Against backdrop of recession & war
CUNY workers, students demand decent contract, no budget
cuts
By Milt Neidenberg
New York
On Dec. 5, a short distance from the wreckage of the World
Trade Center and the deafening clang of giant cranes dumping
tons of twisted metal into long lines of dump trucks, hundreds
of students poured out of their classrooms at the Borough of
Manhattan Community College, a branch of the City University of
New York.
They joined instructors--part time and full time, adjuncts
and tenured--and staff in protest to tell the government that
quality education will not be buried in the dust and debris at
Ground Zero.
The AFL-CIO Professional Staff Congress, which is affiliated
with the Federation of Teachers, organized the Dec. 5 march and
rally.
Speaker after speaker at the rally challenged the Bush
administration, Gov. George Pataki and lame-duck Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani about their lack of commitment to education. Students
and faculty chanted, carried signs and marched around the
campus. They demanded their share of the $20 billion that
President George Bush promised as aid for New York City after
the Sept. 11 tragedy.
The militant protest resulted from PSC frustration with the
administration's intransigence regarding the union's demand for
economic justice. PSC members have worked without a contract
since July 31, 2000.
PSC President Barbara Bowen, who represents 9,000 members on
20 campuses, said CUNY has operated on an austerity budget for
the last 10 years. For more than a year the PSC has fought
Giuliani and Pataki's attempts to slash CUNY's budget. Now
students and union members face a bare-bones budget.
Bowen also protested at a Nov.12 Board of Trustees hearing
about further cuts in the CUNY budget. She asked the board:
"Where do you plan to trim? Crowding more students into
classrooms when some are already sitting in the halls to hear
the class? ... Squeezing even more work out of employees who
already put in hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime?"
Bowen has consistently emphasized that the struggles for a
decent contract, to stop the CUNY budget cuts and to win more
money for education must be joined to force the city university
to provide quality education.
These budget cuts have a racist character. The tens and
thousands of students who attend CUNY are overwhelmingly
African American and Latino. They include many single parents
and students who also hold jobs. Many come from poor and
oppressed communities, determined to get a quality education to
break the cycle of poverty that has plagued their lives and the
lives of their families.
Other students of color also face major hardships. Starting
next semester, undocumented immigrant students will be charged
higher tuition--an estimated $7,000 a year. This doubles the
tuition fee for more than 3,000 immigrant students.
A Nov. 28 student protest at CUNY's Hunter College described
these cuts that will so deeply affect students from other
countries as an anti-immigrant "war purge."
Since the war began on Oct. 7, CUNY administrators, along
with other campus administrators across the country, have
turned international students in to the FBI, the Immigration
and Naturalization Service and other repressive agencies.
There is a growing consensus among the more active and
politically conscious students that the fight against the CUNY
administration is connected with the fight to oppose the U.S.
war against Afghanistan. And Barbara Bowen has taken a
courageous anti-war position.
Money for education and
decent contracts
The 80,000 members of the United Federation of Teachers--the
teachers of the city's public-school system--are in the same
boat as the PSC. They haven't had a contract since November
2000.
Their students, also diverse and multinational, are huddled
in overcrowded classrooms without materials for a decent
education. Special education and after-school programs have
already suffered cuts.
When UFT President Randi Weingarten demanded a 22.7-percent
wage increase that would create parity with teachers in the
surrounding suburbs, Giuliani called her unpatriotic and
selfish. Giuliani was protecting the profits of Wall Street
bankers, who are guaranteed 15 to 20 cents out of every dollar
of the city budget for debt service while everyone else has to
scramble for funding.
Neither patriotism nor sacrifice is on the minds of these
bankers and their puppet-politicians. What is: getting their
greedy hands on the billions of dollars that will be coming
down the pipeline to redevelop the World Trade Center and the
financial center surrounding the bombed-out property. Recently,
they formed an enterprise called the Lower Manhattan
Redevelopment Corporation, to get every cent of money they can
from upcoming redevelopment funding.
Pataki appointed John C. Whitehead to head the corporation.
Whitehead is the former co-chair of Goldman Sachs, a globally
powerful investment bank with political and economic influence
that extends from the United States to many governments abroad.
He is a former head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New
York--the bank that has considerable power in determining the
government's monetary policies. He was also a top State
Department official.
Other members of the new corporation include Richard A.
Grasso, chair of the New York Stock Exchange. The redevelopment
corporation is charged with overseeing all aspects of
revitalizing and rebuilding lower Manhattan, and miles beyond
ground zero.
These financiers will constitute a shadow government whose
political and economic clout will be felt across the United
States.
This is a time of a deepening recession. Unemployment,
increased hunger and homelessness are rising at an alarming
rate. But in the face of demands to increase wages, benefits,
and social services such as education, the Bush-Pataki-Giuliani
axis, on behalf of these financiers and industrialists, cites
the budget deficit, patriotism and sacrifice for the needs of
wartime funding.
A foment of struggle is developing in schools and colleges
in New York City. The protest needs to spread into the streets
of New York to confront Wall Street over funding for quality
education, not for war.
Reprinted from the Dec. 20, 2001, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: [email protected]
Subscribe [email protected]
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
HOME
:: U.S. NEWS ::
WORLD NEWS ::
EDITORIALS ::
SUBSCRIBE ::
DONATE
Email
this article
Printable
page