SEIU Leader Calls for Organizing Unions at the Level of the Business Sector; Calls Company-by-Company Organization Outmoded (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/8/22/20826642/mary-kay-henry-seiu-sectoral-bargaining)
This article is not specific to academia. However, many adjunct unions are affiliated with national SEIU.
I ask you forumites, would organizing all the adjuncts in academia at once help stabilize with good part-time jobs in academia or would it finally push institutions to reduce their reliance on armies of adjuncts for general education in favor of something else?
Quote from: polly_mer on August 22, 2019, 05:45:58 AM
SEIU Leader Calls for Organizing Unions at the Level of the Business Sector; Calls Company-by-Company Organization Outmoded (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/8/22/20826642/mary-kay-henry-seiu-sectoral-bargaining)
This article is not specific to academia. However, many adjunct unions are affiliated with national SEIU.
I ask you forumites, would organizing all the adjuncts in academia at once help stabilize with good part-time jobs in academia or would it finally push institutions to reduce their reliance on armies of adjuncts for general education in favor of something else?
Being an adjunct is not a good part-time job. Ever.
As long as there are adjuncts who decide that being a freeway flyer is good enough, and are willing to find a tolerable level of such through SEIU, then armies of adjuncts will become institutionalized.
It's fun to speculate. I'll take a stab at it.
It could result in fewer part time jobs being used, or it could result in a reassessment of the future of the entire workforce. If you have to pay more for people in 'part-time' positions, and they are 'freeway fliers' then you already know they're available to teach throughout the week. So, you pay them more, because the union is getting some traction, and that makes you look like a good guy...then they are available more...why not integrate them into the department more?
I suspect repealing Taft-Hartley would have wide ramifications. But law isn't my field. Anyone?
There is a type of administrator nowadays. (I'm not pointing a finger at anyone here). He likes the part time workforce because they save money and make the tenure track uneasy. He likes the tenure track because they make the part-timers doubt their sanity and professional qualifications. We really couldn't be much worse off than to have a culture that is a haven for this type of sordid character. Anything that shakes things up has the potential to bring positive, long lasting change. And what haven't they done to deserve unions?
Quote
But according to Princeton economist Henry Farber and Harvard sociologist Bruce Western, an even bigger reason for the decline of unions than corporate resistance to organizing drives is that unionized companies in the US have added fewer jobs over time than their nonunion counterparts.
The slower growth has a few causes: Unions were most successful in now-stagnating or shrinking industries like manufacturing and transportation; investors are less willing to put money into firms where unions capture some of their profits; and unions increase labor costs for employers, who respond by hiring fewer workers. Western and Farber found that unionized firms' slower growth accounted for most of the decline in union membership between the 1970s and '90s.
They did have more success in "now-stagnating or shrinking industries." Perhaps one might consider that there's a reason these industries have not fared so well. US firms aren't the only ones competing for US customers, nor are they the only ones competing to sell supplies to other US firms. There might be some gains for jobs that can't be automated in the short run. But beware of the medium run: self-checkout works a lot better in a country like Switzerland, where a grocery store employee can make $40k/yr. It's not at all unusual to have 20 machines and a single staffed register. Also, online stores (like Amazon) aren't facing those costs, which just makes it more likely for brick and mortar stores to go out of business.
Difficult to predict what would happen to adjuncting. My sense is that many fields would simply see fewer courses offered, with larger class sizes. More courses taught by full-time instructors, but overall fewer people employed. Probably more courses taught by graduate students. If they're covered by high wage requirements, there are pretty easy ways to address that: you pay them more, then start charging them tuition.
The problem with all this is that you cannot bargain away economic reality. My new fun example is NYC's regulation on Uber and Lyft. First, they mandated higher wages. As a result, way more cars got on the road: you increase wages, more people drive. They thought capping the number of drivers would fix it, but of course that only fixed the extensive margin (new drivers entering), not the intensive margin (number of hours driven per driver). The inevitable result was higher fares, which lowered demand, and longer idling times. So NYC passed a new regulation, capping the percentage of time drivers can be in "waiting" mode. Inevitably, Uber and Lyft are now just kicking drivers off the app during low demand hours. Now drivers are complaining, trying to get that practice banned, too. My sense is they'll eventually be successful, and Uber/Lyft will just find excuses to permanently ban people from the platform -- there's just nothing else they can do without withdrawing from the market entirely.
The same holds in academia: you can make college more affordable, you can have small classes taught by tenure-track faculty, you can have higher wages for instructors, you can have high research productivity, you can offer educational support (writing centers, libraries, etc)... you just can't have it all at the same time. We live in a world with limited resources, which necessarily implies that there are trade-offs. It's the sign of charlatans to pretend that there aren't any or that some mysterious other group (the rich, Mexico) can be made to pay for it. (Because in this discussion, it will always be the "rich," let's at least note that European countries with a wealth tax have largely repealed them again, because they don't work. It's really easy to shade the value of your assets and all these things do is get people to buy art and wine, preferably located in a foreign country, instead of easy-to-value and track assets like stocks.)
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Quote from: pigou on August 22, 2019, 11:52:41 AM
Quote
But according to Princeton economist Henry Farber and Harvard sociologist Bruce Western, an even bigger reason for the decline of unions than corporate resistance to organizing drives is that unionized companies in the US have added fewer jobs over time than their nonunion counterparts.
This isn't from a study of higher education workforce. In the higher ed workforce, things are different form many workplaces. typically the adjunct who would organize does not have an ally or friend anywhere, other than the adjunct on either side of him. Management has a built in stealthy method for getting rid of you because your employment immediately expires in four months,maximum. The tenure track hopes you won't organize, because they think doing so will 'legitimize' the use of part time faculty, and possibly divert funds that they want for the fortifying of the tenure track.
