Vol. 20 No. 3                                                                                              May 6, 2002

LET'S ROLL!

BEGIN THE DEMISE OF BOWEN/LONDON LEADERSHIP

      Closer and closer creeps the opportunity to oust the New Caucus and its unfortunate toying with our union, with our contract and with our lives. Virtually everyone who has communicated with us throughout the university has said the same thing: Babbling Barb and Steve "Foggy" London have their own extreme leftist agenda: the promotion of globalized social change. They are concerned about nothing but using your dues to that end. They are not one bit concerned about your welfare, your contract, your retirement or your health benefits.

      Full timers, part-timers, and other professionals have all expressed disappointment and disgust at the Union leadership's behavior. This group represents the most dangerous form of activism that American higher education and labor unionism have ever seen. Unless and until the "silent" majority speaks through democratic ballots to rid us of these dangerously extreme leftist ideologues, we will lose all that we have fought for, all these years. We cannot afford to be silent anymore.

THE NEW CONTRACT AND DOUBLE-TALKING BABBLING BARB

During the campaign, Babbling Barb was beating the drums, babbling, rattling and singing the songs of open negotiations, participation of representatives of every group on the CUNY negotiating team and total openness on the status of negotiations. But when it came time for them to actually negotiate, she completely reneged on those promises, and she beat the drums of TOTAL confidentiality. Even after the agreement was completed, no one was told anything! Then they started visiting the campuses, presenting only what they wanted to present, without providing anything at all in writing to the instructional staff! What's the matter, Barb? Don't you trust the faculty's intelligence? Or did you realize that we might actually read and understand how you manipulated us into a contract which is worse than any that CUNY faculty have ever seen? What happened to the 29% salary increases? Or the "pie in the sky" 168 demands? Now let's talk turkey:

• For the first time in the history of our union, a contract has been negotiated which provides NO ADDITIONAL STEPS AT THE TOP OF THE SCALE IN ANY RANK! People who have not have a step increase in years, or who AT MOST went up two steps in THE LAST SEVEN YEARS will not have a step increase. Factoring in inflation, these people have waited over two years for a contract which now gives them, in effect, a salary decrease!

• We have gotten LESS THAN ANY OTHER NEW YORK CITY UNION in the current bargaining rounds! DC37 got 9% for the same 27 months. The librarians got 16%! And it looks like the teachers will get somewhere between 9% and 15%! But the PSC gets a paltry 7% for 27 months, not even keeping up with inflation.

• And there's more. Those other unions didn't impose an agency shop fee on their poorest members. And they didn't tax their members with a huge increase in dues. But our greedy "leadership" did just that.

• So this is the bottom line: we now pay 1.05% of our gross salary to the feudal lords. Let's understand this. We're talking 1.05 % of our gross salary. For those of us whose combined federal, state and city taxes add up to about 50% - that's a lot of us - we are actually paying 2.1% of our net take-home pay to the union - you know, those guys who claim they're working for us. So we don't even get to keep that paltry 7%. We're really getting 4.9% for two and a quarter years! With inflation, most of us end up with zero increase, or even a reduction in our salary. Both adjuncts and full-timers are hopping mad, and they have a right to be.

• Of course, she will blame it on 9/11. But you all know that the radical New Caucus leadership will never be able to deliver a good contract. Isn't it time to get rid of these clowns?

• Adjuncts have been taken for a ride. Where's the parity that was promised? Nonexistent, of course.

• Librarians have been given short shrift. It seems that their legitimate claims of discriminatory summer scheduling has been ignored by their PSC "representatives."

• Have you ever heard of a union which is not concerned about members who are currently here and paying dues, but is concerned about those who have not yet been hired? We have! PSC's leftist leadership - Babbling Barb and Foggy London - have bargained for these unknown future employees. These "unknowns" will get a semester of pay without work within their first three years, without any obligation to do anything during that time, while the rest of us toil away!

• THE CONTRACT HAS NOT YET BEEN APPROVED BY THE CITY , THE STATE OR THE BOARD. YOU HAVE NOT BEEN SHOWN A COPY OF THE COMPLETED PROPOSED CONTRACT. YET THE PSC HAS TOLD YOU TO VOTE "YES." IS THIS THEIR IDEA OF HOW TO CONDUCT BUSINESS ???

DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR DUES ARE GOING?

• Lori Berenson, according to the Peruvian Justice Minister "a proven terrorist," was given $5,000 of your dues money by your union as a donation to free her from Peruvian jail for collaborating with Marxist rebel Tupac Amaru and renting a house in Lima which stored 8,000 rounds of ammunition and 3,000 sticks of dynamite. Recently, Peru's highest court upheld her conviction and denied her presidential pardon. ( See NYT, Feb. 20,02, p. A-9). Don't be surprised if Babbling Barb/Foggy London decide to donate your dues to Al Qaeda prisoners to free them from the Guantanamo Bay Camp.

