Unionization across all academia, not by institution?: Vox article

[polly_mer]

SEIU Leader Calls for Organizing Unions at the Level of the Business Sector; Calls Company-by-Company Organization Outmoded

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?

[ciao_yall]

SEIU Leader Calls for Organizing Unions at the Level of the Business Sector; Calls Company-by-Company Organization Outmoded

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.

[mahagonny]

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?

[pigou]

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.)

[mahagonny]

;

[mahagonny]

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]

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.

[pigou]

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.

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.

[mahagonny]

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.

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.

[polly_mer]

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.

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.

[downer]

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.

[mahagonny]

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? 

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.

[polly_mer]

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:

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

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:

* 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. 

Googling to bring up that Barnard union link also brought up the necessity of being able to strike as a credible action. 

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.

[mahagonny]

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.

[Hibush]

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.

[polly_mer]

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.