the payoffs of solidarity

Alex: Good morning, comrades. Joseph, you are coming to me on Zoom from Brooklyn. And where are you, Mobina?

Mobina: In Karachi, Pakistan.

Alex: Thank you for coming from so far away. I am thrilled and honored to have a short conversation with you about the group in which the three of us engage actively. The two of you are the leaders of the Executive Committee of the Professional Staff CUNY (PSC-CUNY) local chapter at Brooklyn College (BC). Thank you for your service. I have two questions. What is the nature of our collaboration, how we come together as union members and as an executive committee for our local chapter, given that there will be a new U.S. President on January 20^th? And, who do we think our audience is when we come together to produce actions, words, images, policy, and of course, meetings?

Mobina: We started thinking about this when we did an event on Project 2025 in late October, an educational event where we were thinking about the coalitions we need to build or strengthen with non-union folks, with students, with ISSO (International Student and Scholar Services at BC), with other folks in our community who are undocumented, LGBTQ folks, all those targeted by Trump.

Alex: Mobina, you think at this moment in history, at our workplace, the executive committee and the union’s important function is to build coalition within the institution and out into our communities?

Mobina: That’s what we are working towards. How do we make this group of people whose only connection is that we work in the same place, how do we come together in a shared project that isn’t just about wages, but about the broader picture, the context in which we work: public higher education. This is part of the same process of thinking about how to make community out of shared purpose.

Alex: Yes, this is what is so complicated about union organizing which is so different from most of the other political activity I’ve done.

Joseph:  I think it’s important to say a word about how the executive committee works as a collective. It is an elected body. We ran for office and were elected by our chapter, but we did run as a slate. This year in particular, we faced a number of different fault lines and people in that body took a range of positions. We share a baseline commitment to collaboration, to collective action, and to a desire to make things better, not only on our campus, but in the world as a whole. These are people who are active politically, socially, in a range of different venues. And one place we converge is in the executive committee. And that has a certain role: to represent our chapter and help advance the union in our chapter at Brooklyn College (one of 25 CUNY campuses). We have a certain degree of autonomy within the PSC as a whole. We can organize ourselves. We want to be in alignment in general with what the PSC is doing, but we’ve run several campaigns over the years that weren’t directed by the PSC at all. For example, the letter writing campaign that you were very active in last year, Alex, where all these units on campus wrote aspirational letters to our campus administration to explain what we all need to do our jobs, and asked the administration to be accountable to our needs and words.

Those of us on the Brooklyn College EC share a commitment not only to building a strong union, but also to seeing how the strength of that union can connect to other areas of struggle. And certainly the new presidential administration could have serious effects on our campus, particularly because of the immigration policies that he is likely to advance. These could have, potentially, a devastating impact on our students. We have a lot of undocumented students and even some faculty and staff, so we have an immediate interest there.

Alex: Joseph, right after the results of the election, we had an early conversation that helped me in this interval leading to inauguration. How did we want to be in this newly arranging world, how did we want to spend our time, where could we participate and work towards meaningful response or change? And I recommitted to the work that I do with the executive committee, and also for the PSC, our larger union. This is where we work. It’s where we live, higher education, CUNY, our students, our incredible staff and faculty. It’s local and it’s very important and it’s under huge assault, as is all of higher education. And I wonder if the two of you want to reflect upon the huge amount of work that you do for our EC.

Mobina: I remember when I was an undergrad, the first few semesters I noticed people on my small college campus who stood out. The weirdos, right? The folks who didn’t quite fit in. And by our junior year, all of those folks found each other, and those are the people who came to be my friends and community. The EC feels the same. It’s gravitational, this space we find ourselves in together, one of the places where people feel that they can actually do something within the institution in which we work. CUNY is so often frustrating, but if you want to actually change some things, it’s the one space where you can do it collectively. You are working together rather than fighting with each other. And that’s a really valuable space, a sense that you are working with people, you get excited by them. It’s the closest to being back in school in a way that you get to engage and learn collectively.

Joseph: I think there are two dimensions to this. The first is a kind of affective or emotional payoff that comes from solidarity—acting in concert with other people and feeling like we can learn from each other, grow together, even if we’re not always on the same page. I’ll give you an example. At the December meeting of the PSC’s Delegate Assembly (the union’s main decision-making body, with about 200 members), the BC delegates (a subset of members of the executive committee) had to vote to ratify the contract. We have been out of contract for nearly two years, and an agreement with CUNY management was finally reached at the end of 2024, in part, in anticipation of the new presidential administration, which could generate new financial constraints on public higher education. And in the EC, we were of multiple minds about the contract agreement. We decided that we were going to stand together by voting differently. So we wrote a statement that tried to account for those differences and explain them. And then we had a pre-meeting where we spoke about what we were thinking and how we were feeling. I left both grateful that we could stand together even though we had some sharp disagreements, that we had a connection that allowed us to articulate those differences and somehow support one another even where we didn’t agree. That’s the feeling of solidarity. That’s the feeling that we want to extend across the entire world, but certainly across our campus. And maybe that’s ultimately the charge of the executive committee: to spread the feeling of solidarity across our campus.

The second reason why I commit a lot of energy to the PSC is because it is the best place to fight for the ideal vision of CUNY, which is also an ideal vision of the city, an ideal vision of the world: for CUNY to be fully funded (and many other critical demands expressed in the New Deal for CUNY), to be seen as an essential public good, a resource that benefits the entire city that is worthy of incredible support from the political and economic and social establishment. In promoting this vision and trying to bring it into reality through collective action, we send a message to everybody who attends CUNY—overwhelmingly working class and poor people from our great city—that they are among the most cherished members of our society and deserve everything that anybody else has. And that vision is something the union has always fought for. CUNY as an essential public good.

CUNY students and faculty and staff are treasured members of our society who deserve everything that they may not have gotten heretofore. This is for me one key idea behind the idea of the Free University of New York, and it’s one of the things that gets me out of bed every day.

Alex: I came to CUNY in the later stage of my career in higher education. I had never had the opportunity to join a union. I was thrilled that that was possible. And I am really proud to be part of a larger labor movement in this country. And I was proud to be in our union when I first came to CUNY in 2016, when the first administration of this president came to pass. And I’m even more proud and more defiant and more committed to what it means to be in solidarity with organized labor in this country under the specter of this corporatist, anti-worker society that we live in, and a new administration and its corporate lackeys who are all waiting in the wings.

Joseph: If 50% of American workers were unionized, the political landscape would be transformed in this country. The political situation would be completely different. Trump would not have been elected.

Alex: Our work together on the executive committee, and really all of us in the PSC—CUNY faculty, part-time and full-time, as well as our professional staff who support teaching in their work—we will be actively resisting and holding space in these next four years. And I’m proud to be doing that with you all, and our students, and people from NY who need and love CUNY. And I thank you for your leadership at the local level.