Hey San,
Great flyer. Will put it up on Hostos psc list and fb pages, unless there is
some objection. H
Sent from my iPad
On Mar 14, 2017, at 8:46 PM, Marjorie Stamberg <marjoriestamberg@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
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@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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
