August 6, 2020
UUP stages huge virtual rally for safe SUNY reopening
uupdate 8-6-20

With the start of the fall semester less than a month away, and with a growing sense of urgency, UUP members joined students, lawmakers and community advocates Aug. 5 to demand that SUNY quickly and significantly upgrade its inadequate campus reopening plans.

Lives could be at stake, UUP officers and members said during the Aug. 5 virtual rally for a safe SUNY reopening five months into the global pandemic caused by the coronavirus.

The rally drew an audience of thousands--more than 4,000 people viewed the rally via Zoom, Facebook Live and through AFT--and marked the largest event in UUP’s summer-long effort to have SUNY issue a system-wide set of standards that campuses must meet before students descend on college communities all over the state. Those standards include ongoing testing and contact tracing; social distancing; mandatory mask-wearing in all settings, whether indoors or outside, wherever students congregate; and telecommuting for faculty and staff, to reduce density on campus.

“Today, all of us are here for one reason, and that one reason is because we are committed to the health and safety of our state,” UUP President Fred Kowal said, moments after the great Civil Rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome,” signaled the opening of the rally. “We are one family of New York.”

The union and its advocates have grown increasingly concerned that money, not safety, is driving SUNY’s decision making. UUP members say they are worried that their campuses have adopted the simplest reopening plans possible, to encourage students to return to college—along with their tuition payments and their spending in campus communities.

At the same time, faculty say they hear their administrations describe extensive testing for the coronavirus as too expensive. UUP counters that extensive testing will look like a bargain compared to the cost of once again closing SUNY campuses, as happened in March.

The concerns about preparation are not limited to the four-year campuses. Rowena Blackman-Stroud, the UUP Downstate Medical Center Chapter president, said that faculty and staff at the hospital resorted to reusing single-use masks, wearing plastic trash bags for protective gowns and tying plastic bags around their feet when essential protective gear ran short. Hospital staff sickened, and some died.

“Even though Downstate was a COVID-19-only hospital, they faced shortages of personal protective equipment,” Blackman-Stroud said.

And, as UUP has repeatedly said, the state must step up financially to not only adequately fund its hospitals, but to pay for testing and protective gear for campuses and hospitals.

Stephan Edel, the coalition coordinator at NY Renews – a group of climate advocates and labor groups – also made that point as he spoke during the rally.

“It is terrifying to me to see this state playing chicken with the federal government over funding,” Edel said, in a reference to the fact that state lawmakers have repeatedly said they cannot provide additional funding for SUNY until they know how much additional federal funding the state may receive to fight the pandemic. That latest round of federal funding, however, has stalled in the Senate.

Now, the clock is ticking, and SUNY will reopen before any additional state or federal funding becomes available. Kowal has praised the one-on-one constructive conversations he has had with members of the governor’s staff and SUNY administration. But a broad approach to a safer reopening has yet to develop – and SUNY has yet to even acknowledge UUP’s own reopening plan, which the union issued in June.

“We all need to continue to raise our voices,” Kowal said. “Here in New York, the governor and the Legislature can wait no longer.”

Besides Kowal, four UUP members spoke—statewide Executive Board member and Cortland Chapter member Bekkie Bryan; Brockport Chapter President Alissa Karl; ESF Chapter President Matt Smith; and Delhi Chapter VP for Professionals Sean Babcock.

State Sens. Monica Martinez (D-Brentwood) and Robert Jackson (D-New York City) and state Assembly members Pat Fahy (D-Albany) and Pamela Hunter (D-Syracuse) took part in the virtual rally. So did three SUNY Fredonia students, a University at Albany student in the school’s Educational Opportunity Program and the Rev. Emily McNeill, executive director of the Labor-Religion Coalition of New York State.

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