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CUNY’s Turn to Provide Paid Parental Leave for All


CUNY commencement

Macaulay Honors College commencement (photo via CUNY)


She hid her growing belly under loose dresses and oversized sweaters when she taught her classes of 30 college students. She avoided the departmental office during normal work hours, retrieving her mail early in the morning. If someone realized she was pregnant, she worried, some excuse would be found to deny her work for the next semester. With a baby on the way, losing her job would have put her and her spouse over the financial edge on which they delicately teetered.

Finally, after securing work, the adjunct faculty member relaxed and let her pregnancy show. Still, she worried about the due date. If there were complications, would she be able to return to work within a week as her employer required?

A story from a past generation? No. At CUNY, many adjunct faculty members – called “part-timers”– avoid telling their department chairs and colleagues about an impending pregnancy because their work is contingent from one semester to the next and they fear non-reappointment. Pregnancy discrimination is difficult to prove as adjuncts can be denied employment for any reason or no reason at all.

Even after that hurdle is successfully cleared, CUNY requires that a woman return to work a week after giving birth. Often, this is difficult for the mother and child. Sometimes, it is impossible. Then, she faces the peril of being unilaterally fired, losing her health benefits as well as her income just when she needs them most.
Sometimes co-workers willingly contribute unpaid labor to spell the new mother in the classroom and kindly administrators look the other way. But in many cases, it seems “easier” to find a new part-time faculty member to teach a class than to provide accommodations for the pregnant one. This discrimination arises from chronic understaffing, the well-worn trope of “interruption” to students’ education, and, especially, a pervasive attitude that, even though they teach more than half of all CUNY courses, adjuncts are seen as little more than the labor they provide.

CUNY still pointedly disavows any institutional responsibility to even long-time workers. Adjuncts don’t even have the right to “bank” unused sick days from one semester to the next, and the oddity of counting only their classroom hours as “work time” makes most ineligible for even the limited protections of the Family Medical Leave Act.

We are hopeful, though, that CUNY will soon see fit to enter the 21st century. Recently, two New York faculty unions, United Federation of Teachers and SUNY’s United University Professors, have won paid parental/caregiving leave for their members. And CUNY’s new interim chancellor, Vita Rabinowitz, is a renowned feminist scholar. While working at Hunter College, she was the founder of the Gender Equity Project, intended to clear away obstacles facing women faculty. At a recent Board of Trustees meeting, over a dozen adjuncts asked her to utilize a new state law as a vehicle for the kind of workplace justice she pioneered earlier in her career.

Under New York Paid Family Leave, workers pay a small supplement and receive partial pay and the right to return to their job for up to 12 weeks after childbirth, adoption, or to care for a sick family member. While private employers are required to implement the PFL, unfortunately, public employers, such as CUNY, can choose whether to opt in or not. So far, CUNY has failed to do so.

Currently, CUNY has over 15,000 “part-timers” who need relief from uncertainty. It’s time for their employer to provide this small modicum of security and stability. Then, paid family leave would make CUNY a place where pregnant women can proudly display their bellies for all the celebration that creating new life brings.

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Pamela Stemberg is an adjunct lecturer teaching at CCNY and Hostos College. Marc Kagan is a graduate assistant teaching at Lehman College.

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In Crowded Office Market, Amenities are a Must


dock 72 rendering Brooklyn Navy Yard

Dock 72 rendering


As New York’s economy continues to thrive, the city’s construction and real estate industries are enjoying a sustained building boom that is creating more than 2.5 million square feet of new office space each year. Even with this unprecedented growth, there is still an insatiable demand for new commercial space from companies new and old. To stand out in such a market, developers must create innovative offices filled with cutting-edge amenities – and this trend is reshaping commercial real estate in the five boroughs and beyond.

Amenities like roof decks and fitness centers have long been staples of luxury residential buildings. But more recently, developers and property owners have begun incorporating these perks into commercial office space as a way to attract new and younger tenants. This movement has only intensified in recent months as more and more young professionals and creative companies are drawn to New York City.

Ironically, the apex of this new trend in commercial real estate can be found at one of the City’s oldest facilities: the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Thanks to almost $1 billion of public and private investment, the Navy Yard is in the midst of its largest expansion since the Second World War. The Navy Yard is poised to add 10,000 jobs across two million square feet of new space, in part because that space is optimized to attract the types of companies and talent driven by innovation.