[borrowed from thread: http://thefora.org/index.php?topic=455.msg8086#new]
Quote from: Kron3007 on August 21, 2019, 04:43:17 PM
Of course, the real problem is using part time (adjunct) positions to fill permanent needs. This is akin to some stores hiring mostly part timers to avoid paying them benefits etc. Personally, I think this needs to be dealt with through faculty unions to reduce reliance on adjuncts rather than unionizing as adjuncts and thereby legitimizing this practice. My collective agreement has sections like this and we do not have a lot of adjuncts here, which seems like the better solution.
Quote from: mahagonny on August 22, 2019, 07:03:27 PM
In the higher ed workforce, things are different form many workplaces. typically the adjunct who would organize does not have an ally or friend anywhere, other than the adjunct on either side of him. Management has a built in stealthy method for getting rid of you because your employment immediately expires in four months,maximum. The tenure track hopes you won't organize, because they think doing so will 'legitimize' the use of part time faculty, and possibly divert funds that they want for the fortifying of the tenure track.
Your framing of "allies" and "we" and "they" to me seems tangential from the economics of it. Nowhere do employers want to pay more than they have to for workers... the reason people at Google get paid a lot is the same reason people at Harvard Business School get paid a lot: when, for whatever reason, you've made it to the "top," you're not 1 of 100 people who could teach a class or program some html. You're one person with a very specific skillset that is going to be in demand.
This isn't about diverting funds as much as it is about limited budgets. Every university faces limits, because we don't live in a post-scarcity world.
What you haven't addressed is whether (1) full-time positions would be limited to many fewer new faculty and (2) why universities wouldn't respond to increasing instructor cost by either relying more on graduate students or on increased class sizes. That'd ultimately improve the situation of employed new instructor faculties, make students worse off, and make a lot of now-unemployed formed adjuncts (potentially) worse off.
A world in which everyone just gets better benefits, gets paid more, and the money magically rains down from heaven... does not exist.
Quote from: Kron3007 on August 21, 2019, 04:43:17 PM
Of course, the real problem is using part time (adjunct) positions to fill permanent needs. This is akin to some stores hiring mostly part timers to avoid paying them benefits etc. Personally, I think this needs to be dealt with through faculty unions to reduce reliance on adjuncts rather than unionizing as adjuncts and thereby legitimizing this practice. My collective agreement has sections like this and we do not have a lot of adjuncts here, which seems like the better solution.
Stores employ a lot of part-timers because benefits for full-time employees are really, really expensive. It's not that they just hate paying those benefits: margins in retail, particularly, are razor thin. The money to pay them just isn't there. On balance, that probably makes the part-timers worse off than if they could work full-time and waive the benefits. Such is the cost of labor regulation.
Quote from: pigou on August 22, 2019, 10:42:47 PM
A world in which everyone just gets better benefits, gets paid more, and the money magically rains down from heaven... does not exist.
It doesn't magically rain down. It's hard fought for. You've got to reach out to the graduate students and help them unionize too. Keep class sizes reasonable, get some pay raises.
Quote from: pigou on August 22, 2019, 10:42:47 PM
Quote from: mahagonny on August 22, 2019, 07:03:27 PM
In the higher ed workforce, things are different form many workplaces. typically the adjunct who would organize does not have an ally or friend anywhere, other than the adjunct on either side of him. Management has a built in stealthy method for getting rid of you because your employment immediately expires in four months,maximum. The tenure track hopes you won't organize, because they think doing so will 'legitimize' the use of part time faculty, and possibly divert funds that they want for the fortifying of the tenure track.
Your framing of "allies" and "we" and "they" to me seems tangential from the economics of it. Nowhere do employers want to pay more than they have to for workers...
And nowhere do employers have to keep dead wood around if they don't want to. You can also get rid of your assistant deans because you can't afford them. Nowhere do people not have the option to dump positions that they never really needed, or were added when the money was rolling in. Or you can get rid of things you need because you need other things more.
Quote from: mahagonny on August 23, 2019, 05:58:53 AM
Quote from: pigou on August 22, 2019, 10:42:47 PM
A world in which everyone just gets better benefits, gets paid more, and the money magically rains down from heaven... does not exist.
It doesn't magically rain down. It's hard fought for. You've got to reach out to the graduate students and help them unionize too. Keep class sizes reasonable, get some pay raises.
Mahagonny makes a key point: If highly qualified professionals insist on being treated professionally, then the case is easier to make that a certain standard is required to do the job well. One of my first mentors in academia told me to say no to a double overload. After all, if we demonstrably can do 6 classes per term at practically no notice, then what prevents the administration from making that the new norm instead of paying extra for the first overload because that's time away from family for this one term as an emergency measure? The same holds true with many aspects of the working conditions. Since people are clearly doing it and the sky didn't fall, then the case for why that situation shouldn't be normal is harder to make.
If, however, "everyone" holds the line on what is necessary and reasonable for a professional to do a good job, then the administrators will have to respond. The hard work is holding that line when it comes at personal cost.
Quote from: mahagonny on August 22, 2019, 10:49:55 AM
It could result in fewer part time jobs being used, or it could result in a reassessment of the future of the entire workforce. If you have to pay more for people in 'part-time' positions, and they are 'freeway fliers' then you already know they're available to teach throughout the week.
The "and" is an important assumption.
I am familiar with professional fellows who are full-time employed elsewhere who own a particular class or two as an integral part of the curriculum. That's not rare in engineering; indeed, several non-academic employers with whom I interviewed purposely mentioned as an attractive benefit how many of their PhD holders also taught a class per year with a friendly institution. My current employer strongly supports such arrangements because it benefits everyone involved.
One thing keeping Super Dinky afloat was graduate degreed people in this category (e.g., sitting judges, practicing nurses, local business owners, experts with their own higher ed consulting business who needed to keep a foot in the classroom) who really were part-time faculty, not adjuncts on a term-by-term contract. Those folks generally were paid substantially above the standard per-class rate and had contracts of 3-5 years.
