Class Struggle Education Workers Statement on the Elections in the Professional Staff Congress
We Need to Start Building a Class-Struggle Leadership
This month, elections for union office are being held in the Professional Staff Congress, the union representing faculty and staff at the City University of New York. They take place in the context of the capitalist economic crisis and ruling-class attacks against workers, students and public education itself, while under Barack Obama the U.S. government continues its wars of imperial occupation and bails out the banks. As layoffs of adjuncts and other “contingent” workers mount, the Democrat-controlled state legislature has – at the request of the CUNY Board of Trustees! – imposed tuition hikes as part of its package of draconian cuts and hikes.
In the PSC elections, two slates are once again presenting candidates. Strikingly, the leaders of one slate actively campaigned for the same Democratic Party that has imposed the draconian budget cuts affecting us, while the other is headed by a spokesman for the Republican Party. Founded last fall, the Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) stands for an independent program of class struggle, to mobilize education workers as part of a general counteroffensive by labor and all the oppressed against the capitalist onslaught. While at this time the CSEW does not have the resources to present candidates of its own for university-wide offices, we seek to build an independent class-struggle leadership, opposing both of the contending slates.
The Right-Wing CUNY
PSC members are right to be revolted by the “CUNY Alliance,” the right-wing challenger slate. The CUNY Alliance pledges to be as cozy as can be with management, and denounces “theatrics,” “strike threats” and “noisy demonstrations.” Seeking to whip up retrograde sentiment, it derides “social and political activism,” claiming that the incumbent New Caucus “focuses on global politics.” CUNY Alliance spokesmen have sought to witch hunt PSC delegates (including from the CSEW) for daring even to raise the issue of
One of the CUNY Alliance candidates (for Community College officer) is president of the
The Incumbent New Caucus
A recent mailing from the incumbent New Caucus says it has “the capacity to build the labor movement the current moment demands.” On the contrary, the New Caucus has shown that it is incapable of genuinely fighting for the interests of all CUNY faculty, students and staff, as well as working people generally. The reason for this is that it is beholden to the Democrats, one of the twin parties of capital in the United States and the one currently in power in New York and nationally.
What the current moment demands is a class-struggle labor movement willing and able to take on the devastating attacks on workers’ standard of living and basic rights, obscene bailouts of Wall Street speculators, the escalating ruling-class war on labor and the oppressed “at home” and abroad. Why is the current labor leadership unable to do this? Most fundamentally, because it chains the unions to the bosses’ rules, institutions, parties and politicians. There is no use denying the fact: It is the Democrats that are conducting the current round of attacks on CUNY, its workforce and students. Yet, rather than advance the strategy or resources necessary to organize those most affected by these attacks, let alone prepare for strike action, the New Caucus supports these very same Democrats. Nor is it alone: last year the New York State Union of Teachers, to which the PSC is affiliated, contributed $11,000 to Governor Paterson’s campaign funds (even though he is not running for any office now).
In its election statement in the PSC Clarion (March-April 2009), the New Caucus boasts that it negotiated “one of the best contracts the PSC has achieved – in record time.” Yet in fact, the New Caucus union leadership sold out CUNY “part-time” faculty, who toil for what are literally poverty wages with no security of employment. As every adjunct and “contingent” CUNY worker knows, this contract deepened the rampant inequality of CUNY’s two-tier (more accurately, multi-tier) labor system, while devastating job insecurity was left in place and is taking its toll in adjunct layoffs today. As for the “record time” in which the contract was negotiated, what this really means is that they shoved it down our throats. They rushed it through a single Delegate Assembly meeting, and refused to create a special contract discussion bulletin even when dozens of delegates and alternates called for one to be established. The duct-tape gags that some adjuncts and grad students put over their mouths at that DA symbolized the travesty of real union democracy that occurred.
