A group of employees who work at the City University of New York Research Foundation has shown the public university it can run, but it cannot hide from workers who want to be represented by a union. On Dec. 4, employees at the University Applications Processing Center voted to be represented by the Professional Staff Congress/AFT. The vote was 77 to 14 in favor of union representation for the unit of 100.

The UAPC is charged with processing all the undergraduate applications for admission that come into CUNY. The budget and workers at the UAPC are funded, not by CUNY, but by CUNY's privately operated Research Foundation (RF). While these workers manage the technical end of receiving and verifying the information in the applications, admissions counselors elsewhere on campus do the related work of processing the people.

The admissions counselors are called higher education officers. They are represented by the PSC and have rights guaranteed by state labor law. The UAPC workers fall under the National Labor Relations Act. What are the differences between the two groups?

"We make a whole lot less," says Robert Booris, an international student evaluator with the UAPC. "The leadership of the RF is the same leadership as that of CUNY. The two are indistinguishable. They are contracting out the CUNY work to RF people."

The Research Foundation was set up in the 1960s to administer grants. Over time, it quietly grew to encompass other university functions, but because it is privately chartered, learning exactly what the foundation is up to can be difficult, says Maggie Dickenson, a PSC organizer. This year, she says, the union started noting the large number of employees who were working under the RF. In September, the PSC got a call from Booris and some of his colleagues.

After a year of working for the UAPC, Booris had expected a raise, as promised when he was hired. But when no raise came despite positive ratings, he talked to other employees and learned that raises or even cost-of-living adjustments were not part of the culture of the RF.

Soon, Booris and his colleagues raised the possibility of unionizing. Longer-term employees of the UAPC were as disgruntled as the newcomers, and even more so when they learned that new employees were making more money than those veterans who had been there for 10 or 15 years.

A PSC representative talked to some of the UAPC employees and within five weeks, 80 percent of the workers had signed cards. They also learned a most heartening fact: A unit of RF workers who worked in the central office had already unionized under the PSC and were in the midst of negotiating an agreement that would amount to an 18.76 percent increase over five years.

After the rapid organizing drive, the local NLRB delivered a speedy election date. Now that the union is in place, says Booris, movement on a new contract looks promising--especially with the model of the central office chapter to serve as a guide. [Barbara McKenna / AFT On Campus]

[February 14, 2003]