The freeway flying adjuncts who are mostly interchangeable cogs would likely be most amenable to unionizing and it probably would be most to their benefit for that union to be at least regional, if not national. The questions in my mind are:
1) How much of the truly hard work (i.e., actually going on strike for better conditions, refusing to sign the contracts at any place that isn't negotiating in good faith with the union) are the potential union members going to do to help make the union effective?
2) What percentage of those freeway flying adjuncts really want better part-time jobs instead of one good enough full-time job at one institution? My colleagues with multiple income streams using all their talents want their part-time job to be a little more stable and have a little more money. People who want their multiple part-time jobs to add up to one good full-time job are less predictable to me. However, the steady stream in the media of people who are angry they have a patchwork of bad part-time jobs instead of one good full-time job likely want consolidation of many part-time jobs into good full-time jobs. That's a different union fight than stabilizing recurring part-time positions.
3) What happens when the general education transform really hits (see https://thefora.org/index.php?topic=481.0) and no one needs to be teaching many of these courses at the 4-year institution? The professional fellows will still be needed. The VAPs to cover sabbaticals and other leave will still be needed. The armies in certain fields will not.
I can see professional fellows organizing and getting more stability. I am less certain that unionizing now for the freeway flyers will help nearly as much as unionizing 10-15 years ago would have. I do think that regional/national organizing will help more than the one-isolated-institution-at-a-time.
Quote from: ciao_yall on August 22, 2019, 09:38:56 AM
Being an adjunct is not a good part-time job. Ever.
As long as there are adjuncts who decide that being a freeway flyer is good enough, and are willing to find a tolerable level of such through SEIU, then armies of adjuncts will become institutionalized.
Working as an adjunct works pretty well for me right now. I'd like cheaper health care, but then I believe in a single-payer system, and I don't support putting health insurance responsibility on employers, ultimately. Besides, health care is a huge issue which is just going to get worse and worse for everyone.
I've seen other people for whom working as an adjunct works well too -- mainly people who have other sources of income, and are looking for ways to maintain an intellectual life and gain access to an academic library.
Unionization? It has its pros and cons, and a lot depends on who is involved. Hard to give a verdict ahead of time.
Quote from: downer on August 23, 2019, 06:33:09 AM
Quote from: ciao_yall on August 22, 2019, 09:38:56 AM
Being an adjunct is not a good part-time job. Ever.
As long as there are adjuncts who decide that being a freeway flyer is good enough, and are willing to find a tolerable level of such through SEIU, then armies of adjuncts will become institutionalized.
Working as an adjunct works pretty well for me right now. I'd like cheaper health care, but then I believe in a single-payer system, and I don't support putting health insurance responsibility on employers, ultimately. Besides, health care is a huge issue which is just going to get worse and worse for everyone.
I've seen other people for whom working as an adjunct works well too -- mainly people who have other sources of income, and are looking for ways to maintain an intellectual life and gain access to an academic library.
Unionization? It has its pros and cons, and a lot depends on who is involved. Hard to give a verdict ahead of time.
So why don't you get involved?
Quote from: polly_mer on August 23, 2019, 06:24:45 AM
2) What percentage of those freeway flying adjuncts really want better part-time jobs instead of one good enough full-time job at one institution? My colleagues with multiple income streams using all their talents want their part-time job to be a little more stable and have a little more money. People who want their multiple part-time jobs to add up to one good full-time job are less predictable to me. However, the steady stream in the media of people who are angry they have a patchwork of bad part-time jobs instead of one good full-time job likely want consolidation of many part-time jobs into good full-time jobs. That's a different union fight than stabilizing recurring part-time positions.
More pay and access to benefits and protection from being axed because a failing student complained about your grading will get everybody on board. There doesn't even really have to be a part-time/full-time dichotomy.
Quote from: mahagonny on August 25, 2019, 02:00:54 AM
There doesn't even really have to be a part-time/full-time dichotomy.
There doesn't have to be, but there is currently because many people who are working part-time in academia very much want to be working full-time in academia at just one institution.
In 2010, AFT Higher Education (a union of professionals per their own motto) published a report that included summary paragraphs of:
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Part-time/adjunct faculty members are about evenly split between two groups, those who prefer part-time teaching (50 percent) and those who would like to have full-time teaching jobs (47 percent). Among those under age 50, the percentage preferring full-time teaching work increased to 60 percent. About 46 percent of the respondents have previously sought full-time college teaching employment. Differences surface repeatedly in the survey between those who aspire to full-time teaching jobs and those who do not.
Job satisfaction among part-time/adjunct faculty is fairly high, but there are distinct variations. Sixty-two percent of those surveyed say they are very or mainly satisfied with their jobs. Satisfaction varies considerably between those seeking full- time teaching employment (49 percent of whom are very or mainly satisfied) and those who prefer to work part time (75 percent very or mainly satisfied.) Satisfaction is lower among part-time/adjunct faculty members at four-year public universities. Part-time/adjunct faculty members teaching fewer courses per semester are generally more satisfied than those teaching more courses.
Note: emphasis added
Source: https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/aa_partimefaculty0310.pdf
For perspective, 2010 data indicate
Quote
Adjunct, part-time faculty members, what even the mainstream press (The New York Times, CNN) now call the "working poor" of academe, make up 47 percent of all college faculty in the United States, according to the American Federation of Teachers. Only 25 percent of all professors are tenured or on the tenure track. The remaining quarter comprises graduate-student assistants and full-time non-tenure-track instructors, often classified as "lecturers."
Source: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Adjunct-Loving-It/145109
The 75% contingent figure is 100%-25% TT/T, but graduate students are a different category and, for this discussion, so are full-time non-TT.
In the time I have available this morning, I can't find any data to support the hypothesis that now a larger fraction of currently part-time folks want to be full-time than was true in 2010.
