A View from The Left- LIU-Brooklyn-Teachers Stave Off Union Busting Attack, For Now

Workers Vanguard No. 1097	7 October 2016

LIU-Brooklyn-Teachers Stave Off Union Busting Attack, For Now

Permanent Jobs for Adjuncts! End the Two-Tier System!

For professors and librarians at the private Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus, the fall semester began with a union-busting attack by the administration: a 12-day lockout. Citing the “historical likelihood of a strike,” the university banned from campus hundreds of its full-time and part-time faculty represented by the Long Island University Faculty Federation (LIUFF) over Labor Day weekend. Faculty email accounts were blocked, health care coverage was cut off, and many LIU professors were forced to apply for unemployment. The administration brought in scabs—either administrators or unqualified replacement teachers. It was the first lockout of higher education faculty in the U.S. and it targeted a union that has repeatedly dared to strike in the past.

The lockout elicited outrage among students on the Brooklyn campus, which has the highest percentage of blacks, Latinos and women of all the LIU campuses. Gouged some $35,000 a year for tuition, they face a lifetime of paying back student loans. With the campus in chaos and classes taught by strikebreakers or canceled altogether, students accused LIU president Kimberly Cline of defrauding them. Daily student solidarity protests demanded, “Let them teach! Let us learn!”

Since she arrived in 2013, Cline has sought to promote a prettier picture to Wall Street by boosting LIU’s balance sheet at the expense of unionized workers. Four other unions on the Brooklyn campus have been working without contracts: secretarial and clerical workers, carpenters, engineers and maintenance workers, and janitors. Since March 2012, the clerical workers have not had any wage increase and are increasingly struggling to make ends meet as they’re forced to cover their health insurance premiums.

In the case of the LIUFF, the administration doggedly tried to bully the union into accepting a rotten contract and to drive a wedge between full-time faculty and low-wage adjuncts. The union was seeking pay parity with faculty at the LIU-Post campus in suburban Long Island, where full-time faculty make $10-15,000 more a year. For its part, the university proposed slashing adjuncts’ hours while gutting their benefits fund, increasing the workload of librarians, decreasing benefits to all new hires and implementing an onerous review process for tenured faculty.

The administration ended the lockout on September 15 after facing a barrage of negative publicity. While the union stood fast against attempts to pit sectors of the faculty against one another, the conflict at LIU-Brooklyn has merely been kicked down the road. LIUFF members returned to work while agreeing to continue negotiations. Dropping its demand for a five-week contract extension, the union accepted a nine-month extension, with wages and benefits remaining frozen. The university gloated over the union’s agreement “not to strike” for the course of the academic year, pleased that the possibility of strike action had been moved from the start of the semester to right before summer. In return, the administration acceded to a union request for a “professional mediator to facilitate a fair contract.” There should be no illusions in “neutral” mediation based on the false hope that a mediator will pressure management for concessions at the negotiating table in the absence of union struggle.

The fact that an employer could impose a lockout in New York City, a “union town” in a state that has the highest rate of union membership in the country, says volumes about the dire state of the unions and is bad news for the entire labor movement. Other unions clearly had a stake in defending the LIUFF, but the union tops did not even pull out their own members who kept on working during the lockout. Meanwhile, some faculty from LIU-Post, who are under a separate union contract, reportedly scabbed and taught classes at Brooklyn during the lockout. A crucial step to winning any labor struggle on the campus is shutting down the university. Students should have held support rallies outside, not inside, LIU’s gates and boycotted all classes. Picket lines mean don’t cross! All the campus workers should be in one union!

The LIUFF is a small union of professors, who constitute a petty-bourgeois layer without a lot of social weight. In order to win, they need to be under the wing of the broader union movement in New York City, from transit workers to Teamsters. The lockout elicited broad sympathy among workers across the city. But, disdaining the kind of battles it would take to beat back such attacks, the labor bureaucrats in the city offered little more than paper statements of “solidarity” while their own members crossed picket lines. The union misleaders did nothing to mobilize their members to build mass picket lines that could stop scabs and deliveries.

