I started my current job as a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a senior college in the City University of New York (CUNY) system, in August 2008. Unlike some other newly minted PhDs who received job offers in the fall of 2007, mine was not rescinded because of the onset of the Great Recession in December 2007. I am a person under forty-five who has worked at the same workplace for almost fifteen years, a rarity.

I have had the fortune to work in CUNY for that time because of an activist, social movement–oriented union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), which successfully resisted austerity contracts; maintained the stability of pensions, protection of tenure, and a high-quality and affordable public employee health insurance program; and gave me the opportunity to work with the working-class and immigrant students who make up CUNY’s diverse student body. Faculty and staff working at CUNY could rely on such programs such as public service loan forgiveness; a guaranteed return tax-deferred annuity; and paid parental leave, which made working and staying at CUNY the obvious choice for a middle-income New Yorker like myself, raising children and building a life for myself in our increasingly unaffordable city.

CUNY has been a public good that makes a good life possible for so many New Yorkers. As the PSC proudly states, “Everyone loves someone at CUNY.”