I can find evidence of some increasing factors that would contribute to more people being involuntarily part-time and thus very interested in the union advocating much more strongly for consolidating an army of part-timers into full-timers over focusing on the goal of stabilizing the part-time jobs.
In 2016, the AACU published a report relevant to this part-time/full-time discussion: https://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/2016/spring/magness. The decline of the for-profit universities has reduced the number of part-time academic jobs available while the continued graduation of even more qualified people puts pressure on the overall system (AACU report)
The number of full-time jobs has grown (AACU report), but not enough to absorb all the newly qualified graduates, let alone all the qualified people who want full-time positions. In addition, involuntary part-time academic work strongly affects only a handful of fields (AACU report) where only academia is seeking those graduate degreed folks in large numbers; fields where a graduate degree opens up additional professional job opportunities don't tend to have the same part-time/full-time split.
Sentences from the AACU report that I think need to be on more people's radar for the nuance in distinguishing between various types of contingent faculty:
Quote
* The wage gap between the two groups [full-time and part-time] is significant; the median salary of full-time contingent faculty was $47,500 in 2010, and most enjoy full-time employee benefits that are not available to adjuncts.
* <T>he most precipitous drop [in full-time instructors as a percentage of overall number of instructors] actually took place between 1970 and 1977. This drop in the percentage of full-time faculty is usually attributed to the rise of community colleges, which employ relatively high numbers of part-time faculty. ... The observed decline in the percentage of full-time faculty actually derives from the fact that the number of part-time positions has expanded at a faster rate
* The number of job applicants continues to exceed the number of available full-time positions, even as the total number of full-time positions in many fields has more than doubled since 1970.
* <part-time> Adjuncts who lack terminal degrees and who teach at less-prestigious institutions will likely be the most vulnerable—not for want of upward mobility to full-time positions, though that credentialing barrier still exists, but for want of additional adjuncting work at their previously existing levels.
source: https://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/2016/spring/magness
I still remember the Barnard union organization flap where a long-time adjunct didn't get one of the far fewer full-time jobs after doing much of the heavy lifting of organizing (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/06/09/instructor-who-says-she-brought-adjunct-union-barnard-no-longer-employed-there).
Googling to bring up that Barnard union link also brought up the necessity of being able to strike as a credible action. (https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2018/12/03/barnard-contingent-faculty-union-warns-gwc-against-accepting-bargaining-framework-citing-own-struggles-with-negotiations/)
People who feel they have little to lose and much to gain can make a credible threat to strike, especially if a strike would make a significant difference to the operations of the employer (e.g., an army of part-time adjuncts carrying much of the general education load). The desire to consolidate the armies of part-time positions into fewer, but much better, full-time positions makes complete sense, as does joining a union stating that consolidation is one of the three top goals.
On the other hand, people who have many options and were only slightly positive on negotiating for a bit more tend to not be interested in shouldering the personal costs of striking. People who aren't afraid of being fired for one student complaint and have already negotiated a pretty good individual deal are not in the same boat as people who are one of the faceless army who can be replaced with a phone call or two.
But all of this data about job satisfaction is drawn from surveys of peoples' experience to date. Make the part time job pay better and have access to benefits and something to fight against the 'temporary at will employment - can be fired at any time for any reason, or no reason' idiocy, and it begins to provide some portion of the things that people wanted full time jobs for in the first place.
Quote from: mahagonny on August 25, 2019, 05:51:52 PM
But all of this data about job satisfaction is drawn from surveys of peoples' experience to date. Make the part time job pay better and have access to benefits and something to fight against the 'temporary at will employment - can be fired at any time for any reason, or no reason' idiocy, and it begins to provide some portion of the things that people wanted full time jobs for in the first place.
The Screen Actors Guild provides benefits like retirement and insurance rather than the employer. That makes sense since actors have many short-term employers. Would a similar SEIU system be valuable to adjuncts? A by-the-course contract would include a payment to SEIU to cover those costs.
I'll acknowledge that the model is premised on SEIU representation being near universal, which would require some improbable changes in labor law and worker behaviour. But it is still useful to identify useful steps.
Quote from: mahagonny on August 25, 2019, 05:51:52 PM
But all of this data about job satisfaction is drawn from surveys of peoples' experience to date. Make the part time job pay better and have access to benefits and something to fight against the 'temporary at will employment - can be fired at any time for any reason, or no reason' idiocy, and it begins to provide some portion of the things that people wanted full time jobs for in the first place.
That's the argument for why people who want teaching jobs without service and research requirements should push for a stronger part-time, regional union so that two part-time jobs at neighboring institutions add up to income and benefits of one full-time job that's only teaching.
That case does very little for the people who don't want the extra overhead of wrangling multiple income streams and want just one stable job with only one bureaucracy and one set of rules.
That case does very little for people who want a different type of job that focuses more on research or some other aspect of faculty life than teaching. Making the part-time job moderately better doesn't change the fact that many people are teaching intro/survey/gen ed classes when what they really want is to lead a graduate seminar and spend most of their time on their own research.
In addition, while there's a case to be made for unionization of part-time faculty in fields where graduate study is mostly preparation for academic employment will help the employees, the case for why the university should be stabilizing that part-time employment is much, much weaker.
Daniel von Flanagan used to point out that making part-time faculty more expensive is the best way to get universities to reduce their reliance on the armies of adjuncts and convert back to mostly professional fellows and one year/term replacements. Making the part-time jobs be good will mean making them expensive enough that some combination of consolidation into full-time jobs where service can be enforced, reduction of requirements, or adjusting the mix of students admitted for those who have already met the requirements is more likely to happen than stabilizing the current part-time folks into a better part-time position for the fields where armies of part-time faculty are common.