A centerpiece of the Navy Yard’s expansion is the new high performance office building, Dock 72, on which our firms, Boston Properties and Rudin Development, and our anchor tenant, WeWork, have partnered to provide commercial tenants with world-class amenities, sustainable design, and state-of-the-art technology.

Our vision for Dock 72 has been to create a next generation waterfront workplace, where tenants and their employees can collaborate and connect with their coworkers and neighbors. That is why our team is collaborating with WeWork to create a truly unforgettable workplace environment, generated with the well-being of tenants in mind.

When completed later this year, Dock 72 will offer tenants multiple organic food, beverage, and coffee options; an outdoor basketball court and a full-service fitness complex; and a rooftop conference center, event space, an open lawn, and terraces with breathtaking views of the surrounding Navy Yard, the East River, and Manhattan. These amenities were curated by WeWork, based on the best practices they’ve developed while attracting innovative companies in cities around the world. They’re just a few of the reasons why tenants of Dock 72 will enjoy one of the best work experiences in New York City.

Landlords and developers know that it isn’t enough to just offer modern office space – the recent boom in commercial construction means that potential tenants have a wide-variety of options to choose from. That’s why companies like ours will continue pushing the boundaries and coming up with new, state-of-the-art amenities.

This is good for New York City. Businesses that locate in innovative new spaces like Dock 72 will have happier and healthier employees, which will in-turn make them more productive. This creates a virtuous cycle that will keep our city a vibrant and prosperous economic hub for decades to come.

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Michael Rudin is a Senior Vice President at Rudin Management Company and Andrew Levin is Senior Vice President of Leasing-New York of Boston Properties.

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City Leaders Say They Stand with Muslims & Immigrants, But Do They Mean it?


cojo pablo

(photo: William Alatriste/City Council)


New York City’s leaders have recently been protesting with Muslim and immigrant New Yorkers, but these same leaders are often missing once the cameras are gone. After last week’s stunning Supreme Court setback, the time finally has come for these same leaders to ditch New York City’s anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant police policies.

We clearly say we’re a sanctuary city, but the facts on the ground are unclear. No, city workers can’t ask about immigration status, but NYPD officers continue to use dragnet surveillance on immigrant communities. Most importantly, they continue to share that data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which the Trump administration is using to intensify its deportation efforts.

Every day, license plate readers all across New York City monitor cars in real-time. These cameras create a massive database of our movements across the city. But instead of using this database just to do police work, the NYPD shares the data with private, for-profit firms like Vigilant Solutions, a company that struck a deal to share New York data with ICE earlier this year.

But the license plate readers aren’t even the worst part. At least the City told us about them. All-too-often, we only find out about spy tools after they’ve been used for years. Tools like stingrays, fake cell towers that can suck-up all the phone data for miles around. To target one suspect, stingrays often need to track thousands of phones. Worst of all, the NYPD has even used these devices without a warrant. Wondering if your texts or calls were copied before? There’s no way to tell.

The City Council knows about the problem now – we told them about it – but for years this spying went on in secret. How? The NYPD has a slush fund: millions in federal and private dollars that can be spent without any oversight by the City Council. The mayor could end this tomorrow; Mr. de Blasio could require the NYPD to disclose how its spy data is shared with ICE with the stroke of a pen. But I’m not holding my breath.

Instead, we need the City Council to act. For years, CAIR-NY, NYCLU, and other advocates have pushed the POST Act, a commonsense bill that would require the NYPD to tell our lawmakers what military-grade spy gear they’re buying with private and federal dollars and how they’re keeping that information safe. The NYPD could continue surveillance, but the cowboy-era of buying whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted would be over. More importantly, the NYPD would finally enact policies to make sure our city’s resources won’t help ICE deport our neighbors.

But, the bill has stalled.

Our city’s leaders have long promised to make New York a sanctuary for all—a symbol of inclusion at a moment of presidential prejudice. So far, action has fallen short of soaring rhetoric, but that can change. This is the moment for our city to practice what we preach. This is the moment to prove we can do more than just show up for the protest.

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Albert Fox Cahn is the Legal Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, New York, a leading Muslim civil rights organization. On Twitter @CahnLawNY and @CAIRNewYork.

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