1 Education Drive

Room F-3293 Garden City, New York 11530

Asked & Answered: Political Action and Our Current Membership Numbers

Question: What kinds of activities does the NCCFT Political Action Committee engage in beyond our campus?

The Political Action Committee (PAC), chaired by Professor Uzo Osuno, is an advocacy group made up of member-activists interested in promoting public education, especially when it comes to issues that affect the NCCFT. PAC members attend political meetings and events, enabling them to make sure our union’s voice is heard in both formal and informal ways by the state and county legislators, including the county executive. PAC members also attend NYSUT, Long Island Federation of Labor, and other events in order to network with other unions in our area and throughout the state.

These are some of the events that PAC members attended in 2019/2020:

  • Fundraising and other events for County Executive Laura Curran, Nassau County Legislature Presiding Officer Rich Nicolello, District 1 Legislator Kevan Abrahams, former NCC Trustee and District 16 Legislator Arnold Drucker
  • Monthly meetings of Election District 19, which is the election district in which we sit geographically
  • NYSUT’s twice yearly meeting of the contiguous election districts in our area
  • The Annual Nassau County Democratic Committee Dinner. (We usually attend the annual dinners of both political parties, but the Republican Committee’s dinner was canceled in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic.)
  • Workshops and training at NYSUT’s 41st Annual Community College Conference in Cooperstown.
  • The Induction Ceremony for the Nassau County Legislature
  • The Annual MLK Scholarship breakfast
  • NYSUT-sponsored Higher Ed Lobby Days in Albany where we met with both House and Senate members.
  • The annual Nassau Community College Legislative breakfast, hosted by NCC President Jermaine Williams, where PAC Chair Osuno made a presentation to the legislators about the role and value of NCCFT faculty within the classroom and beyond.

If you’d like to get involved with our Political Action Committee, please contact the NCCFT Office.


Question: Now that we know how many people took the Early Retirement Incentive, how many full-time faculty remain and what is the breakdown by units?

Editor’s Note: While the numbers in the explanation below remain the same, the labels have been changed to match the definitions in Section 3 of our contract.

Before the COVID-19 campus shutdown, we had 551 members, broken down into these groups:

  • 413 instructional faculty members (which includes classroom & non-classroom faculty with academic rank)
  • 124 professional faculty members (which includes members without formal academic rank)
  • 14 LINCC Lecturers

Fifty-one people took advantage of the incentive:

  • 41 instructional faculty
  • 9 professional faculty
  • 1 LINCC Lecturer

In addition, two additional members left through attrition, leaving us with 498 members:

  • 371 instructional faculty
  • 114 professional faculty
  • 13 LINCC Lecturers

These numbers, which are subject to change, are current as of this writing.


Asked & Answered is a new, regular feature of the NCCFT blog. If you’re an NCCFT member and have a union-related question that you’d like us to answer, please send it to the NCCFT Office in an email. (While we do not guarantee that all questions will be answered on the blog; we will respond to all questions that the office receives.)

3 Responses

  1. Thank you for answering my question. I applaud the invitation to NCCFT members to get involved in NCCFT political action and encourage the Executive Committee to do more. Maybe we could have special NCCFT meetings to organize this— like, beginning this summer? The lack of equitable state and county funding for community colleges has class and racial justice ramifications. Possibly we can help members be more involved in NYCET political action too; recent letters on the NYCET “political action site” addressed higher education with regard to “four-year colleges” but not community college funding.

  2. Regarding the faculty numbers:
    1st, I would like to know how losing two members by “attrition” is different than losing them through the ERIP? As I understand it we are only “guaranteed” (maybe a poor choice) 1 replaced faculty member for each 10 lost under the ERIP, which would mean 5 replacements for the 51 lost, many of which are key senior faculty across the College.
    2nd, if we are in such dire straits, why did Trustees DeGrace and Powers, through abstention, defeat the Board’s proposal to empower the County attorney to go after Dover Gourmet for over $213,000?
    Last, I had posed a question during the 2 Budget Hearings regarding what other plans the Administration had if the ERIP wasn’t able to strip all 138 jobs from the College, such as cuts within the Administration. It was intentionally skipped, as my second question regarding the provision of hand sanitizer and masks was answered, although not deemed to be a budget issue (how not a budget issue?). How many times can the Administration use the word “transparency” in a meeting without fully understanding its meaning. By my estimation, the ERIP only saved about 1/3 of the 18-19 million the cuts to “salaries and benefits” are meant to save.
    Sorry for the rant, its been a long semester.

  3. I’m deeply concerned about the loss of full-time lines. This contributes to the overall impoverished, dependent status of the profession, to falling wages of workers in general, and undermines the independence of the academy in public life.

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