Quote from: polly_mer on August 25, 2019, 06:34:59 AM
Quote
Part-time/adjunct faculty members are about evenly split between two groups, those who prefer part-time teaching (50 percent) and those who would like to have full-time teaching jobs (47 percent). Among those under age 50, the percentage preferring full-time teaching work increased to 60 percent. About 46 percent of the respondents have previously sought full-time college teaching employment. Differences surface repeatedly in the survey between those who aspire to full-time teaching jobs and those who do not.
Job satisfaction among part-time/adjunct faculty is fairly high, but there are distinct variations. Sixty-two percent of those surveyed say they are very or mainly satisfied with their jobs. Satisfaction varies considerably between those seeking full- time teaching employment (49 percent of whom are very or mainly satisfied) and those who prefer to work part time (75 percent very or mainly satisfied.) Satisfaction is lower among part-time/adjunct faculty members at four-year public universities. Part-time/adjunct faculty members teaching fewer courses per semester are generally more satisfied than those teaching more courses.
Note: emphasis added
Source: https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/aa_partimefaculty0310.pdf
Sentences from the AACU report that I think need to be on more people's radar for the nuance in distinguishing between various types of contingent faculty:
Quote
* The wage gap between the two groups [full-time and part-time] is significant; the median salary of full-time contingent faculty was $47,500 in 2010, and most enjoy full-time employee benefits that are not available to adjuncts.
* <T>he most precipitous drop [in full-time instructors as a percentage of overall number of instructors] actually took place between 1970 and 1977. This drop in the percentage of full-time faculty is usually attributed to the rise of community colleges, which employ relatively high numbers of part-time faculty. ... The observed decline in the percentage of full-time faculty actually derives from the fact that the number of part-time positions has expanded at a faster rate
* The number of job applicants continues to exceed the number of available full-time positions, even as the total number of full-time positions in many fields has more than doubled since 1970.
* <part-time> Adjuncts who lack terminal degrees and who teach at less-prestigious institutions will likely be the most vulnerable—not for want of upward mobility to full-time positions, though that credentialing barrier still exists, but for want of additional adjuncting work at their previously existing levels.
source: https://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/2016/spring/magness
I seem to recall that the math works out to show that even some of the people without terminal degrees want full-time positions. That would be magical thinking as far as I can see, since full-time hiring is going to have a much higher bar.
At my former university, where I was chair for three years, adjuncts had formed a union. Based upon my talking to some of our temps not everyone was pleased with that fact (time to pay your dues, people!). We had a few long-time adjuncts who, because of the union, now could have 2 or even 3 year contracts based on seniority, giving them some job security, which was the biggest win I saw they achieved. Some didn't need that security because they filled an important role in the department gen ed curriculum and did not want to do anything but show up and teach anyway. And, not everyone likes being part of a union.
I was also a member of a union back when the state I was in was a closed shop (you had to be part of the union in order to accept the job). Before I was chair, our union actually went on strike (for a few hours as it turns out as we were doing it illegally) and the whole situation sucked - up, down, backwards and sideways. Jerks on both sides. Overblown rhetoric on both sides. Just a mess. It started when the university played hardball out of the gate, at least as compared to the previous contract, which was pretty nice (the union was one of the country's oldest and had managed to get pretty good health insurance for tenured faculty - by far the biggest benefit [which if course in the US is everything]). Long story short, lots of marches and chants later, we took to the streets with our shirts and our signs and did our thing. It felt awkward and weird and I was mad but I also felt manipulated by the union in a pretty major way. The situation eventually resolved itself and we got a contract nobody was happy with that probably would have been the same contract had the university just came out of the gate the way they had in the past.
However I left my union a couple years before I left when I was chair. It was primarily due to an experience I had when I, a union member, had to get grilled and treated like a criminal by my own union because, as chair, I had approved not giving a faculty member their umpteenth promotion (a quirk of my former university). The person who treated me like a common criminal was a former high school teacher who was making six figures as a "high ranking" member of the union (salary information was public because I was at a public institution). They tried all sorts of tricks such as pressuring me into recording our conversations, etc... ultimately, the old crusty fart with the insanely high salary lost his case at the final grievance hearing, and a year or so later after much hand wringing and way too much alcohol I finally wrote the letter and was out of the union because my state had changed the law such that we were no longer a closed shop. I now have a new job at a new institution and am not tenured or in a union and I've never been happier.
I still am not anti-union but I sure am anti-some-unions. Some are good, some are bad, just like a lot of things in life and no way will unionization be the "cure" to adjunctification no matter how much we wish it would be. Just because you have a contract doesn't mean you have a *good* contract and just because you are in a union doesn't mean you're in a good one. And union dues are not cheap either.
The way the world is going I think unions are on the way out - with tenure close behind, really. There just doesn't seem to be the stomach for people to truly organize and 'fight the power' in the US anyway, and the media manipulation makes it easy to turn the public against that sort of thing. It's a real race to the bottom "if I can't have it you can't have it" mentality these days, underpinned by a lot of true suffering, and I honestly don't see things getting better. I do wish anyone who does the work to form a union the best of luck because in the right situation they can be an overall positive thing.
Quote from: marshwiggle on August 26, 2019, 06:33:46 AM
I seem to recall that the math works out to show that even some of the people without terminal degrees want full-time positions. That would be magical thinking as far as I can see, since full-time hiring is going to have a much higher bar.
From memory of discussions probably 10 years ago now, a then-recent survey showed that most of the people who were part-time and wanted to be full-time lacked terminal degrees.
One big problem is, not that long ago in the US, people could get even tenure track positions at smaller, more remote schools with a humanities master's degree. It wasn't unreasonable to expect to be able to get a full-time academic job if one were willing to move and were flexible about relative teaching load between major courses and service courses.