• Thousands of dollars (almost $190,000 during the last year) are being spent each month for relatively redundant conferences, meetings and junkets around the globe. For example, New Caucus faithful such as Renate Bridenthal traveled to Morelia, Mexico to attend a conference on "Women, Public Education and Globalization" (held Oct. 31-Nov.2,01, see PSC web site). Then she traveled to another one in early February of this year: a World Social Forum in Porto Alegre (See Senate Forum, Feb.13, 02). Don't we have enough conferences right here in New York City on women of the world? Do you really have to go to far away places and spend our dues money to understand and learn about global issues affecting women?

• Hundreds of dollars are being misused to print, label and mail to members such colorful flyers as the one advertising the screening of "Live Nude Girls Unite!" and "Strike," a PSC Film series at the Center for Worker Education.

• Many hundreds of your dollars are being used to feed members of the ever-mushrooming committees and their meetings after meetings, with elaborate and plentiful varieties of food and drinks. Is this done so that the Committees will do what Babbling Barb and "Foggy" London want them to do?

• In just the one month of November 2001, the union spent $17,292.00 ( See Nov. Financial Statement) for reassigned time and stipends to faithful members of the Babbling Barb/"Foggy" London cabal. By creating an unprecedented number of committees, such as a Committee on Diversity, Solidarity Committee and others, they have found ways to reward New Caucus faithfuls with your dues money. The Solidarity Committee alone spent more than $15,000 last year. Doing what? Nobody knows. Do we have any business getting involved with the internal business of the Cafeteria Workers Union or the Book Sellers Workers Union, if that is the plan? The members have the right to ask these questions, since our dues are being used for the committees.

• More than $21,000 were spent on consultant fees in the month of November 2001. Why do we need to spend this kind of money when there is so much rich and powerful brain power within our membership? Who are the consultants? What kinds of reports have they issued, on what issues and when, and by whom? Who selects them?

• Last year, more than $23,000 were spent on public relations. We wouldn't need extra public relations money if only the officers could avoid dressing like bums and wear proper attire while attending public meetings, if they would stop talking arrogantly, and avoid the spectacle appearance of 1960's radicals. How can they act so unprofessionally when they are supposed to represent the professionals of the Professional Staff Congress? Perhaps they should spend some of their own money for halfway decent clothes, ties, deodorant and haircuts before claiming to represent professionals.

• Retreats costing thousands of dollars seem to have become standard operating procedure at our union. No one seems to be able to do any committee work without going to a fancy retreat with plenty of food, a good bar and lots of recreation. For example, Susan DiRaimo, co-chair of the Open Access Committee (another one!) asked the Delegate Assembly to approve a retreat to deal with the issue of "Testing, Barriers to Entrance to CUNY." First, we believe that this issue legitimately belongs in the University Faculty Senate and not in the Union. Second, must they go to mountain retreats, costing hundreds of dollars of our dues, to discuss the issues? She also recommended that PSC "make available funds to have someone analyze the registration tapes of all the students at CUNY." She is concerned about diversity and affirmative action. Has she got any clue as to how costly this mammoth job is? Does this belong in the Union? They are supposed to negotiate and implement a contract for its members - a good contract, not the one we got. Leave the other stuff alone.

• On August 20, 2001, our Vice President "Foggy" London wrote to the membership asking them to distribute and collect, from students, postcards to be used to flood the legislative leadership about the budget cuts. The local chapters were to collect the postcards, and the PSC was to pass them on to the legislators. "Foggy" London hadn't the foggiest idea of the cost of printing, collecting and mailing 180,000 postcards - or maybe he did, and just didn't care. We have not heard a single report of the outcome of this campaign. "Foggy" London doesn't care. After all, this is not his money! The members pay for it. Is "Foggy" London driving us toward an Enron-type bankruptcy?

MISSING: RESULTS OF THE SURVEY ON ADJUNCTS

      At the start of her term in 1999, Babbling Barb mailed out a survey to all CUNY adjuncts, supposedly to find out who they were and to determine their needs. Among other things, she wanted to know how many of our adjuncts really depend upon the adjunct work in CUNY and how many belong to other unions. It has been almost two years now, and the membership has not been given the results and analysis of this survey. It is, we understand, being treated very secretly. We wonder why! Is it because the outcome of the survey was not what they wanted to hear? Since your dues money was spent conducting this survey, we demand that Babbling Barb release the results of this survey immediately.

WILL THE WELFARE FUND BENEFITS OF ADJUNCTS INCREASE AT THE EXPENSE OF FULL-TIMERS AND RETIREES?

