Nassau Community College adjuncts spend week on strike

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He told a group of reporters the AFA would not accept anything less than the deal he claimed the union had negotiated with Mangano’s office.

“Now [NCC’s trustees] are saying they want to negotiate,” Loiacono said. “Well, what would they like to do? Take an agreement I had, use it as ‘proposals’ and then cut it up. Well, that isn’t the way this goes. I negotiated already.”

The NCC board vote

NCC’s board has 10 seats. Nassau’s county executive appoints five board members, New York’s governor appoints four, and NCC students elect one of their peers to the board. The board’s last chairman, Geoffrey Prime, resigned in May, leaving nine trustees on the board currently. Four are Republican appointees and four are Democratic appointees. In an interview, Jocelyn Molina, a 20-year-old, fifth-semester student from Roslyn and the student trustee, declined to discuss her party affiliation.

The board on Sept. 9 held a special meeting to consider the AFA’s salary demands. Six of the nine trustees — the minimum for a quorum — were present. They split their vote 3-3, falling short of the six votes needed to approve a new agreement.

Loiacono argued that partisan politics played into the vote. Mangano, a Republican, is running for reelection against Tom Suozzi, a Democrat and his immediate predecessor. Loiacono contended that the Democrats on NCC’s board skipped the meeting or voted against the union so as to avoid handing Mangano an accomplishment that he could tout just two months before the election.

“The reason [the Democrats on NCC’s board] did it was because they thought that an agreement that came as a result of the county executive getting involved would help him win the election and would hurt the candidate for the Democrats,” Loiacono said. “…They realized that when people said, ‘when it comes to conflict resolution, Ed Mangano is the man,’ they said that will hurt Tom Suozzi.”

Loiacono claimed that the Nassau Democratic leadership pressured the Democrats on NCC’s board not to vote for any deal with the union. “[County Democratic Chairman] Jay Jacobs and other Democratic leaders were telling the Democrats to vote no,” Loiacono said.

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