City University
Progressive slate wins
for faculty and staff
Special
to Workers World
New York
In
a hotly contested union election, a progressive slate called the New Caucus has
won 16 out of 21 Executive Board seats in the Professional Staff Congress, with
two seats so close that a count of disputed ballots will be necessary.
The
PSC is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers. It represents 15,000
teachers and staff members at the City University of New York--the biggest urban
public university in the country. Many of the faculty are part-time and poorly
paid.
The
New Caucus won this victory despite a sustained campaign of red baiting by its
opponents, who have controlled the union for the last 20 years or
so.
New
Caucus presidential candidate Barbara Bowens is an English professor at Queens
College. She was a paid union organizer for the Farm Workers before she
volunteered to help organize the clerical workers at Yale
University.
Her
opponents didn't dare attack her background as a union organizer. Instead they
focused on an article she had written on academic unions for the Modern Language
Association. In the article she quoted Karl Marx and used the term "class
struggle."
This,
they claimed, was proof that the New Caucus intended to turn the PSC into a
movement union and away from what they called "serving the needs of its
members."
The
New Caucus pointed out that red baiting didn't address the issues and that the
official caucus had not served its members well. It had failed to get raises won
by other academic unions, had not enforced the contract's overtime provisions,
and had failed to mobilize the membership, the students and the communities it
serves.
The
red baiting didn't work. Now the New Caucus faces its real enemy. It has to get
a fair contract out of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki.
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