      It is no secret that in the past, a small portion of the Welfare Fund money originally negotiated for full-timers and retirees has been going to part-timers. Now that Babbling Barb has forced adjuncts to join by taxing them with an Agency Shop Fee, so adjuncts will control lots of votes, it has been rumored that Steve "Foggy" London is going to divert a large chunk of money from the full-time and retiree's Welfare Fund for the benefit of adjuncts. This would mean that full-timers and retirees will experience significant reductions in their Welfare benefits. What a travesty of justice in which full-timers and retirees who have given their life's work to CUNY will be treated so inhumanely for the election benefit of Babbling Barb and Steve "Foggy" London!

WITH A GURU LIKE STANLEY ARONOWITZ, WE WILL NEVER SEE THE NIRVANA (A DECENT CONTRACT)

     "CUNY Rewards a Laughingstock," screamed the headline of the December 3, 1998 article by Mark Goldblatt of Fashion Institute of Technology in The New York Post. He questioned, "If being a National Laughingstock cannot derail a career as a university scholar, what can?" (See http://www.frontpage.com/archives/academia/goldbaltt12-4-98.htm). Goldblatt was protesting Stanley Aronowitz's promotion to a distinguished professorship in CUNY.

     A little background is in order here. One day, Aronowitz - who has allegedly claimed that the Law of Gravity doesn't exist, decided to create a left-wing journal called Social Text. It published such nonsense, that Professor Alan Sokol of New York University decided, as a joke, to write an "article" with loads of "scientific"-sounding jargon with no meaning at all and submit it for publication! Aronowitz accepted it and published it in spite of the fact that the article was complete "gobbledy-gook," even to its author! So Aronowitz published Sokol's "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" without realizing that it was nothing more than a parody of academic double-talk.

     There's more. Roger Kimball, in his article "Painful Sting Within the Academic Hive" (see the May 29,1996 issue of the Wall Street Journal) wrote that Aronowitz, Aa Marxist Sociologist and a cofounder of the journal was "unable to realize a jargon-laden thicket of academic gibberish." That article was a joke - a hoax. (See http://www.sablesys.com/kimball.html)

     Yet another writer, Mr. Erich Eichman in "The End of the Affair" for the New Criterion, reporting on the panel discussion about the contrivers, wrote: "Mr. Aronowitz is not a thin man or a shy man, and much of what he said" was "incomprehensible." (See http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/15/dec96 /erich.htm)

     Doug Henwood, editor and publisher of Left Business Observer # 75, Dec.1996.p.2 (http://www. panix.com/~dhenwood/Jobless_future.html) in his criticism of Aronowitz's The Jobless Future wrote that "Virtually all the evidence marshaled (by Aronowitz) to prove the point is factually wrong." He ponders Aronowitz's use of "the inevitability of job-death to argue for less work and more leisure, and for shorter workweeks as a way of boosting employment" and concludes that although they may be extremely admirable goals, there is no better way to discredit the left, which has enough credibility problems as it is, than to make your case by using your arguments that can't survive a routine bout of fact-checking.( p.5).

     David Horowitz, in his article, "The Loafing Class: Shiftlers, lazy good-for nothings?" Try the richly paid leftist professors securely ensconced in their ivory towers in Salon Magazine provides a penetrating view of Aronowitz, an Antioch extension program Ph. D. He ends with the phrase: "Loafers of the world unite!" (See http://www.salon.com/col/horo/1998/02/09horo.html)

     Our point in presenting this history is an important one. First, those new to CUNY should know of the mass media frenzy regarding the Sokol scandal in the mid 1990s. Second, one should be alert to the strange and weird ideas of Aronowitz who not only talks and writes "gobbledly gook" but is also incapable of understanding the ideas of others. Third, one should be concerned because Mr. Aronowitz has become so important and influential with the PSC leadership that nothing happens, including policies affecting all of us, without his stamp of approval or blessing. He is not just in the inner circle, but he effectively controls the leadership. He is a member of the Executive Council and the Delegate Assembly, and he is on the Negotiating Team. He is everywhere. Babbling Barb, Steve "Foggy" London and other clowns in the New Caucus have, it appears, become the disciples of this Guru, including the chanting of his mantras, worshiping his persona, adapting his ideology to Union, and awaiting his nod and blessing before any decisions are made.

     This is yet another reason for this awful contract. It is also extremely unfortunate that the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor have not taken a second look at Aronowitz's elevation to the Distinguished Professorship. Perhaps it is time for the Board to reexamine this decision.

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Editor: Sharad Karkhanis, Kingsborough Comm. College, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11235. (W) skarkhanis@kbcc.cuny.edu (H) S.Karkhanis@worldnet.att.net

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