberg’s kind of paper for always doing more with less, whether it involves covering the city with the smallest staff of the three daily papers or making a lot more out of some stories than others could have imagined.

A display of the latter talent came in the paper’s Sept. 23 issue, featuring a story headlined, “Elex Fear of a Wild ‘Party’.” It warned of “Liu pension tension” because City Comptroller candidate John Liu had the strong support of the Working Families Party and a large number of city unions in the Sept. 29 runoff for the Democratic nomination against David Yassky.

The story got much of its ballast from an unnamed former ranking official in the City Comptroller’s Office, who cited both those alliances and what he described as Mr. Liu taking the side of private bus-line owners and Transport Workers Union Local 100 during negotiations with the city on a takeover five years ago.

What made the weight given to these comments—and the resulting hype of the story— odd was that both current Comptroller Bill Thompson and his predecessor, Alan Hevesi, had strong relations with most of the unions backing Mr. Liu. And so by the traditional yardstick for what constitutes news, what seems notable is not Mr. Liu continuing in that tradition but the fact that his opponent, fellow Councilman Yassky, has supported Mayor Bloomberg’s push for reduced pension rights for future city workers.

That wouldn’t have made as spicy a story, however. Nor would it have provided grist for a Post editorial that ran under the headline, “John Liu, Labor’s Pawn,” that allowed the paper to meet its minimum daily requirement for bashing the Working Families Party. It began, “Big Labor may be about to score a huge—and dangerous—victory by installing its puppet, Queens City Councilman John Liu, in the enormously powerful job of city comptroller.”

Only in the Post, kids, only in the Post.



An article in the Sept. 25 issue about an arbitration decision regarding overtime pay for Bus Dispatchers overseeing shuttle buses that covered closed subway routes said the dispute concerned New York City Transit bus companies and the Subway Surface Supervisors Association. The union involved, in fact, was the Transit Supervisors Organization.