CONTRACT BULLETIN #2
The PSC held its second collective bargaining session with CUNY management on Friday, September 15. The union accomplished two important things at the session: we presented our complete list of contract proposals, which are published below; and we established that the negotiations will be open. The PSC maintains the right to communicate with our members, the press and the public about the course of negotiations. Confidentiality will be observed only on an ad hoc basis, when agreed to by both parties for a particular discussion.
Representing the PSC is the Negotiating Team appointed by the Executive Council. Its members are: Barbara Bowen, President; Steve London, First Vice-President; Cecelia McCall, Secretary; John Hyland, Treasurer; Stanley Aronowitz, University-Wide Officer; Frank Deale, University-Wide Officer; Michael Fabricant, Vice President for Senior Colleges; Anne Friedman, Vice-President for Community Colleges; Peter Hoberman, Vice-President for Cross-Campus Units; Eric Marshall, Vice President for Part-Time Personnel. In addition, the PSC team is supported by Frank Annunziato, who has agreed to serve as Chief Negotiator while we fill his position at the PSC; and by Arthur Schwartz and Susan Jennik, legal counsel to the PSC. The Negotiating Team will also include representatives of the chapter contract liaisons once the liaisons are in place.
CUNY management is represented by Vice-Chancellor for Faculty and Staff Relations Brenda Malone; Vice-Chancellor for Legal Affairs/General Counsel Frederick Schaffer; Director of Instructional Staff Labor Relations Raymond O'Brien; Assistant Director of Instructional Staff Labor Relations Joan Fleishman; and Randy Levine, an attorney and consultant to the CUNY negotiating team.
We began the session by stating that the PSC wanted to move the negotiations forward and to make our contract proposals public as soon as possible. Thus we had decided to present our proposals to management at this session, even though CUNY had told us that management might not be ready with its proposals. We presented copies of the 170 proposals below to the representatives of CUNY management; the proposals complement the Statement of Principles we had read at the opening session. The proposals contain a program for transforming our professional lives; they offer a new vision of the University as a major resource for the people of New York and a center of both research and teaching.
On receipt of the proposals, CUNY management announced that they would reply with an evaluation of which demands they considered permissible, mandatory, and non-mandatory subjects of bargaining. We asked for this response in writing before our next bargaining session; CUNY agreed.
Turning to the issue of ground rules for the negotiating sessions themselves, a subject Randy Levine had raised at the first session, the PSC restated its agreement to the first two of management’s proposed ground rules: that collective bargaining sessions would be held alternately at the PSC and at 535 East 80th Street (except when the presence of a large number of people at the session made it more practical to meet elsewhere); and that both sides would sign off on tentative agreements as negotiations progressed, but that no agreements would be final until ratified. Both of these rules are standard features of labor negotiations, and it is useful for the PSC to have a written record of tentative agreements as discussions progress.
The third ground rule proposed by Mr. Levine, that negotiations be kept confidential except for necessary communication with our respective constituencies, was rejected by the PSC. We proposed—and management accepted—that either side could request that certain portions of the discussion at the table be in confidence for the sake of making progress, but that both sides would have to agree in advance to that arrangement. Otherwise, the PSC will provide summaries of sessions to you on this website and in other publications.
We welcome your comments on the proposals and the negotiations, and will follow this list of the PSC proposals later in the year with more detailed analyses of each section. While we reserved the right to present further proposals to management, the PSC’s central vision for the new contract is contained in the proposals below. They were developed through the most far-ranging process of contract discussion ever undertaken by the PSC, and were approved unanimously by the Delegate Assembly last June. If we are to achieve at the bargaining table the transformation of our working lives these demands propose, we will need the engagement of every one of our members. We believe it’s a transformation worth fighting for.
PROFESSIONAL STAFF CONGRESS/CUNY
PROPOSALS FOR COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGREEMENT
SEPTEMBER 2000
STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES
The contract proposals of the Professional Staff Congress/CUNY offer a new vision of the City University of New York. They propose a restoration of the conditions of professional academic life that will enable CUNY to return to national prominence. They propose a university that will break new ground in offering higher education to a great urban population. There is nothing piecemeal or incremental about the PSC’s vision; we present a bold program to fashion the urban public university New York deserves. At a moment when economic prosperity places a new approach to CUNY within reach, the PSC invites the Administration to become our partner in rebuilding the University.
