The New School: Student-workers on strike vs crisis-ridden system

NEW YORK CITY, November 23—Since November 14, the union for the Part-Time Faculty (PTF) representing 2,600 teachers ( 87 percent of the entire faculty of the New School) has been on strike because the administration refused to meet their simple reasonable demands for higher wages and better benefits. Many full-time faculty and students quickly joined the PTFs, canceling classes and issuing statements opposing crossing picket lines (physical and digital). Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members are joining these striking workers, bringing a strategic revolutionary message of the need to struggle for communism.

The City University of New York’s (CUNY’s) 30,000-strong Professional Staff Congress (PSC) that includes PLP members issued a statement of solidarity, stating that the PSC is proud to stand with them and urges all CUNY adjuncts to sign the No Scab pledge. The strike is happening just two days after 48,000 academic workers of the University of California system launched their own strike, and about one year after the second strike called by graduate student workers at Columbia University in 2021 which lasted for ten weeks before the demands by the union were met. Adjuncts are organizing broadly. PTFs at Howard University in Washington D.C. faced down the administration last year  and won gains with a strike threat.

Faculty and teachers are being driven into the ranks of the oppressed working class by capitalism’s multiple financial crises and are fighting back. Full-time faculty are being replaced by untenured, precarious and low-paid professors, while at the same time tuition and student debt has risen, all because the U.S. ruling class aims to lower spending on higher education. The only way forward for these and other workers is building a movement to overthrow the profit-hungry capitalist system which treats teachers, other workers and students like expendable garbage.

The New School was founded a century ago with a progressive, social justice mission, at least on paper. Today’s administration has abandoned even the pretense of this mission. The university’s negotiation team walked away from the bargaining table, leaving a so-called “last, best and final” offer that included a seven percent raise this year and a 2.5 percent raise in the following eight years, which could be translated into barely 1 percent raises per year for the incoming 9 years, not even a negligible improvement of the low-pay situations for PTFs given the four-year wage freeze since 2018 and today’s all-time high inflation. The same “final offer” gives the university unlimited authority to hike out-of-pocket costs for the health plans and cut 1/10 of the faculty at Mannes, its music conservatory, from the health plan altogether. The university’s offer will perpetuate and even worsen the precarious situations many PTFs are facing.

Today’s wave of faculty strikes may well be a historic moment when the intensifying  class war includes proletarianized academics en masse. Shut it down, and shut it tight! Join workers globally on the road to communist revolution.