Who We Are
Rank and File Action (RAFA) brings together workers at the City University of New York (CUNY) to engage in participatory, inclusive, democratic unionism and grassroots, militant, working-class organizing. We fight for a fully funded, fully equitable, free, open, and decolonized people’s university that supports the needs of students, staff, and faculty, advances racial and economic justice, and resists multiple oppressions harming our communities.
All rank-and-file workers, students, and community members who agree with our program and structure are welcome and invited to join RAFA. A majority of current RAFA members are adjunct faculty, graduate workers, and other contingent workers represented by the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY), with strong participation of PSC members in full-time faculty and staff positions as well as CUNY workers and students from outside the PSC. As a movement initiated by CUNY contingent faculty frustrated at our marginalization within the university and our own union, RAFA is dedicated to ending the exploitative and divisive multi-tier system of adjunct labor. We work to strengthen solidarity across job titles and to challenge the idea of the university as a meritocracy while confronting unequal power dynamics shaped by race, class, ethnicity, nationality, language, visa status, age, disability, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, credentials, and rank that impact our lives and complicate our organizing.
We recognize that our power as workers relies on our ability to control and withhold our labor. Therefore RAFA is committed to building the unity, solidarity, and democratic participation necessary to carry out successful job actions, including strikes, capable of winning our demands.
We believe that unions are about more than wages and benefits. We seek to unleash the full power of organized workers, students, and community members across New York to build a labor movement that can win full funding for all public services; help dismantle white supremacy and the structures that sustain it; end the practice of pattern bargaining that divides public sector workers and keeps our pay increases below inflation; and reverse the Taylor Law’s ban on public sector strikes.
The city and the university that we fight for were built on the unceded land of the Lenape peoples and through the erasures and exclusions of Lenape communities. As we carry out our work on this unceded land, we acknowledge these Lenape communities and their elders, past and present, as well as future generations. We reject their erasure and work to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism and to ensure that CUNY does not contribute to further colonial displacement of racialized and oppressed communities through real estate speculation, gentrification, and barriers to access.
What We Fight For
Excellent Pay, Benefits, and Working Conditions for all CUNY Workers. For decades, the wages of CUNY workers have not kept up with inflation or with the rising cost of living in New York City. Our most precarious workers do not even make a living wage. We fight to ensure that all CUNY workers, whether in the PSC or not, receive fair compensation and access to health care.
An End to the Exploitative Multi-Tier System of Labor at CUNY. Over the last several decades the university has increasingly relied on highly exploited, low-paid adjunct workers, who now make up nearly two thirds of CUNY faculty. Close to half of CUNY’s non-teaching staff similarly occupy part-time, contingent positions. For the same work, these workers earn a fraction of the wages and benefits of their full-time counterparts, creating an unjust multi-tier system. We oppose the further casualization of labor in the university and demand equal pay for equal work and fair and equitable pay for all labor, with meaningful job security and a path to permanent full-time positions for all who aspire to them.
Full Funding for a Free and Open CUNY. We seek to build the power needed to force the city and state to fully fund CUNY, as they did for 129 years (from 1847 until 1976), and to stop shifting the cost burden onto students, faculty, and staff. There is plenty of wealth in New York that could be redirected to make CUNY fully open and free for all, and to provide comprehensive support for students including Metrocards, housing, food, healthcare, and mental health counseling. CUNY was free while its students were mostly of European descent. In 1969, a wave of campus occupations led to Open Admissions, which allowed all graduating NYC high school students to enter CUNY for free. CUNY started charging tuition in 1976, after the student body became majority Black, Latinx, and Asian. We stand firmly against all tuition and fee increases, as well as against racist and classist standardized admissions testing, which disproportionately harm and discourage low-income working-class students of color. We also support and will use our power to fight for the full funding of other city services including K-12 education, public transportation, public housing, and public health services.
Strong Policies Against All Forms of Oppression. We will fight to defend CUNY faculty, staff, and students from all forms of oppression, discrimination, and harassment based on factors including race, ethnicity, immigration status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, age, and disability. We support the creation of transformative justice options that provide reparations for those harmed and hold accountable those who cause harm.
