By Karen Juanita Carrillo/ New York Amsterdam News
In a new class action lawsuit filed on Jan. 26, five City University of New York (CUNY) peace officers allege that the state of New York is failing to pay them at the same salary rate as their counterparts at State University of New York (SUNY) schools.
New York state employs both groups of officers who, other than having different job titles, do the same work, the lawsuit claims. The only difference between the two groups is their racial composition: “The higher-paid group is about 90% white. The lower-paid group is about 90% people of color. This lawsuit challenges that pay discrimination,” the text for the lawsuit states.
Mohamed Alshami, who works as a CUNY Campus Peace Officer at Hunter College, said back in 2022 he started researching the average salaries of university law enforcement offices in New Jersey, Connecticut, and especially New York. He was shocked to see how much more other groups were getting paid. CUNY officers, who are part of Teamsters Local 237, recently reached a tentative labor agreement with the state but even this new contract doesn’t place CUNY officers close to the earnings SUNY officers receive.
“I looked at our collective bargaining agreement and I checked other agencies’ collective bargaining agreements and compared ours with theirs, and I saw a big difference,” Alshami told the Amsterdam News. “With New York SUNY, they get like double our salary and I feel like it’s unfair and we need to do something.”
CUNY peace officers are hired with a starting salary of $36,614, but SUNY police officers can start out earning as much as $82,928 if they work near New York City.
The employment discrimination law firms Valli Kane & Vagnini and Mehri & Skalet, PLLC who are representing Alshami and four other plaintiffs say they’ve determined that most CUNY Officers are people of color. As of 2022, 48.9% of CUNY officers were Black, 24.9% were Latinx, 13.6% were Asian, 11.1 % were white and 1.4% were classified as other. Meanwhile, the statistics on SUNY police officers found that in 2021, 89% were white, 7% were Black, and 4% were Latinx or Asian.
The pay difference between CUNY and SUNY officers is a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the officers in their class action suit said.
Read the full article from New York Amsterdam News here.
