US: University labour union leadership rescinds vote to divest from Israel

On 23 January, faculty and staff from the City University of New York’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC) union voted 73-70 in favour of a resolution to divest from Israeli companies and government bonds and recommended the teachers’ pension divest $100m from Israeli companies and bonds.

However, less than a month after the resolution passed, union leadership organised a re-vote on the divestment resolution - which led to a 113-63 vote against it on 20 February.

Now, members of a university labour union have expressed concern that months of hard work to pass a resolution to boycott and divest from Israel had been undemocratically overturned by leadership.

CUNY’s PSC union is said to have around 30,000 members and is one of the largest academic unions in the country.

Speaking to the Middle East Eye about the union leadership’s move to hold a re-vote and revoke the resolution, Evan Rothman, sponsor of the resolution in the PSC Delegate Assembly to boycott and divest, said union leadership had cited two aberrations - which impacted a total of four votes - as the key reason for conducting a second vote.

“One of the irregularities was that the Brooklyn College chapter was supposed to have seven votes, but because of miscommunications, nine people ended up voting – two more than were supposed to,” he said.

“The other irregularity that was identified was two delegates from Baruch College were not eligible to become delegates. That should have been flagged before the elections.”

However, Rothman believed that the union leadership’s intense scrutiny of the electoral process and the decision to “fix” procedures was unusual and unprecedented.

“I’ve talked to union members who have been delegates for 30 years, and they could not recall a single instance where the leadership had directed staff to do an investigation into the credentials of every single delegate to determine eligibility.

Palestine exception

“To me, this is another instance of the Palestine exception where we saw colleges and universities across the country bring out all of these policies that were understood to be formalities but never enforced,” Rothman said.

Although leadership said that upholding the vote to divest could open the union up to potential legal action, Rothman said no such evidence had been presented.  

“They have not given any details about what that legal action is. We've seen examples in the past of bringing out these legal boogeyman, in particular around former Governor Andrew Cuomo.”

While Rothman said he was not privy to whether political pressure was applied on union leadership to reverse the vote, he said that CUNY’s status as a public college meant they were more susceptible to external forces. “As a public sector union, we are more exposed to the whims of New York state politicians than a private sector union, which has some bosses, but those are not elected leaders."

Reflecting on the pushback to divest, Rothman said it was a difficult situation. “Amid the delegates, there’s a lot of hurt and healing that needs to be done.”

PSC’s director of communications, Fran Clark, said in a statement: “The PSC Delegate Assembly voted to rescind its resolution, passed on January 23 by a 73-70 vote, which committed to divesting the union's reserve funds from Israeli corporate securities and urging the Teachers Retirement System to do the same.

“The Delegate Assembly chose to rescind the resolution because irregularities were identified in the January 23 vote. The irregularities were corrected and a re-vote was held on February 20. The divestment resolution failed with a vote of 113 opposed, 63 in favour.”

Corinna Mullin, CUNY faculty and organiser with CUNY for Palestine, said union members had worked hard to organise and build support within the union for divestment through teach-ins, protests and the PSC’s 2021 resolution in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

“It takes courage to stand up to the politicians and other Zionist forces seeking to silence those speaking out in solidarity with Palestine,” she said. “What some of our union members don’t get is that if we cave into pressure on this, how will we win all the other important battles we have in front of us at a time of resurgent fascism?”