The City University of New York is the largest, oldest, and most visible urban university in the United States. It remains one of the spectacular success stories in the history of higher education. Nationally, CUNY has been the leader in expanding educational access without compromising academic standards; long before the post-War education boom, CUNY recognized the value of extending higher education to those who had conventionally been excluded because of income, religion, race or gender. The University’s history has shown the wisdom of that commitment: not only have our graduates contributed in countless ways to public life, but they have worked in partnership with faculty and staff to create new knowledge and expand the frontiers of research. After a quarter century of difficult times, CUNY remains the home of educational innovation and cutting-edge scholarship. Its faculty and professional staff are among the most productive in the American academic community.
Yet twenty years of massive economic losses have taken their toll. The conditions necessary for professional work within a university have been allowed to deteriorate to levels that endanger the fabric of the institution. A serious university must offer time for research, it must provide fully-staffed libraries and counseling faculties, it must support the professionals who run its labs and program its computers. Without a commitment to ongoing professional life, a university becomes a trade school; it loses the single distinguishing characteristic of an institution of higher learning. We do not want this to happen to the City University. The people of New York deserve more. The way to revitalize CUNY is not to add a flagship program here and a selective college there; it is to restore decent professional conditions to the entire faculty and staff. Only with such conditions in place can we ensure credibility as an academic institution and regain the reputation we once enjoyed. If CUNY is to remain the great public university the people of this city need, it must reinvigorate its faculty and professional staff by crafting an agreement that embraces the following principles:
- The mechanisms of shared governance must be restored. Toward this end the PSC seeks the right to negotiate all changes in the University that affect the terms and conditions of employment of its members.
- The faculty and staff must be renewed, and erosion of salary in both absolute and relative terms must be reversed. The PSC seeks substantial salary increases in every year of the contract and special increments at the top and bottom of the salary scales to restore lost competitiveness.
- Salary inequities that have been allowed to develop during years of underfunding must be remedied. The PSC seeks pay and benefits for adjuncts on the basis of parity with full-time faculty and proposes one-time increments for staff titles that have suffered particular salary erosion.
- Teaching loads for faculty and workloads for professional staff must be made comparable to those at other research universities, or Doctoral-Extensive institutions, to use the new Carnegie classification. The PSC seeks substantial reductions in teaching loads at both the senior and community colleges, and calls for compensation for overtime work for professional staff.
- Professional life and academic development for both faculty and staff must be supported. The PSC seeks research funding, sabbatical leave, junior faculty leave, protection of workers’ health and safety and other requisites of professional life at a level that makes contribution to scholarship possible.
The proposals we present are advanced with an exceptional degree of support by the University’s faculty and professional staff. They are the result of the most extensive development process ever undertaken by the PSC. Representatives of every sector of the University met for weeks to discuss possible proposals; the PSC conducted research among its members and on best practices nationally; the final set of demands was accepted unanimously by the union’s Delegate Assembly. The support PSC members showed for a new union leadership is also testimony to the commitment to rebuilding CUNY. It speaks of the widespread recognition among the instructional staff that our professional life must be restored if we are to offer quality education to the people of New York.
But a serious university costs money: the PSC proposals are in part a call for reinvestment in CUNY. There may never be another opportunity like the one before us to make the case for the investment a great university requires. Both the state and city are enjoying budget surpluses, and public recognition of the value of higher education has never been more widespread. New York above all, with a resurgent economy increasingly based on information and technology, should have a premiere urban university. The PSC’s proposals would recreate CUNY, making it the first-choice institution for New York’s middle class as well as the primary university for the city’s poor and working class. The vision we seek to put in place will demand courage; it asks for a commitment to public life as bold as the one that created Central Park or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a new union leadership and a new Chancellery, we are in a position to negotiate a landmark agreement. Together, we are in a position to create a university that will define urban public education for generations to come and become one of the major public achievements of New York City. The PSC is prepared to build such a university; we ask the Administration to join us in that work.
CONTRACT PROPOSALS
Contents
1
Error! Main Document Only.
A.Recognition
B.Salary
C.Workload
D.PSC/CUNY Relations
E.Grievance and Arbitration
F.Disciplinary Actions
G.Bill of Rights
H.Professional Staff
I.Part-time Faculty
J.Hunter Campus Schools
K.Distance Learning
L.Retirees
M.Health, Pensions and Other Benefits
N.Conditions for Professional Life
O.Duration
Recognition
1. All employees who perform the same or similar functions to those in titles in the unit, such as but not limited to teachers in CLIP and Language Immersion Institutes, shall be included in the unit regardless of funding source for their positions.