Thus, people who do a little research on job prospects look at the backgrounds of people who are associate professors in some of these places, see the master's degree, and expect that they are then qualified to get that kind of job. What the research doesn't always turn up is how long ago that person with the master's degree was hired and how the number of qualified individuals has exploded to the point that a PhD, a book, and several years of teaching is now so common that even Super Dinky could safely sort the applications with only a master's degree and no full-time experience as composition/writing center/tutoring center director into the reject pile.
A current increasing problem for certain fields is how many recent PhD graduates who previously would have found something full-time for a year or three are now just staying in involuntary part-time work to keep their foot in academia. While the adjunct distress stories have remained constant for most of the last 25 years, the details have changed to include more PhD holders who are willing to move, but can't get anything full-time so they stay put, put down roots, and then get trapped in finding enough part-time academic work in the local big city to stay afloat for another term instead of hitting bottom and having to take a non-academic, non-desirable job just to pay rent and eat.
A corollary to Mahagonny's advocating for better part-time jobs would be being more humane upfront by only having good enough jobs on offer with mostly long-term contracts so that people would accept reality sooner and move on to other good enough jobs instead of hoping that this term is the term where they make their mark and get hired full-time.
Quote from: Hibush on August 26, 2019, 02:47:26 AM
Quote from: mahagonny on August 25, 2019, 05:51:52 PM
But all of this data about job satisfaction is drawn from surveys of peoples' experience to date. Make the part time job pay better and have access to benefits and something to fight against the 'temporary at will employment - can be fired at any time for any reason, or no reason' idiocy, and it begins to provide some portion of the things that people wanted full time jobs for in the first place.
The Screen Actors Guild provides benefits like retirement and insurance rather than the employer. That makes sense since actors have many short-term employers. Would a similar SEIU system be valuable to adjuncts? A by-the-course contract would include a payment to SEIU to cover those costs.
Absolutely. Fine idea. Unions can set up pension accounts. Every course you teach would garner a contribution. First thing to do is get membership levels up, I would suspect. Though I'm not an expert, just a member who pitches in a little here and there.
Quote from: polly_mer on August 26, 2019, 05:27:10 AM
Daniel von Flanagan used to point out that making part-time faculty more expensive is the best way to get universities to reduce their reliance on the armies of adjuncts and convert back to mostly professional fellows and one year/term replacements.
I'm not going to channel DvF (I might misquote) and he's deleted his account so it can't be referenced. I might have heard this approach promoted by others. It sounds to me like playing a trick on the part time adjunct faculty. Advocate for them with the intent of eliminating their job. The unintended consequences are now intended. As a scare tactic, it wouldn't have gone far with me and my colleagues, since we needed a union just to try and get cost of living/inflation raises. And I suspect many are in the same boat.
Quote from: fast_and_bulbous on August 26, 2019, 06:44:17 AM
At my former university, where I was chair for three years, adjuncts had formed a union. Based upon my talking to some of our temps not everyone was pleased with that fact (time to pay your dues, people!). We had a few long-time adjuncts who, because of the union, now could have 2 or even 3 year contracts based on seniority, giving them some job security, which was the biggest win I saw they achieved. Some didn't need that security because they filled an important role in the department gen ed curriculum and did not want to do anything but show up and teach anyway. And, not everyone likes being part of a union.
It's possible to work many years at the same place with zero job security. Paradoxically, the fact that you can be dumped easily with no aftermath makes you attractive.
Quote from: fast_and_bulbous on August 26, 2019, 06:44:17 AM
The way the world is going I think unions are on the way out - with tenure close behind, really. There just doesn't seem to be the stomach for people to truly organize and 'fight the power' in the US anyway, and the media manipulation makes it easy to turn the public against that sort of thing. It's a real race to the bottom "if I can't have it you can't have it" mentality these days, underpinned by a lot of true suffering, and I honestly don't see things getting better. I do wish anyone who does the work to form a union the best of luck because in the right situation they can be an overall positive thing.
Tenure has the monopoly on truth-telling. After it's gone, no one will tell the truth or understand it. If only people realized.
Quote from: fast_and_bulbous on August 26, 2019, 06:44:17 AM
The way the world is going I think unions are on the way out - with tenure close behind, really. There just doesn't seem to be the stomach for people to truly organize and 'fight the power' in the US anyway, and the media manipulation makes it easy to turn the public against that sort of thing.
How much of this is simply a result of the lifestyle diversity of the workforce? Decades ago, the typical worker was male, married with children, in a single wage earner household. So a union in any industry could basically push for the same kinds of things for all workers, and get lots of buy in. Compare that to now, and the adjunct situation as a particularly stark contrast. Workers can be single, married, any age, with or without family. Some have this as their sole source of income, but others only have it on the side OR are retired and don't rely on it for survival. About the only thing all of the workers have in common is "More money is good." While none may be opposed to things like better benefits, for those who have full-time employment elsewhere, or get benefits in retirement, then it won't make any difference, and they're probably not in favour of a strike to secure benefits which will have no value for them.
Before people are willing to "fight the power", they have to agree on "why?".
My state is a "right to work" state (gawd I hate that doublespeak) And...our Regents policy strictly forbids collective bargaining. This would have to happen on a state by state basis.
Quote from: marshwiggle on August 27, 2019, 05:50:15 AM
Quote from: fast_and_bulbous on August 26, 2019, 06:44:17 AM
The way the world is going I think unions are on the way out - with tenure close behind, really. There just doesn't seem to be the stomach for people to truly organize and 'fight the power' in the US anyway, and the media manipulation makes it easy to turn the public against that sort of thing.
How much of this is simply a result of the lifestyle diversity of the workforce? Decades ago, the typical worker was male, married with children, in a single wage earner household. So a union in any industry could basically push for the same kinds of things for all workers, and get lots of buy in. Compare that to now, and the adjunct situation as a particularly stark contrast. Workers can be single, married, any age, with or without family. Some have this as their sole source of income, but others only have it on the side OR are retired and don't rely on it for survival. About the only thing all of the workers have in common is "More money is good." While none may be opposed to things like better benefits, for those who have full-time employment elsewhere, or get benefits in retirement, then it won't make any difference, and they're probably not in favour of a strike to secure benefits which will have no value for them.
