1. Can you briefly introduce your union and its history to our readers? What landmark struggles would you want to share?
On April 14, 1972, the Legislative Conference and the United Federation of College Teachers merged to create the Professional Staff Congress (history). PSC/CUNY is an affiliate of New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), representing 30,000 faculty and staff at the City University of New York and the CUNY Research Foundation. We are dedicated to advancing the professional lives of our members, enhancing their terms and conditions of employment, and maintaining the strength and educational excellence of the nation’s largest urban public university.
Through organizing and bargaining, the union has increased full-time salaries, more than doubled adjunct pay in the last two contracts, won stable funding for adjunct health insurance, protected tenure, expanded job security for lecturers, professional staff, and adjuncts, won investments in faculty and staff research and professional development, secured sabbaticals with 80% pay for full-time faculty, and much more. We’ve defended academic freedom and have mobilized members around a range of social justice causes, including fighting austerity, opposing stop-and-frisk policing, opposing war, and protecting the environment.
2. The current US administration has launched a war against the working class, attacking unions and labor rights, democratic institutions and processes, and immigrant workers. At this moment, how should unions resist and step into the political realm? What is the importance of working-class resistance as a class resistance at this moment?
Trump, MAGA, and the oligarchs behind them have cut taxes for the rich and paid for it with cuts to healthcare and food assistance. They are scheming to undermine the rest of our social safety net, to rig the economy and undermine our elections. ICE agents are in our streets and at our airports.
This era of crisis can be an era of growing working-class solidarity and union expansion, if we rise to the occasion and organize. Marches and rallies are incredibly important, and the PSC has mobilized large numbers of members to turnout. But we know they might not be enough to stop the slide into authoritarianism. That’s why May Day Strong organizers working with unions across the country are planning a strategic escalation: a day of no work, no school, no shopping.
The PSC cannot lawfully call for CUNY employees to strike. It’s not now calling for CUNY employees to strike. But we recognize that it may take a strike of workers across multiple sectors to protect free and fair elections and disrupt the violent billionaire takeover of our country. So, we’re building the organizing muscle of our union and calling on all PSC members to take part, in some way, in May Day actions. Millions of Americans have taken to the streets in protest. We may soon be in an era of mass disruptions.
3. In addition to an internal war, the administration is widening the war abroad with a renewed intensity of imperialist war, aggression, and intervention. US labor has a shameful history of collaboration with imperialism. What is the responsibility of the US labor today in opposing imperialism and war? How should we further our struggles to fulfill this responsibility?
International solidarity should be a hallmark of unionism. It is at the PSC. Recently, our union has taken positions opposing the invasion of Venezuela and the war in Gaza. Now, Trump has started another war for oil in Iran. Here is our statement about it.
As a union long committed to advocating for peaceful solutions to international conflicts, the PSC took an early stance against the “War on Terror,” opposing the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and what the New York Times called “America’s Forever Wars”.
Taking clear, strong positions matters, especially when our positions as the PSC can influence our national affiliates. The AFT changed its position on the war in Iraq because the PSC and other locals took anti-war positions and pushed the national union to follow suit. Organizing members for anti-war and anti-imperialist protests is also critical, as is educating our fellow workers about the struggle for international justice.
4. As academic unions, one of the forthcoming problems is attacks on education, university autonomy, and the nature and content of education itself. How do you assess the challenges faced by struggles in universities and against attacks on education now, and how should university unions struggle against them?
Research and history that don’t support the white supremacist, science-denying MAGA worldview are being suppressed, and funding that supports life-saving research and the creation of new knowledge was cut by the Trump administration. A New McCarthyism is rising on college campuses as well. (See below in the answer to another question for more about that.) At CUNY, last year, at least 70 grants worth $17 million in funding were slashed, putting more than 100 jobs at risk. Since then, a few colleges have chosen to sign a “compact” and collaborate with the Trump administration in exchange for the release of research dollars. But most have not, and unions like our national affiliates, the AFT and AAUP, have fought back in court and have won, for the most part.
Unions allow faculty to pool resources and fight back in court, in the national media, and at the ballot box. (See the national campaign from AFT/AAUP). Unions also give faculty a way to wage a collective fight-back locally and regionally. Our union’s Defend Research Working Group organized an op-ed project to educate the public about the value of research, collected endorsements on a letter to the NY Congressional Delegation, and held a press conference in front of the Trump building on Wall Street. Regionally, we’re partnering with the other academic unions and AAUP advocacy councils in NYC to organize via the NY Metro Coalition for Higher Education. The coalition held a rally and a town hall last year. This Fall it worked with AAUP and Higher Education Labor United to protest outside the offices of the billionaire oligarch Marc Rowan, the man behind Trump’s authoritarian “compact” for universities. This week, PSC members will meet up with the Metro Higher Ed groups in front of The New School for a pre-rally and feeder march to the citywide May Day demonstration.
