San -- should we put your flyer up on csew page? Or would the bureaucracy
get pissed off cause it is psc business. Can you send a pdf and a jpg?
On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 12:02 PM, S_ AN <s_an@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Comrades -- the intro to this posting was from emails to other sites --
obviously CSEW members are intimately involved with all this!
------------------------------
*From:* cs_edworkers-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <cs_edworkers-bounce@
freelists.org> on behalf of S_ AN <s_an@xxxxxxx>
*Sent:* Tuesday, March 14, 2017 12:01 PM
*Subject:* [cs_edworkers] Text of flier for PSC delegate campaign
For those interested in the contrasting programs and approaches in the
current elections within the Professional Staff Congress, below please find
the text of a flier I recently put out for my campaign as an independent
for Delegate from Hunter College to the union's Delegate Assembly. (I also
attach a PDF of the flier.) -- SJ
* * *
* From adjunct and union activist Sándor John -- **On the April
2017 Hunter PSC chapter elections*
* Tough times call for a fighting program*
* We need a radical labor voice in the PSC Delegate Assembly*
* Dear fellow adjunct/contingent or tenured/tenure-track faculty and
staff:* *Please keep an eye out for the PSC union election ballot which
will be mailed on April 3, so you can vote in the Hunter PSC chapter
elections.*
We are facing an onslaught against our most basic rights and
hard-won gains. Immigrant students, workers and their families face
escalating threats of deportation; unions are under existential attack;
public education is on the chopping block. These are tough times, and we
need a fighting program – not business as usual.
I am running as an independent candidate for Delegate to the PSC’s
Delegate Assembly, which is the union’s principal governing body. I am an
adjunct associate professor in Hunter’s History Department, and have
taught at CUNY for 14 years. From 2008 to 2014, I served as an
independent delegate and member of the Hunter union chapter executive
committee. In 2008, I helped found CUNY Contingents Unite as a voice within
the union for adjuncts and others in CUNY’s contingent majority. I’ve
helped build speak-outs with CUNY campus workers when Gov. Cuomo excluded
them from his promised $15 minimum wage; and with students from the
Internationalist Club against the unending killings of black people by
police, in solidarity with the Mexican teachers strike, and against Trump’s
“Muslim ban,” ICE immigration raids and deportations (escalating the record
number of deportations carried out under Obama); and building support for
the inspiring organizing drives by immigrant workers at the Hot and Crusty
bakery restaurant near Hunter and at B&H Photo.
*New York is a union town – New York is an immigrant town: Use our
power to defend the rights of us all. *The capitalist social and
political crisis brings new dangers every day. As a long-time union
activist and socialist, I have fought to strengthen the union movement so
it can serve as a genuine organizing center to defend all workers and all
those targeted by the reactionary offensive. Defending our rights means
opposing *all* of the employers’ divide-and-conquer tactics, from CUNY’s
two-tier system of adjunct poverty to the nationwide anti-immigrant and
xenophobic offensive. I am a member of Class Struggle Education Workers, a
left opposition tendency in NYC education unions, which has been front and
center in efforts to mobilize labor’s power in defense of immigrants,
Muslims and the rights of us all. We point out that chaining the working
class and oppressed to the Democratic Party paved the way for Trump. To
defeat Trump’s attacks, it is crucial to unchain the power of labor from
its decades-long subjugation to the bosses’ parties. An initiative I
enthusiastically support is the vote by the Painters Union in Portland,
Oregon, to “call on the labor movement to break from the Democratic Party,
and build a class-struggle workers party.”
*Equal pay, rights and benefits for adjuncts – this is key to
strengthening the PSC as a whole in the face of anti-labor attacks. *In
2014, the international Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor approved
CUNY Contingent Unite’s call for a minimum starting salary of at least
$7,000 per 3-credit course (which is the Modern Language Association’s
minimum standard), together with a seniority system and real job security
for all contingent faculty. I’ve fought to *unite* tenured/tenure-track
and adjunct faculty, grad students, TAs, HEOs, CLTs and others in our
union, together with the cafeteria, clerical, janitorial and maintenance
workers who keep the university going. Real solidarity is key to real
unionism. Thus, I’ve called for a “No” vote on contracts repeatedly
negotiated by the PSC’s New Caucus leadership that keep *increasing*
inequality between the tiers, and led the “We Demand the Right to Vote”
campaign when they excluded all but “full-time” faculty from the 2013
Pathways referendum. Last year I worked hard *in favor of* the union
strike authorization vote (arguing against those in the adjunct milieu who
balked at this basic step), and proposed concrete measures to lay the basis
for a real strike.
* In this period of hardline attacks on the most fundamental rights
of labor, I believe it is more crucial than ever to have a radical labor
voice in the PSC Delegate Assembly.* We’ve never won anything by bowing
down to injustice.
March 10, 2017 For more
information: s_an@xxxxxxx Labor donated