Corporate management comes to CCNY; Moses limos to work–when she bothers to show up–slashing office and maintenance staff to the bone

By Joan Parkin

If you think an institution of higher learning like City College treats its employees better than factory workers, think again. City College is as exploitative as any other profit-driven corporation.

At the top of the City College corporation is President Yolanda Moses. Moses makes some $120,000 a year and “lives in an upper West Side duplex-penthouse at a pricey $6,000 per month,” according to a source who wished to remain anonymous. This condominium is The Montana at 247 W. 87th Street on Broadway.

According to David Suker of the Graduate Student Council, Moses also employs “a chauffeur and an executive secretary each paid upwards of around $70,000 per year.” The house, chauffeur and secretary are all paid for by City College.

These high salaries are not unique. Other salaries paid for by the college, according to 1992-1994 CUNY personnel vacancy notices, are between $91,718 and $107,261 for the Vice President for Development and Institutional Advancement, between $91,718 and $101,718 for the Provost as well as for the Vice President for Student Affairs, and between $88,190 and $97,991 for the Vice President for Finance and Management. Those positions are currently filled by John Lubbe, David Lavalle, Thomas Morales, and Nathan Dickmeyer respectively.

At the bottom of the employee chain are work-release employees who make $28 a day with no benefits. These parolees “help” the CCNY maintenance staff (more on this below).

Also at the bottom of the chain are mentally and/or physically challenged individuals who act as subcontracted Metropolitan Food Service Corporation cafeteria employees. Their lowest paid worker, according to one cafeteria employee, receives $2 per hour.

In between, the bulk of City College staff–clerical, maintenance, and custodial– have seen their numbers reduced by 30% since 1989 through layoffs and attrition and their productivity demands almost doubled.

Clerical and secretarial workers have been reduced from 188 in 1990 to just under 120 today. Full-time workers have been reduced from 134 to 119, according to Director of Affirmative Action Gloria Medonne. In the financial aid office there is only one worker to process thousands of student loan applications.

Between 1992 and 1996 City’s maintenance and custodial staff declined by 30 workers from 236 to 206. Director of Physical Plant Services Kevin Farley explained that “Our crews are working very hard and are very good working people, but because we are understaffed, we cannot satisfy the demand to adequately service this campus.”

One custodial worker, a member of Dis-trict Council 37 of the American Federation of State, City and Municipal Employees, the union that represents custodial workers here at CCNY, said that when he started working at City there were over 30 workers on his shift. Now there are only 15. He continued, “A guy retired on the second floor and I have to do his work and mine.” After 25 years he makes only $500 gross per week. All City College DC 37 workers have been working without a contract for the past three years and have received no wage increase in that time.

About the custodial staff shortfall, DC 37 shop steward Anthony Colon joked in gallows humor style, “We’re so short we make Gary Coleman look tall.”

George Varian, Chairman of Supervisors of Mechanics of the City of New York for Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said that over the past ten years he has seen his general maintenance crew go from 24 to 6. Moreover, work loads have tripled.

According to Varian, who also holds a BA in sociology from City College and has been working here since 1971, there used to be one to two general maintenance workers per building. Now there is “not even one per building.” Varian continued that in the past two and a half years his painters have been reduced from 4 to 1 in number, carpenters from 4 to 1, plumbers from 6 to 4, and electrical workers from 11 to 6 workers. A work volume increase of 25% to 30% has accompanied these maintenance staff reductions.

The staff downsizing has been frustrating. Varian explained that “we can’t get a routine down” because they are so short-staffed and emergencies often come up. If, for example, a maintenance worker is putting up a bulletin board, he may be called upon to stop what he is doing to respond to an emergency like fixing one of the campus’s 350 outside doors.

Staff also pay the price in other ways outside efficiency. According to shop steward Anthony Colon, because of inflated productivity demands, “The health of many custodial staff is at risk. You can see it by the gaunt look in their faces. They are withdrawn, exhausted and out of it.” Colon said one woman who works at City “passed out twice on the street from stress.” He continued that “many people who complain that workers are not moving quickly enough simply don’t understand how terrible the situation really is.”

What particularly irks Varian is the “lack of social consciousness” concerning employees doing jobs under the prevailing rate. Varian gives the example of a chairman of a liberal arts department who recently painted his own office. For many this task may seem quite innocent, but, as Student Ombudsper-son Keeanga Taylor notes, “It in fact lets the administration completely off the hook from its responsibility of providing the school adequate staffing.” It also directly violates state law aimed at protecting prevailing wages established for each job assignment. According to Varian in such situations, “Faculty should pressure the administration to hire more painters.”
 
City College also uses work-study students, work-release laborers, and disabled workers  paid at less than half the cost of union jobs.

A Custodial Assistant after 12 years makes $20,752 per year, about $11 an hour or $80 per day. Work study students get $6.50 an hour. Work-release workers get only $28 a day. One disabled cafeteria worker said he makes only $2 an hour. These handicapped workers also often receive Social Security benefits at no expense to the college.

In addition, according to Vice President for Student Affairs Morales, the school is in the process of taking on Work Experience Program (WEP) workers who will work at the College in exchange for their welfare benefits, about $500 a month. That arrangement came about with the support of the two largest unions on campus, the Professional Staff Congress–the faculty union–and DC 37 which tried to make what they thought was the best of a bad situation by pushing for the Ramirez-Marchi bill in the state legislature allowing CUNY students to work on campus and avoid dropping out of school. From an administrator’s standpoint however, students on workfare are nothing but cheap labor, a nice replacement for traditional union jobs being reduced now by attrition.