5. Both CUNY and SUNY have highly diverse workforces and student bodies with immigrant and working-class backgrounds. In recent weeks, the attacks on immigrants have been confronted by working-class solidarity. How has your union’s Immigrant Solidarity Working Group fought against these attacks, and can you describe your union’s solidarity with immigrant struggles overall? How do you assess the role of workers’ struggle in resisting these attacks?
The union is committed to ensuring that every student is safe in their classroom, and that all our colleagues and community members are protected from threats based on their immigration status. New York is a city of immigrants, and CUNY is their university. About a third of CUNY students were born outside the U.S. mainland. The Immigrant Solidarity Working Group has trained hundreds of members to do courtwatch shifts every Friday morning since April 2025, where we bear witness and support immigrants who are called to the courts at 26 Federal Plaza.
The Working Group is organizing on campuses, distributing know your rights materials and whistle kits to sound the alarm if ICE is present. They are also petitioning to demand full-time staff on every campus to support immigrant students, and they mobilize as a bloc for many of the mass mobilizations.
Immigrants’ rights are workers’ rights! Unions and organized workers have the collective power to push back. See the Day of Truth & Freedom strike in Minneapolis that shut the city down after the murder of Renee Nicole Good. That was unions and faith groups working together. We need more of that!
6. CUNY witnessed violent attacks during the height of the crackdown against the Palestine solidarity movement. More recently, the firing of 4 faculty members from CUNY and your solidarity with them has drawn nationwide attention. Can you describe this process for our readers and your resistance against these attacks? How do you view your struggles against campus policing and political repression, and your solidarity with resisting students and workers, in terms of their importance to your role as an education union?
In late March, nearly 100 Professional Staff Congress (PSC) members rallied outside CUNY Central, calling for the reinstatement of the final member of the “Fired Four.” In summer 2025, four Brooklyn College adjunct professors lost their jobs due to advocacy for Palestinian rights. Following sustained organizing by the union, faculty and staff, students and allies, three of the Fired Four have been reinstated. The fourth adjunct has been blacklisted–barred from employment at every single CUNY campus. We will not stop pushing until they are rehired as well. Click here to read more about the March protest. And here to read more about the Fired Four campaign, which has been waged through the grievance process, campus organizing, community protests, online, and in the press.
7. One significant aspect of organizing in universities is worker-student solidarity. In our struggles as academic workers, can we develop our solidarity with student movements and bring our movements closer together? What is our path for creating popular universities that are democratically run by students and workers?
The PSC works in close coalition with CUNY students through the CUNY Rising Alliance, advocating together for a free and fully funded people’s university and free transit for students. Finding common cause is important: our working conditions are the students’ learning conditions. Being a social justice-oriented union that actively opposes the austerity, policing, racism, and ICE violence that targets our students and their communities makes the partnership even stronger.
8. The anti-worker Taylor Law in New York robs the working class of its most effective weapon, strikes. How do you assess the Taylor Law and its impact on the working class in New York? What is the path for advancing and regaining the right to strike in our state?
It’s a challenge in the public sector; private sector organized labor is different. The PSC cannot lawfully call for CUNY employees to strike. We have to work to repeal the anti-strike parts of the Taylor Law while keeping the parts that protect workers and their contracts. That will require a movement of many of the state’s public-sector unions. We also have to keep building the strength of our union. It may take more than protests to protect our city if the Trump Administration subverts the elections or puts troops on the streets of New York. And there are other actions we can engage in to defend democracy or help win a fair contract.
9. How can we develop solidarity between our unions and among unions in the state as a whole? Do you have strategies and avenues of solidarity you would like to share with our readers and us?
Deep coalition building. We’re organizing through the Central Labor Council with unions of many different political orientations to mobilize for May Day. We’re working through the NY Metro Higher Education Coalition and are a part of HELU–Higher Education Labor United. The PSC is part of a HELU effort to advance a Northeast regional bargaining strategy guided by the recently released Amherst Compact.
President Davis added the following quote to the release about the compact: The Amherst Compact represents the extensive, collective work of aligning shared principles and committing to strategic coordination to lift the whole higher education sector. And now the next phase of that work begins, as each union prepares for the bargaining table and fends off the attacks on our professions and our students. We are better positioned now to turn these challenges into opportunities as a result of this thoughtful, ambitious blueprint for action.