Before people are willing to "fight the power", they have to agree on "why?".
Not my take at all. OK, I'll put my cards on the table. I am pro union. We can both analyze and speculate about the future. Here's my version:
Despite part time faculty having variegated lifestyles, most of the time, crappy pay and temp worker status are part of that lifestyle. What we know: once a union drive gets under way, the vote is almost always 'yes union' and frequently by an overwhelming margin. The potential for more unions is high because the pay is low and the lack of respect. And not knowing whether your course will run until the very last minute is potentially a big disruption if not a financial hazard.
Quote from: fast_and_bulbous on August 26, 2019, 06:44:17 AM
The way the world is going I think unions are on the way out - with tenure close behind, really. There just doesn't seem to be the stomach for people to truly organize and 'fight the power' in the US anyway, and the media manipulation makes it easy to turn the public against that sort of thing. It's a real race to the bottom "if I can't have it you can't have it" mentality these days, underpinned by a lot of true suffering, and I honestly don't see things getting better. I do wish anyone who does the work to form a union the best of luck because in the right situation they can be an overall positive thing.
1. If there exist both a fight to save tenure and a fight to save unions, they have next to no mutual reinforcement. Tenure doesn't warm the hearts of people who depended on labor unions to get a roof over their heads. A guy with tenure may just as often be the guy who lives in your little town in Ohio who wishes he lived in Harvard Square or Manhattan. People with tenure don't use unions like SEIU or UAW, working stiff unions
2. There can be good jobs in academia without tenure if there are unions, because of the potential for solidarity, even when jobs are classified either part-time or full time.
3. Solidarity in the current system is limited, since tenure track sees adjunctification as a looming threat and adjunct faculty don't get respect from the tenure track.
As for fighting, it makes much more sense to fight for the life of unions than it does to fight for tenure. There are many more allies.
Quote from: marshwiggle on August 27, 2019, 05:50:15 AM
Quote from: fast_and_bulbous on August 26, 2019, 06:44:17 AM
The way the world is going I think unions are on the way out - with tenure close behind, really. There just doesn't seem to be the stomach for people to truly organize and 'fight the power' in the US anyway, and the media manipulation makes it easy to turn the public against that sort of thing.
How much of this is simply a result of the lifestyle diversity of the workforce? Decades ago, the typical worker was male, married with children, in a single wage earner household. So a union in any industry could basically push for the same kinds of things for all workers, and get lots of buy in. Compare that to now, and the adjunct situation as a particularly stark contrast. Workers can be single, married, any age, with or without family. Some have this as their sole source of income, but others only have it on the side OR are retired and don't rely on it for survival. About the only thing all of the workers have in common is "More money is good." While none may be opposed to things like better benefits, for those who have full-time employment elsewhere, or get benefits in retirement, then it won't make any difference, and they're probably not in favour of a strike to secure benefits which will have no value for them.
Before people are willing to "fight the power", they have to agree on "why?".
Very good points. I don't have an answer. I would even say there is little solidarity amongst tenured faculty across many universities - the life of a "teaching faculty" in the liberal arts is quite different than that of a "research faculty" in a STEM field, for instance. This was on display when our union organized and finally went on strike. It really struck me how much I just plain disagreed with all the rhetoric I was hearing from many of the faculty who I swear worked at a different university than me. That right there may be why solidarity is so difficult - there may not be much in common (other than wanting job security and good benefits) amongst faculty in the first place.
Quote from: mahagonny on August 27, 2019, 08:07:06 AM
Despite part time faculty having variegated lifestyles, most of the time, crappy pay and temp worker status are part of that lifestyle.
This is very common in humanities fields, particularly at underresourced institutions. This is somewhat common in liberal arts and social science fields at underresourced institutions. This is not at all the case for most people who are in fields where academia is not the primary employer for graduate degreed folks. This is not at all the case at most elite institutions where people get paid good money for everything.
I again make the distinction between professional fellows (i.e., part-time faculty who are incorporated into a specific major program and are the individual responsible for a specific required class or three) and true adjuncts who are part of a pool of people who are covering the random number of sections of general education courses. The professional fellows tend to have stability, pay worth their time or true volunteers, and don't have sections cancelled at the last minute because they are valued members of the faculty on a part-time basis. These are the engineers who teach the one section of unit operations in the fall for the chemical engineering department, the judge who takes one (possibly large) lecture class on the basics of the court system for the criminal justice majors every spring, or the now-professional-consultant in the education department who teaches one what-you-need-to-know-about-IDEA course online each term because the elementary and special ed programs differ in their timing.
As fast_and_bulbous points out, people in the same employment category in different parts of the university may be experiencing very different things. Ignoring that reality is one reason I am very skeptical of the benefits of unions that are attempting to serve a wide array of needs without actually acknowledging SPADFY. For example, in grad school, I ended up as a TA for a required 10 h/week for a whopping $50/month because the humanities-controlled grad union had negotiated away the top of the pay scale in favor of supporting a much higher floor on the pay scale. I understand why the union-leadership did it, but that didn't fix my problem of being required to take on extra duties on top of my engineering research fellowship with essentially no extra pay nor any lessening of my deliverables to the research project.
For the record, I am against being forced to work more with no additional pay and no change in other job duties. As one of my colleagues pointed out, even being an exempt, salaried professional doesn't make one a slave. In my present job, I am an at-will employee who can be fired with zero notice. However, seldom is that done at my employer for non-criminal acts because people in my job category are very hard to replace, unlike the part-time faculty member in certain fields where the number of sections is highly variable and cancelling some gen ed sections to redistribute students into other gen ed sections happens every semester.
