CUNY Faculty Members Who Belong to TRS Demand Pension-Pay Update

Recently-retired faculty at the City University of New York who are members of the city Teachers’ Retirement System pushed at a Dec. 3 board hearing for CUNY to provide TRS with the educators’ most-recent salaries so that the pension system could recalculate their monthly payments.

The Professional Staff Congress, which represents CUNY’s instructional faculty, said this issue has affected employees who retired after April 2012—the month the first raise was retroactively implemented under its seven-year contract that ended in 2017—and chose a retirement plan through the TRS. Though the scope of the problem is still being determined, about 300 retired staff have been affected, according to the union. (About 80 percent of CUNY retirees chose a different pension plan that was sponsored by the Teachers’ Insurance and Annuity Association of America.)