Union elections in the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) take place at a critical time for the workers of New York and their sons and daughters at the City University of New York (CUNY). Attacks on the right to education are escalating as an integral part of U.S. rulers’ war on working people abroad and “at home.”

The latest attack on CUNY: vicious new cuts in tuition assistance, with the new requirement that those receiving it carry a minimum of 15 credits. This would effectively exclude students from poor, minority and working-class families who have to work for a living, limiting financial aid to fulltime students. It would affect the great majority of students taught by members of the PSC, the faculty/staff union at CUNY, the largest urban public university in the United States.

The ruling class wants to root out any remnants of open admissions and impose racist elitism at CUNY and elsewhere; it seeks the piecemeal privatization of education, subordinating universities to business needs; as part of the war drive, it wants to regiment intellectuals as it did during the Cold War.

In January, the London Economist hailed the elimination of open admissions at CUNY, praising this as a “parable of elitism in universities.” It quoted Chancellor Goldstein saying, “Elitism is not a dirty word.” Now elements linked to the right-wing Manhattan Institute want to block programs aiding black men, whose enrollment figures at CUNY have fallen sharply since 1999.

Meanwhile, CUNY faculty have gone more than four years with no raise and three years without a contract, while the CUNY administration has bled the Welfare Fund in order to use this as a gun to the PSC’s head. The situation for adjuncts in particular is unbearable, while 80th Street (and right-wing demagogues inside the union) try to set full-timers against part-timers.

The PSC elections are occurring at a time when big things are happening in the working class. Last winter’s NYC transit strike showed the enormous power of the multiracial working class and gave the lie to those who pretended the class struggle had become passé. Now the same “slave-labor” Taylor Law that covers us at CUNY has been used to fine the TWU and sentence its president Roger Toussaint to jail. This attack ought to be answered with a united walkout by all city labor!

In recent weeks, several million immigrant workers have taken to the streets against racist persecution – and now the migra (immigration police) has launched new round-ups in New York and across the country. The war in Iraq and the unending lies and sociopathic viciousness of Bush & Co. generate widespread discontent, while (despite the efforts of union leaders) many workers are disgusted with the other major ruling-class party, the Democrats, who have sought to out-Bush Bush on one crucial issue after another.

Playing by the Bosses’ Rules Means Defeat

Like the crisis at CUNY, the transit strike and its aftermath have shown the crying need for a class-struggle leadership: that is, a labor leadership with the program and will to wage the class struggle through to victory. This is clearly not the case with the current leadership of the unions, from the hidebound hacks of the Labor Council to the Toussaint bureaucracy that sold out the transit strike to the leadership of the PSC. Our union leadership prides itself on “progressive” credentials – in contrast to the previous reactionary leaders – but it operates within the bourgeois framework of Democratic Party-chained “labor statesmanship.”

PSC activists are right to be outraged and disgusted by the demagogy, McCarthyite baiting and outright lies of the so-called “CUNY Alliance,” the right-wing slate that popped up out of nowhere for these elections. They want to cut adjuncts and other part-timers out of the union (that’s what it means when they say adjuncts shouldn’t have to pay union dues). They say the union shouldn’t address issues “outside” CUNY (i.e., protest the war on Iraq), as if the fate of this public university were not determined by what is going on in this country and the world.

Their mindset is reflected by the diatribes of the rightist “National Association of Scholars” (which has a chapter at CUNY) against open admissions and affirmative action, and the smears of “The Patriot Returns,” an Internet sheet which echoes attacks against CUNY as “the unpatriotic university” (Front Page, The Sun, Post et al.) and the hate campaigns of the far-right. The “CUNY Alliance” pledges (truthfully in this case) to be as cozy as can be with management, and denounces “noisy street theatrics” like union demonstrations.

Right-wing mouthpieces can redbait ’til they’re red-white-and-blue in the face. The obvious truth is that the incumbent New Caucus is not a bunch of rabble-rousing reds, but a social-democratic grouping that plays according to the rules laid down by the capitalist system. Yet what’s needed, in the face of the arrogant, hardball-playing millionaires and billionaires who control CUNY, the city, the state and the rest of the country are real reds! We cannot win by respecting the limits of “responsible,” i.e., pro-capitalist unionism.

The New Caucus says it’s all because of the anti-labor, anti-minority, anti-education austerity imposed by the city and state authorities. They even point out that this is directly connected to the U.S. war and colonial occupation of Iraq (and now the threats to extend the war to Iran). What this situation calls for is an all-out struggle, together with all city labor, students and the rest of the working people, to defeat the ruling-class offensive. The transit strike was the best opportunity in decades to do just that.

