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