Quote from: polly_mer on August 29, 2019, 06:38:31 AM
I again make the distinction between professional fellows (i.e., part-time faculty who are incorporated into a specific major program and are the individual responsible for a specific required class or three) and true adjuncts who are part of a pool of people who are covering the random number of sections of general education courses. The professional fellows tend to have stability, pay worth their time or true volunteers, and don't have sections cancelled at the last minute because they are valued members of the faculty on a part-time basis. These are the engineers who teach the one section of unit operations in the fall for the chemical engineering department, the judge who takes one (possibly large) lecture class on the basics of the court system for the criminal justice majors every spring, or the now-professional-consultant in the education department who teaches one what-you-need-to-know-about-IDEA course online each term because the elementary and special ed programs differ in their timing.
It doesn't matter how matter categories of adjunct faculty you can sort us into. It matters how the voting turns out. It's usually union -YES! and frequently by a huge margin.
Quote from: polly_mer on August 29, 2019, 06:38:31 AM
For the record, I am against being forced to work more with no additional pay and no change in other job duties.
i doubt that very much.
Moderator note: removed baggage.
How long are you going to resist the realities of SPADFY?
Some people are indeed volunteers or otherwise able to work for less money. Good volunteers will get tasks when employees hold out for more money. That doesn't negate the situation that people who need to be paid should walk when the tasks greatly exceed the money being offered.
That situation also doesn't change the reality that certain fields pay far more than other fields because teaching one course on the side for the majors is very different than wanting to be full-time in academia while being involuntarily part-time. That involuntarily part-time situation tends to be very heavily weighted to the humanities and indeed the gen ed requirements.
Quote from: polly_mer on September 04, 2019, 06:18:16 PM
How long are you going to resist the realities of SPADFY?
Some people are indeed volunteers or otherwise able to work for less money. Good volunteers will get tasks when employees hold out for more money. That doesn't negate the situation that people who need to be paid should walk when the tasks greatly exceed the money being offered.
That situation also doesn't change the reality that certain fields pay far more than other fields because teaching one course on the side for the majors is very different than wanting to be full-time in academia while being involuntarily part-time. That involuntarily part-time situation tends to be very heavily weighted to the humanities and indeed the gen ed requirements.
...which are also the departments with greater numbers of adjunct faculty, who then vote for union ratification en masse. The rest of the adjunct population is more mixed in their take on unions, but the vote goes in favor of the union, once it's underway and people get up their nerve by seeing the support around them. And why people who think like you do, without sympathy for the rank and file worker, keep coming back to the discussion for another headache.
The question remains: is it better for the part-time people who want to unionize to have the union be across all the institutions in the region or to continue to go one institution at a time?
A related question is whether unionizing the part-timers will result in overall better treatment for a more stable part-time population who get some professional development support or whether making part-timers more expensive will essentially kill part-time positions in certain fields where armies of poorly paid part-timers exist, especially as the number of students entering college with their gen eds completed increase?
I am genuinely interested in the answers because I'm still in a situation where we have jobs standing open through lack of people willing to learn new things and yet there are large enough numbers of people who would rather be poorly paid academics in untenable positions that they can be exploited as a group.
It's like watching an ongoing 117 car pile up as the next set of cars keep driving at 5 mph into the mass instead of getting off the freeway.
Quote from: polly_mer on September 05, 2019, 06:44:00 AM
The question remains: is it better for the part-time people who want to unionize to have the union be across all the institutions in the region or to continue to go one institution at a time?
A related question is whether unionizing the part-timers will result in overall better treatment for a more stable part-time population who get some professional development support or whether making part-timers more expensive will essentially kill part-time positions in certain fields where armies of poorly paid part-timers exist, especially as the number of students entering college with their gen eds completed increase?
I'd view the bolded part as a good consequence, even if it means that some people no longer continue the work they have been doing.
Though it would seem to be an unstable situation: if the positions all go away, then doesn't the union also go away, and then the schools bring back the poorly paid jobs?
I'm also wondering what is the effective difference between unionization across academic versus by institution. Who would do the negotiating for a contract at a particular school? Who would go out on strike if negotiations break down? How would it help adjuncts at school A if adjuncts at schools B, C and D go on strike?
Quote from: polly_mer on September 05, 2019, 06:44:00 AM
A related question is whether unionizing the part-timers will result in overall better treatment for a more stable part-time population who get some professional development support or whether making part-timers more expensive will essentially kill part-time positions in certain fields where armies of poorly paid part-timers exist, especially as the number of students entering college with their gen eds completed increase?
Yes to both. This is uniformly true across every unionized industry: it's good for anyone with a union job, bad for anyone who now does not have a job that they otherwise would have had, and it drives up costs for customers.
The premise that it's a good thing for everyone in the industry is purely paternalistic: it's removing the agency of potential employees and telling them they would have been stupid/wrong to take the position at the offered wage and that it's in their own interest for them not to be allowed to take the position. Alas, that kind of paternalism is incredibly pervasive -- see also every article about Uber wages, even as the evidence is clear that wages are too high, not too low. (Drivers have wait times between customers during much of the day. The most obvious sign of supply exceeding demand.)
Quote from: pigou on September 05, 2019, 09:28:00 AM
Quote from: polly_mer on September 05, 2019, 06:44:00 AM
A related question is whether unionizing the part-timers will result in overall better treatment for a more stable part-time population who get some professional development support or whether making part-timers more expensive will essentially kill part-time positions in certain fields where armies of poorly paid part-timers exist, especially as the number of students entering college with their gen eds completed increase?
Yes to both. This is uniformly true across every unionized industry: it's good for anyone with a union job, bad for anyone who now does not have a job that they otherwise would have had, and it drives up costs for customers.[/b]
You wouldn't by any chance be beating the bushes for someone in the academic world who is both (1) deeply concerned about the rising cost of higher education, and (2) regrets the degree to which they have been responsible?