A Faculty that is Representative of the Diversity of New York and the CUNY Student Body. The University must recruit, hire, retain, tenure, and support more Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color in well-compensated permanent faculty positions and ensure robust representation of BIPOC, women, Latinx, Queer and Trans, working class and first-generation faculty so that CUNY faculty demographics mirror the undergraduate student body.
A Decolonized Curriculum. CUNY must commit to becoming a pedagogically decolonized university. Across disciplines, courses should critique the ways that the academy has traditionally centered itself around a white, western canon; foreground the knowledge, experiences, scholarly and artistic work of oppressed, colonized, and racialized people, including Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC), working class women, Queer and Trans, and people with Disabilities; and incorporate frameworks such as racial capitalism, settler colonialism, anti-colonialism, disability justice, and police and prison abolition. We also demand that ethnic studies and women and gender studies departments and programs that have been working to challenge white supremacy and heteropatriarchy in the academy, be fully funded, expanded, and integrated into the required curriculum.
A University That is Free of Cops and ICE. We demand that all NYPD, ICE , state police, university officers and other agents who are deputized with police powers be banned from all CUNY campuses and facilities, and that instead of a security approach based on violence and surveillance we enhance the safety of our CUNY community. We also demand that the university not collaborate or comply with any information requests from ICE, NYPD, or any other city, state, or federal law enforcement agency and that a program for campus safety be developed by committees composed of students and CUNY workers. We also demand an end to the NYPD repression and surveillance of students and workers.
Student and Worker Control of the University. We reject as illegitimate and harmful CUNY’s current governance by a Board of Trustees appointed by the governor and mayor, with a sole student representative and no voting member from the university faculty or staff. We call for the development of a new model of democratic, transparent, and cooperative co-governance of the university, with power over all decisions to be shared among students, faculty, and staff.
Smaller Class Sizes. The university says that the union cannot bargain over class size. We disagree. Class size is directly linked to pay and working conditions which are mandatory subjects of bargaining. We demand that CUNY reduce class sizes significantly to ensure healthy and supportive conditions for faculty and students.
Childcare for all CUNY Workers and Students. No one should be asked to choose between their job or education and their children’s safety and care. The university should provide free childcare to all students and faculty in need. We demand access to free childcare for all.
Democratic unions. Unions at CUNY, including the PSC, are ossified, top-down, and bureaucratic. Union structures should be amended to ensure proportional representation of all titles at all levels of governance. There should be term limits and fair elections, including of the bargaining team, and the franchise should be expanded to new members. There need to be horizontal rather than top-down platforms for communication, and bargaining should be open to the membership. Finally, unions at CUNY should step up organizing by training and fairly compensating more members to do organizing work. A democratic union should be committed to defeating the anti-labor Taylor Law by mobilizing members for a strike.
How We Fight
RAFA recognizes that the power of workers to strike is labor’s oldest and most powerful weapon. Beyond its utility for achieving workers’ demands, the strike is a unique vehicle for political education and the raising of workers’ class consciousness, and creating and developing solidarity across lines of job title, race, gender and sexual identity, immigration status, the broader labor movement, and the working class as a whole. We emphasize the importance of strikes and other militant job actions as a pathway to more democratic control of unions and workplaces, instilling a sense of ownership over those same workplaces and institutions, and setting an example of worker power for both organized and as yet un-organized workers across industries and sectors. The recent demands of both traditionally organized and spontaneous labor actions have reached beyond merely economic bargaining and towards racial and social justice. Inspired by this, we strive to foster conversations and labor actions to achieve a more just CUNY for all rank-and-files and our working-class students of color.
Understanding this, we insist that the character of any labor actions we undertake be as democratic and transparent as possible, must involve real decision-making power being vested in rank-and-file strike committees elected in our respective unions expressly for that purpose, and above all must not be managed top-down by bureaucratic union structures that have, time and again, historically proven to be impediments to workers exercising their full power and self-determination in the context of strikes and job actions.