Adjuncts ask, How cheap can you get?

Part-time faculty are used to being shortchanged for the many hours they put into teaching outside of class—hours spent preparing for class, advising students, grading papers and so on. But hundreds of part-timers at five colleges in the City University of New York face a special injustice. In the last week of every semester, they are docked an hour of pay per class because the colleges say they are just proctoring exams.

Gail Graves teaches three courses in French in the Modern Languages department at Baruch College, one of the five colleges that doesn’t pay for a complete 15th week. In a normal week, she is paid for nine classroom hours and one office hour. The last week of the semester, however, she is only paid for seven hours, despite the fact that “I’m inundated with e-mails from students, [and] I am meeting with students all week who are practicing recitations,” she says. “I also have to grade exams. I’m actually working more this week than almost any other week during the semester, but I’m not getting paid for any of that. I’m just getting paid for the time I spend proctoring. That’s outrageous.”

Two years ago, the adjuncts’ union, the Professional Staff Congress/AFT, filed a grievance on behalf of faculty at Baruch, Bronx Community College, the College of Staten Island, Kingsborough Community College and Queensborough Community College. When it went to arbitration, the arbitrator ruled that, because the union contract is silent on the issue of how many weeks define a semester, the case would be decided on past practice. Those 12 CUNY colleges where adjuncts had been paid fully for the 15th week were obligated to continue, but the five that had not paid the complete 15th week were not obligated to start (nor were they prohibited from starting).

So this spring, the union kicked off an ongoing “Campaign of Outrage.” It began with a petition drive, which rapidly garnered 2,000 signatures from full- and part-time faculty, staff and students. Then, it held demonstrations during the last week of May on the five campuses and presented the petitions to the college presidents. This summer, the demonstrations continued at college open houses for prospective students, and the campaign will be sustained until the docked adjuncts are made whole.

“We’re not talking about a lot of money” to make things right, says Graves. “It won’t break the college.”

To learn more, visit:
www.psc-uny.org/CampaignofOutrage.htm.

New Rutgers local gets official nod

A unit of 1,816 administrative professionals joined the ranks of certified AFT bargaining agents at Rutgers University on June 7, when the New Jersey Public Employment Relations Commission issued its stamp of approval for the local, the Union of Rutgers Administrators/AFT. The URA filed a majority of cards under the state’s automatic recognition card-check law on April 25. After a month of negotiations, the union and university reached a stipulated agreement on the makeup of the bargaining unit.

“This is a huge and hard-won victory,” says AFT organizing director Phil Kugler. It came after the tenacious administrative professionals courageously hung tough in the face of a hostile employer’s anti-union campaign.

In January, Rutgers University president Richard McCormick signed a neutrality agreement with the union, after the intercession of New Jersey State AFL-CIO president Charlie Wowkanech, the AFT, the national AFL-CIO and numerous elected officials. Both Gov. Jon Corzine and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) came to campus to support the workers, and they and many state legislators worked behind the scenes to ensure that workers’ rights were protected. (See the cover story of the May/June issue of AFT On Campus for more details.)

“For more than 10 years, the New Jersey State AFL-CIO has worked tirelessly to build one of the finest labor political programs in the nation,” commented Wowkanech. “Never has the value of being able to tie strong political action to aggressive organizing been more evident.”

The campaign also drew on-site organizing assistance from other project and state organizers, and union members from across the country.

The URA/AFT is the largest union formed to date under the two-year-old card-check law. It joins full- and part-time faculty, who are represented jointly by the AFT and the American Association of University Professors.