Welcome back! As the fall semester begins, we wanted to reach out to you with some updates about the current contract negotiations and to encourage you to join us in the struggle to win a good contract for all PSC members that includes a minimum $7K per three-credit course for adjunct faculty.

As many of you may know, our contract expired nearly two years ago. Our union’s elected bargaining team has since failed to secure any increase in funding from either the CIty or the State, and current funding levels do not even keep pace with inflation—much less the cost of $7K per course for adjuncts. So now our union is stuck fighting for crumbs from an ever-shrinking pie to bring our wages closer to parity with full-time lecturers.

Unfortunately, instead of calling on the full power of the membership to keep the pressure on Albany, PSC-CUNY leaders have urged us to sit back and wait for the bargaining team to do its work. Meanwhile, the leadership have been silent on the recently approved tuition hikes that management claimed were needed to pay for our contract demands. While we don’t know what’s being discussed in the closed-door bargaining sessions, many of us fear a compromise that will not get us to $7K and may even deepen the two-tier system by expanding pay gaps among different categories of adjuncts, dividing our union even further. Since PSC-CUNY has declined to bargain over class sizes, we are also concerned that framing any increase for adjuncts around productivity, as the bargaining team has done, opens the door to making us work more, when we are already working far more than the hours we are paid for.

We know that a strike is a big undertaking, especially when the Taylor Law threatens us with serious penalties, but we also know that until we really stand up together to fight for a fully-funded CUNY and a fair contract, the budget will keep getting slashed and our working conditions—which are our students’ learning conditions—will keep getting worse.

$7K or Strike is currently mobilizing for a series of special chapter meetings and town halls over the coming weeks to discuss the contract crisis and to put forward resolutions calling for a strike authorization campaign.

We need your help to make this happen. In order to make quorum, we will need every adjunct who supports going on strike for $7K to be at their chapter meetings ready to vote yes.

To get involved, contact your campus steward [7korstrike.us20.list-manage.com] or $7K or Strike.

And please join the $7K or Strike contingent at this year’s Labor Day Parade, this Saturday, September 7, to promote a strike authorization campaign and to build solidarity with rank-and-file members of other unions. Meet us at 10am with the PSC contingent on 44th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues. Look for the $7K or Strike t-shirts. The parade is scheduled to start moving at 10:15am.

In Solidarity and Struggle,
$7K or Strike!
7korstrike.org [7korstrike.us20.list-manage.com]

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