2002 Fall Delegate Assembly focuses on union women

During a convention that concentrated on empowering women, UUP delegates were treated to several spirited events and speeches about the achievements and challenges facing the union’s professional women.

Frances Fox Piven — a distinguished professor of political science at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City — gave a historical view of the rise of business groups, corporate abuse and attacks on labor in her keynote speech at the 2002 Fall Delegate Assembly in Rochester.

“The activation of corporate power in the 1970s was the demise of the social movements of the 1960s, which fought for higher wages, regulation and social programs,” Piven said. “Then the path was clear to roll back those movements” affecting U.S. workers.

An activist and academic in the fields of welfare and electoral politics in the United States, Piven helped to establish the welfare rights movement of the 1960s and ’70s. More recently, a “cultural campaign,” including welfare reform, has come from the corporate culture and is now dragging our economy down, Piven said.

“An award-winning scholar for her lifelong work on inequality and social justice, Frances Piven’s efforts are of the utmost importance to the labor movement,” UUP Pres-ident William Scheuerman said.

Piven’s numerous honors include the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology in 2000 and the first Lifetime Achievement Award of the Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association in 1995.

In her address, Piven emphasized that higher education faculty are the “mentors of the young people” and that today’s academy is “much bigger than the manufacturing” sector. “In the great movements, it has to be labor and the universities together,” she said.

Over sandwiches and soda, former UUP President Nuala McGann Drescher of Buffalo State shared her “reflections and perspectives” with fellow delegates.

Many more women have joined the ranks of academe, and are no longer “just presumed to be the spouse” at an academic function, said Drescher, a distinguished service professor emerita of history. But, while there’s been an attempt to redress some of society’s ills in the last decade, the policies and the way women teach undergraduates has not changed, she said.

“Few women have benefited from affirmative action and we have a subjective evaluation process,” Drescher said, noting that going to court is “shocking, grueling and vicious,” and judges are reluctant to tamper with academic freedom.

“We’re facing an economic crunch; the result is an endemic increase” in part-timers and non-tenure tracked women, she said.

Women have had an easier time getting into the institution, but not in moving up, Drescher said.

“Only power-based protest is going to make any difference” in attacking gender bias, she said. “You have to ‘tool’ it, with power, commitment and an agenda.”

The luncheon presentation was hosted by the union’s statewide Women’s Rights and Concerns Committee, chaired by Vicki Janik of Farmingdale.

Gender equity was also the topic during the academic delegates’ meeting. Janik moderated a panel discussion with colleagues Diane Geerken of Cobleskill; Dan Gordon, Plattsburgh; Barbara Hillery, Old Westbury; and Sally Knapp, Albany.

Panelists reported that while, surprisingly, one in six college presidents are women, only about three members of boards of directors at the top 100 companies on Long Island are women.

In higher education generally, women comprise 37 percent of the faculty; the figure is around 30 percent at SUNY, according to AAUP’s annual study.

Regarding salaries, men customarily earn 130 percent of what women make in fields such as law, medicine, engineering, science and higher education. Notably, men and women have the same average salary at SUNY Geneseo.

“But, salary disparity is looking beyond numbers and charts,” Janik said, stating that the way career paths move must be examined, and “then the inequality exists.”

Geerken referred to the need to work with campus human resources personnel to help eliminate discrimination in the hiring process for professionals, who would also be aided by the establishment of guidelines for promotions.

Other DA theme events included a financial planning seminar for women and a musical accolade to women in the labor movement by UUP delegate Jean Dickson of SUNY Buffalo with singer Keith Woodin.

“This Delegate Assembly is a tribute to women activists at UUP,” Scheuerman said, acknowledging Drescher and thanking Doris Weisman from Stony Brook HSC for coordinating osteoporosis screenings — which she “finagled” at no cost to UUP, he said.

— Lisa Feldman Reich