2. The Chairpersons of Library, Counseling and Co-op Departments shall be elected by members of the respective departments.
3. CLIP and Intensive Language Immersion Institute staff are full-time personnel who shall be assigned a title of Language Immersion Lecturer.
4. The exclusion of Continuing Education Teachers and Lecturers from Articles 9, 18, 19 and 20 shall be omitted.
5. CUNY Health and Safety Officers shall be included in the bargaining unit.
6. CUNY sign-language interpreters shall be included in the bargaining unit.
7. All computer titles within an academic or instructional area of the University shall be presumed to be covered by the PSC bargaining unit unless it can be shown that the preponderance of the job responsibilities are merely clerical in nature. All computer titles within an administrative area of the University shall be presumed to be included in the bargaining unit if the preponderance of the job responsibilities are instructional in nature or support the instructional activities of the University.
Salary
8. Salaries shall be restored to their historic position of comparability with the salaries provided by major research institutions. Faculty, graduate assistant and non-classroom instructional staff salaries shall be amended as follows:
9. Starting salaries shall be substantially raised in each faculty, graduate assistant and staff rank.
10. The number of steps between the bottom and the top in each rank shall be reduced.
11. The remaining steps shall be substantially increased so that maximum salary steps in each rank are substantially increased.
12. The waiting period of the longevity steps shall be eliminated.
13. All members of the bargaining unit shall receive substantial across-the-board salary increases in each of the three years of the contract.
14. Lecturers shall be placed on the Assistant Professor salary scale at the appropriate step.
15. The Registrar series shall have parity with the Professorial salary scale.
16. Adjunct faculty shall be paid on the basis of parity with full-time faculty as follows:
17. Adjunct Lecturers shall receive one-twentieth (1/20 or 0.5) of a Lecturer’s salary, at the corresponding level on the salary scale, for every contact hour taught. It is understood that this salary would include compensation for office hours and fulfillment of various departmental duties, as for full-time faculty ranks, on a pro-rated basis depending on hours taught. Salary for Adjunct Assistant Professors and higher Adjunct ranks would be based on the same ratio of parity plus an additional 10% for Adjunct Assistant Professors, 20% for Adjunct Associate Professors and 30% for Adjunct Professors. These salary rates include pro-rated time for office hours and departmental assignments. Adjuncts shall receive the same salary placement regardless of the college in which they work.
18. There shall be established an hourly overtime rate of 1/1000th of annual salary or compensatory time, at the employee’s option, to apply for any work in excess of 30 or 35 hours a week, depending on position, for all non-classroom instructional staff.
19. All non-classroom instructional staff members shall receive differential pay for all work performed on weekends and evenings.
20. There shall be a $10,000 increment for all steps on all College Laboratory Technician, Assistant to HEO, and Assistant Registrar schedules in addition to the negotiated percentage increase.
21. An annual salary and salary steps equal to that of Lecturers shall be established for CLIP Lecturers.
22. The Research Assistant salary scale shall be equal to that of Lecturers.
23. The Research Associate salary scale shall be equal to that of Associate Professors.
24. The Performance Excellence Award shall be deleted from the contract.
25. The Lecturer Doctoral schedule and the EOC Lecturer Doctoral salary schedule shall be eliminated, but only if the PSC proposal to move Lecturers to the Assistant Professor salary schedule is accepted.
26. Add to Article 10.3a: “Adjuncts whose course is canceled less than thirty (30) days prior to the start of classes shall be paid for the entire course.”
27. A step salary schedule shall be established for faculty members at the CUNY Law School.
28. Instructional staff who work multiple positions shall be paid for this work at the same rank and step as they are paid for their full-time work.
29. The restriction on multiple teaching opportunities for those members of the instructional staff who receive reassigned time for research activities shall be eliminated.
30. Add to Article 20: “Payment for multiple position teaching shall not be deducted from back-pay awards.”
Workload
31. Teaching loads shall be made comparable to those at other major research universities. The undergraduate contact hour teaching load shall be a maximum of 15 annually for senior colleges (including the College of Staten Island and New York City Technical College), a maximum of 20 annually for community colleges, and a maximum of 20 annually for Instructors, Lecturers and Substitutes. (It is understood that this teaching load applies to all undergraduate and Master’s courses.)
32. For new tenure-track faculty, the contact teaching hour load shall be a maximum of 12 annually for all senior and community colleges in at least each of their first two years, depending on the research programs of the individual faculty members.