After the lockout ended, the LIUFF proclaimed victory at a press conference with a crop of city council members and union presidents, including Barbara Bowen of CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC) and Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, to which both LIUFF and PSC are affiliated. Weingarten and Co.’s main theme was unity against “the Trump effect.” Adorned with Hillary Clinton campaign garb, Weingarten appeared to be at a Democratic Party lovefest. Promoting the class-collaborationist myth of shared interests between labor and management, she proclaimed, “America is better than this divisiveness.”

Instead of forging a fighting alliance of the labor movement, the union misleaders pour money into electing “lesser-evil” capitalist politicians, as they did with Bill de Blasio and Barack Obama. Under the guise of school “reform,” the Obama administration has overseen a massive assault on public education and teachers unions. The starting point for successful class struggle is to break with the Democratic Party, which, no less than the Republican Party, represents the interests of the capitalist ruling class.

For Worker/Teacher/Student Control of the Universities!

Reflecting the trend in the rest of the country, tuition at LIU has risen drastically in the last couple decades. Since 1995, on average, tuition and fees at private universities have jumped 179 percent. With total student debt climbing to over $1.2 trillion, many recent graduates are headed for a bleak future of low-wage and temporary jobs and debt peonage. While full-time faculty salaries stagnate, a burgeoning layer of university administrators bathes in growing compensation. At LIU, the already-bloated salaries of top administrators doubled between 2008 and 2014. In 2014, President Cline made almost half a million dollars—the median income for a private university president.

This is all the more grotesque when one considers the university’s growing reliance on a supply of highly-educated but low-paid contingent faculty, or adjuncts. Decades ago, most college faculty members were tenured or tenure-track. Today, most are non-tenured, and half of those work part-time. Adjunct faculty members rely on temporary contracts with restricted hours, often having to teach at multiple schools. Generally lacking any means for voicing grievances or seeking advancement, a third of adjuncts live near or below the poverty line and one in four are enrolled in at least one public assistance program. A 2012 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Ph.D. Now Comes with Food Stamps,” detailed the condition of what is aptly termed “adjunctivitis”:

“Some are struggling to pay back student loans and cover basic living expenses as they submit scores of applications for a limited pool of full-time academic positions.... Many bounce on and off unemployment or welfare during semester breaks. And some adjuncts have found themselves trying to make ends meet by waiting tables or bagging groceries alongside their students.”

Hiring adjuncts is one way the campus administrations cut costs by not providing health insurance and other benefits. The proliferation of glorified temps at universities is an example of what is happening to the American working class in general. Temporary contract workers, who toil side by side with permanent employees for a fraction of the pay and no benefits, have been increasingly used to undermine union protections, divide the workforce and erode workers’ living standards.

The LIUFF is one of the very few faculty unions at a private institution, including both permanent and temporary instructors. Having gone on strike six times since it was formed in the early 1970s, the union has in recent years won some gains for adjuncts. In its last strike in 2011, adjuncts won paid office hours and maintained the benefits trust fund that helps to defray the cost of health insurance. We demand: Down with the two-tier system! All faculty should get permanent contracts, with the same benefits and job protections as tenure-track.

The fight to gain and extend union rights on campus is a fight against the administration, which runs the university on behalf of the ruling class. The universities train the next generation of ideologues, technocrats and managers needed by the capitalists to run their system. When it comes to the education of those the capitalists exploit and oppress, they invest only as much as they expect to realize in profit.

Private universities like LIU should be nationalized and run by those who work, teach and study there—abolish the administration! Against the race and class bias that permeates higher education under capitalism, we demand open admissions and no tuition with a paid living stipend, as part of the fight for the right to free, quality, integrated education for all. Such a perspective is linked to our fight for a socialist future where the resources and wealth of society are dedicated to the advancement of everyone and not to the exclusive benefit of a tiny capitalist class of filthy rich exploiters.