Thursday night, delegates of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY), the union representing faculty, graduate assistants, and many staff titles at the City University of New York (CUNY), voted 73-70 in favor of a resolution for the union to divest from Israeli companies and government bonds, identify other potential investments for divestment, and recommend that the Teachers Retirement System (TRS) pension plan also divest its $100 million invested in Israeli companies and bonds. This is an important victory for CUNY workers and the movement for Palestine, setting an example for the broader labor movement.
This comes as Palestinians in Gaza have endured a brutal genocide and, after the recent ceasefire agreement, are coming back to rebuild amid the rubble. At the same time, violence against Palestinians is continuing, including a brutal raid on Jenin in the West Bank last week. The vote at CUNY is the product of an international struggle in solidarity with Palestine, with massive marches all over the world and significant student activism, including the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at City College that demanded divestment and the workers’ assembly there that called on the PSC to divest. Union leaderships dragged their feet to put out ceasefire resolutions and then to do anything other than ceasefire resolutions, refusing to organize a strong resistance to the genocide or to the attacks on pro-Palestine workers and students. A notable counterexample is UAW 4811’s ULP strike at the University of California in May 2024 following the brutal repression of the encampment at UCLA.
But despite hesitations from union leaders, rank-and-file workers organized for Palestine, took to the streets, and are forcing union leaders to heed the call from the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions for the international labor movement to “declare your union to be an Apartheid Free Zone, to end corporate and institutional complicity in Israel’s apartheid regime and genocide of the Palestinian people.”
Public sector workers in New York City, including from PSC-CUNY, District Council 37 (DC37), and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), have been collaborating on a pension divestment campaign for over a year. DC37 Local 3005, which represents public healthcare workers in New York City, passed a similar resolution demanding divestment from their own pension plan (New York City Employees Retirement System, or NYCERS) in September.
The PSC’s sister unions representing faculty and graduate assistants at Rutgers University passed a similar joint resolution in November calling on the university and the American Federation of Teachers to divest, and for Rutgers to cease relations with Tel Aviv University. The primary difference in this case is that the PSC will divest its own holdings — something within its control — while the AFT and Rutgers University are not bound to follow the recommendations of the unions’ votes.
There is also a strong campaign for union divestment within the UAW, with Local 2320 (National Organization of Legal Services Workers) confirming in November that its own union funds are not invested in any Israeli companies or government bonds, and at least six UAW bargaining units and/or locals, along with other UAW groups, have signed on to a UAW BDS pledge.
The PSC’s resolution was a hard-fought battle. After the 2021 “Resolution in Support of the Palestinian People” to merely “discuss” BDS at the chapter level passed, some members left the union. Some filed a lawsuit — which nearly reached the U.S. Supreme Court, before the court declined to take the case — arguing that they have a right to refuse to have the union’s collective bargaining agreement apply to them in addition to their preexisting right to not become union members. Faculty who voted in favor of the resolution have been harassed. The union’s executive council also proposed a resolution (which passed) mandating a one-month discussion period before resolutions can be voted on in an attempt to discourage timely political resolutions in response to current events. Even though the stated rationale is to encourage discussion of resolutions at the chapter level so that delegates know where the members they represent stand, many chapters put little effort into informing members about resolutions or promoting discussion about them, revealing the true purpose of this resolution: to reduce the union’s ability to take political stands.
Since that 2021 resolution, PSC leaders have become even more wary of the union taking any official position on Israel and Palestine, for fear of “dividing the union,” losing members, or causing other legal blowback. Indeed, this was the primary argument made in opposition to the resolution during the delegate assembly, not political disagreement with condemning Israel’s actions against Palestinians. This labor-chauvinist attitude — especially in light of the PSC’s history of passing other anti-war resolutions — betrays the principle of international solidarity that so many PSC members claim to believe in. This attitude from the union leadership has also made the union very slow to take action in response to the genocide; previous BDS resolutions have been voted down (even the 2021 resolution to “discuss” was a watered-down version of a proposal to fully support BDS), a resolution to support the Five Demands of the CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment was also voted down, and attempts have been made to postpone and postpone again any discussion of Palestine. This attitude is why it took the PSC more than 15 months since the start of the genocide to take even this small step.
Last year, the same delegate assembly voted down a proposal to conduct a membership-wide referendum on divestment. Some delegates invoke not knowing “the will of the members” as an excuse not to take action — without actually wanting to know the views of the members, appealing to “democracy” to stop discussions of Palestine while defending the PSC’s undemocratic methods on other topics, such as the recent contract ratification vote. We reject this cynical and selective appeal to democracy when it comes to the struggle for Palestine and understand that it is precisely the union leadership that stands in the way. In fact, it’s even more repulsive given that our union never consulted us on investing in Israel or elsewhere in the first place, and how difficult it is for members to even know where our union has investments. What is democratic about that?
Part of our struggle is to push for union democracy. Our union has the responsibility to organize spaces for democratic discussion, debate, and voting about our contract, about Palestine, about the attacks from the Trump administration, and about the necessity to organize around the principle that an injury to one is an injury to all — spaces for all members, not just the delegates.
The narrow margin by which the divestment resolution passed reflects both the hard work of those involved in the TRS divestment campaign in adverse conditions and how divestment remains an active and contentious issue within the union. This resolution is a victory for both the movement against the genocide and for those in the labor movement pushing for working-class unity across borders, especially within the context of the U.S. labor movement’s history of complicity with U.S. imperialism. Unionized workers should all push their unions to divest and to stand up for Palestine in every way they can. We should demand that our union not have investments, which encourages them to run like businesses.
But the struggle is far from over; one union’s vote will not compel the pension systems to divest, and one union’s own investments are only a very small part of the U.S. dollars supporting the genocide in Gaza and the apartheid state conducting it. Further, we can anticipate a backlash from the Zionists inside and outside of the government, especially emboldened in the context of a Trump presidency. Trump has already promised attacks on students involved in the movement for Palestine, and is pushing institutions to take even more draconian measures.
As Trump comes into office promising a slew of attacks on immigrants, trans people, workers, Pro-Palestine activists, and others, it is essential that our union build off of this resolution to say that our union stands with the working class and oppressed and takes action in defense of our rights.
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