Ostensibly, none of the work-release, work-study or WEP workers are meant to replace union jobs. Work-release workers, according to one union supervisor, are not supposed to be allowed to use tools, can’t paint, or move furniture. They can however clean outside of the buildings as a supplement to the school’s labor force. Yet one DC 37 worker who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that in response to his complaint that a union worker was asked to help work-release workers strip a floor in the gym, he was told by DC 37 Local 1597 President Lola McBryde, “Work-release workers can do anything–dance on their heads if they want to–as long as it is not alongside union employees.”

Day Student Government Vice President of Campus Affairs Donald Vega confirmed this. Vega stated two years ago he saw work-release workers “painting the hall in the NAC Building.” Rob Wallace of the Student Ombudsperson staff two weeks ago recognized several mentally handicapped workers who usually work in the cafeteria collecting recyclable paper in the science building.

According to PSC Chapter Chair Gary Benenson, “Twenty years ago most of the clerical jobs today taken by work study students and eventually by WEP workers would have been well-paid union jobs.” Benenson also explained that faculty often do their own xeroxing, furniture moving, etc. to make up for the lack of resources. According to Benenson, “Faculty are being called upon to do all kinds of things not required of them in order to better serve the needs of students.”

To redress this, Benenson writes in the PSC newsletter Inside the Knowledge Factory, “[M]uch more attention and resources are needed for mundane issues like registration, scheduling and advisement. The role of faculty and staff has already expanded tremendously. In many ways, City College is running on volunteerism. However, the Administration seems oddly detached from these day-to-day affairs. Who’s minding the store?” Benenson also noted that since the 1995 retrenchment, 60 faculty have been lost through volunteer or forced retirement, 20 to 30 of whom were involuntary pushed out into another job, and 10 lost their jobs without finding another.

Other non-union employees are hired by the Barnes and Noble campus bookstore which nationwide is a non-union shop. According to one CCNY Barnes and Noble employee, just last week an employee “who never showed up late or missed work was fired for telling a customer to shut up.” If, according to one DC 37 worker, “his job had been a union job, he would have been reprimanded, but not fired.”

Not all prevailing-wage jobs at CCNY are unionized, but most of them are. Moreover, unions can help ensure that the prevailing rate is in fact paid. And while union jobs are not fool-proof, they offer more job protection and better wages than non-union jobs. Hence the reasons why an administration intent on cutting labor costs prefers non-union workers.

The administration’s justification for these exploitative practices is the recent series of budget cuts administered to City College. Yet when one looks at the school’s own statistics as reported in City Facts, a manual issued annually by the Office of Institutional Research, one finds that not everyone has been equally impacted by the cuts.

In contrast to the staff reductions, the number of executive administrators increased between 1992 and 1996 from 87 to 91. And while expenditures for maintenance have plummeted from $18.689 million to $15.262 million in that time, a $3.427 million drop, expenditures for institutional support, which include administrators’ pay and equipment, have fallen only by $769,000 from $15.262 million to $14.313 million. None of the staff has seen a pay raise in three years. But, according to Charles DeCicco, Moses’s public relations person, administrators at City College received a pay raise in their last contract settlement.

DeCicco justified Moses’s duplex arrangement as “an extension of her office” where Moses hosts important functions like meetings of the advisory board for Certificate Programs. He also explained that college presidents nationwide have expensive housing. Though Moses doesn’t enjoy the compensation the notorious John Silber of Boston College took in, the relative extravagance of her ar-rangements, including those for her housing,  seem inappropriate at a time of an oft-cited severe budget crisis for CUNY. Student-rights attorney Ron McGuire, a CCNY alum, recalled City College presidents lived much more cheaply in an old stone house in the South Campus now operating as a day care center. Moreover, they did so at a time CUNY didn’t face the budget crunch it does now.

Other spendthrift practices include the hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to the CUNY Construction Fund for new building. Newsday recently ran a series of stories detailing the gross overspending CUNY administrators indulged in while building poorly constructed projects. For example, at City College, Steinman Hall’s renovation cost $72 million, 86.1% over the original estimate. $128 million was spent on Shepard Hall’s renovations, 100% over the original budget. Budgeting and staffing for CUNY Security has also skyrocketed in the past several years. (More on CUNY construction and security in future issues of the Advocate.)

It seems odd that the budget cuts are grounds enough to slash the staff, but not enough to remove Moses from her W. 87th Street perch, staunch overspending on poorly constructed building or severely reduce security expenditures. The executive, construction and security budgets show CUNY does have enough money to hire more staff and faculty and pay them more. Administrators instead choose to spend CUNY’s money on poorly constructed building projects, security, and luxurious living standards for its top executives.

About these apparent contradictions, union worker Live DJ 1–he also works for the radio station–says, “The staff people do all the work and their numbers continue to dwindle while the administrative staff do the least of the work and their numbers continue to go up. The people at the top are making big money. City is just like Corporate America only smaller.”

One quick remedy is obvious. Next time the bathrooms are dirty, a wall needs to be painted, a ceiling caves in, or your financial aid doesn’t move fast enough, don’t complain to the staff–they’re doing a Herculean task given the situation. Instead, pressure the administration to hire more workers, to stop its union-busting, and to end sub-minimum wage slavery in favor of living wages.
 

Number of Faculty and Staff (The categories were redefined in the O.I.R. data as of 1992)
 
 Year                   1990                   1991                    Year                   1992                  1994                    1996

Teaching faculty	734	667	Full-time faculty	599	600	527
Non-Teaching faculty	283	224	Part-time faculty	552	644	498
Buildings and Grounds staff*	200	189	B and G staff**	236	269	206
Office workers*	188	161	Office workers***	190	208	191

*Includes provisional hires
**Includes skilled craft, service, and maintenance staff
***Includes clerical, secretarial, and technical staff
Source: adapted from CCNY Office of Institutional Research data