After new promises of initiating a massive campaign to organize adjuncts right after the contract was signed, the New Caucus leadership initiated a campaign, all right – to get out the vote for Democrat Obama in Pennsylvania! Their campaign literature states that when the initial $700 billion bailout was proposed, “the PSC was the leading voice in the effort to organize a demonstration supporting labor’s position” – in fact the protest’s slogan of “no blank check” for Wall Street was merely a quotation from Obama, who has now poured trillions into Wall Street’s gullet while drastically escalating the war in Afghanistan and continuing the imperialist occupation of Iraq.
Bowing to the Right
Right-wingers seek to discredit the union itself because delegates exercised their democratic right to debate proposed resolutions on
The pattern is a familiar one, with fear of right-wing attacks pushing self-styled progressives ever further from their ostensible goals. In reality, determined struggle by supporters of Class Struggle Education Workers has been required time and again to get the union to take even minimal stands on fundamental issues of working-class solidarity – from the call to free death row black journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal to support for last year’s courageous strike by the Puerto Rican Teachers Federation in defiance of the island’s equivalent of New York’s “slave labor” Taylor Law. When NYC transit workers went on strike in 2005, calls on the PSC leadership to seize the moment for a real solidarity mobilization fell on deaf ears, even though the strike was the biggest challenge in years to the very same Taylor Law that seeks to illegalize any kind of “job action” at CUNY.
Last September, the PSC’s New Caucus leadership wouldn’t endorse a demonstration by CUNY Contingents Unite (CCU) at Governor Paterson’s office to protest budget cuts and tuition hikes. Reason? They were holding sensitive negotiations with the Governor over state spending on CUNY, and did not wish to upset or embarrass him. At another demonstration initiated by the CCU at the December Board of Trustees meeting, New Caucus leaders collaborated with forces that sought to undermine the protest and turn it into cheerleading for the Democrats. Their call for a “New New Deal” is actually a way to highlight support for the very capitalist party and government that are attacking CUNY faculty, students and staff. Meanwhile, we are repeatedly hearing it asserted in different forms that the CCU is not part of the union, when everybody knows that CCUers have signed up hundreds of people for the PSC.
Not “Lesser-Evilism” but a Program of Class Struggle
Student protesters marching to the 75,000-strong March 5 NYC labor rally chanted “Students and labor: shut the city down!” But with the Democrats in power, labor officialdom deepens its commitment to the practice of collaboration with the ruling class. The wholesale attacks we are seeing today will not be defeated by a strategy that not only centers on lobbying the politicians leading the assault on CUNY and the working class but seeks to “partner” with CUNY management in the process.
Some union members who are critical of the current leadership nonetheless urge support to the New Caucus as a “lesser evil,” arguing that this is “just being realistic.” But it is very unrealistic to believe that supporting class collaboration will somehow ease the way for militancy.
In its parallel to the national political scene, the “lesser evil” argument underscores the fundamental issue of labor’s subordination to the bosses’ parties. While the election of the first black president represents a significant social shift in a country that was built on slavery, politically Obama’s administration is a facelift for the dictatorship of capital – from the bailouts, gutting of auto workers’ right to strike (as part of the auto “bailout”) and pushing anti-teacher “merit pay” to murderous U.S. drone attacks that are driving hundreds of thousands out of their homes in Pakistan today. Instead of accepting the rigged “rules of the game” of ruling-class politics, we need a class-struggle workers party.
The logic of lesser-evilism leads away from rather than toward class struggle. It is how capital gets its destructive, profit-driven way, one election after another, be it in the form of the Democratic Party, or those who help subordinate our union to that party today. The interests of CUNY workers and students are incompatible with those of the arrogant CUNY administration and the bankers and real-estate speculators of the Board of Trustees.
We believe that the union should fight for full restoration of open admissions and for no tuition, with a living stipend to make it possible for students without financial resources to study. While in its “security” frenzy the administration is trying to turn the 19 campuses of the City University into gated communities, we call to eliminate the turnstiles, which are a pretext for increasing police control and repression. The Board of Trustees should be abolished, placing CUNY under the control of teachers, students and workers.
The most urgent needs and aspirations of millions of workers, youth, immigrants and members of oppressed communities throughout