Instead, the New Caucus accepts the “framework” at CUNY and negotiates within the limits of what the capitalist rulers say they can afford. Literally. When CUNY negotiators said there is no new money, the PSC leadership opted for “working within this inadequate framework” rather than “walking away from the table.” So they bargain to shore up the welfare fund with money taken from retroactive pay. Some “bargain”! From all reports, the contract being negotiated contains next to nothing for adjuncts and precious little for anyone else.

Republican Pataki says “screw you, I’m vetoing the education budget.” The union tops’ answer is to vote Democrat. This means actively supporting the capitalist system that is ripping up education all across the globe. In ’04 the PSC leaders endorsed pro-war millionaire Kerry – who called for sending 40,000 more troops to Iraq and criticized Bush for not invading Falluja soon enough – and organized bus trips to round up votes for him in Pennsylvania.

But union-busting, like imperialist war and “homeland security” repression, is a bipartisan affair: it was Democratic state attorney general Eliot Spitzer who got the Taylor Law injunctions against the transit strike. The most fundamental and urgent need of labor is to break from the Democrats and all capitalist parties and politicians. Workers and all the oppressed need a party that fights for our class interests, a revolutionary workers party.

Last fall the PSC leadership talked of a “job action” over the contract. Yet since then, supporters of the New Caucus have argued that the union membership is not “ready” for militant action. It would be silly to deny that many college teachers are affected by academic elitism and the idea that “professionals” should not use “blue-collar” methods. Management is adept at using divide-and-conquer tactics in an institution whose arcane hierarchies breed status-worship.

Yet the members’ response to the packed September 29 contract rally at Cooper Union told another story. Enthusiasm and militancy filled the room, and every mention of a possible strike was met by cheering and applause. But the momentum was allowed to dissipate. Talk of a strike remained just talk, with no real measures taken to prepare one. Even the popular protest outside Chancellor Goldstein’s residence was not repeated. Nor did the leadership seek to mobilize escalating mass protests outside meetings of the Board of Trustees, drawing in students and other sections of the labor movement, or other measures that could have been taken to build for a strike.

On essential issues facing teaching staff it has been all talk and no action. The leadership has criticized the firing of Mohammed Yousry and Susan Rosenberg, organized conferences on academic freedom, and criticized the destruction of open admissions. But it has not mobilized the membership to block these attacks. Efforts to mobilize students to support our union during the contract struggle have been feeble to nonexistent.

A crucial test came with the transit strike, the biggest chance in years for us to strike a real blow at the Taylor Law. There could have and should have been a de facto work stoppage in unity with the transit and other city workers, as we proposed during the TWU strike in December, and again when the transit ranks voted down the contract in February. But the leadership stood by as the Taylor Law was used to victimize the TWU. Like the rest of the labor tops, they accept the basic rules of this system.

As with New Directions in the TWU, once in power these and similar “reform” groupings in the unions are incapable of leading real struggle. They can only produce defeats, like in transit.

Thus we will not vote for the social-democratic New Caucus, nor for the McCarthyite “CUNY Alliance.” What is needed, in the PSC and throughout the labor movement, is a leadership with a class-struggle program to mobilize the power of the working class and all the oppressed.

We believe that the union should fight for full restoration of open admissions and for no tuition, with a living stipend to make it possible for students without financial resources to study. While in its “security” frenzy the administration is trying to turn the 19 campuses of the City University into gated communities, we call to eliminate the turnstiles and get all cops off campus. The Board of Trustees should be abolished, and CUNY should be under teacher-student-worker control.

The situation of adjuncts, who teach most of the courses at CUNY and are paid next to nothing while being denied the most basic benefits and rights, is a barometer. There has been no advance on any of adjuncts’ most pressing demands (while health care costs were actually hiked for many). Thus some part-timers have been mooting the idea of forming a separate union. That would be a big mistake, making part-timers even more vulnerable and cutting them off from the union (like the “CUNY Alliance” would like to do).

Adjuncts are right to be outraged. But to change the situation, part-timers as well as full-timers need to mobilize as part of the union and break the “framework” of submission to capital. We need to build a class-struggle leadership fighting for full parity, health care, job security and all our other crucial demands; full citizenship rights for immigrants; a break with the bosses’ parties, to build a workers party to fight for a workers government, which will make the right to free, quality higher education a reality for all.

–Supporters of the Internationalist Group in the PSC and CUNY Internationalist Clubs
20 April 2006