CUNY Adjuncts Refusing to Teach Spring 2020

[marshwiggle]

I have a lot of respect for the 7korstrike people at CUNY because they do need to either formally strike or informally cause a disruption to get the price up.  Or, CUNY will be doing something interesting to address a lack of cheap, good enough labor in terms of requirements waivers, limiting admissions, or partnering with other institutions for otherwise empty seats.

And how about the mythical hordes of adjuncts who works alongside these strikers who have a full time job and don't need the money and would, in theory, bust the strike by working? You respect this person also?

You mean the people with full-time jobs (i.e. who the positions are advertised for) who would bust the "strike" (which is not supported by the union and therefore illegal) by working (i.e. doing what they agreed to do int their contracts)?

I fully support people who feel that their job is unsatisfactory and quit or don't re-apply. If there is no-one willing to work under those conditions, the conditions will change. People shouldn't base their own happiness on the actions of other people whose actions they cannot control.

Well looks we've found that fault line between you and Polly. Solidarity is a bitch isn't it?

Polly is free to correct me, but I don't see that we're particularly disagreeing. As she said,

"they do need to either formally strike or informally cause a disruption"

A formal strike would be legal. Any informal disruption which does not break any laws is, by definition, possible.

She also said

"CUNY will be doing something interesting to address a lack of cheap, good enough labor"

If there aren't enough people to work at the offered price, things will HAVE to change. I have always agreed with this.

[mahagonny]

Polly claims to respect the proposed strike and the people carrying it out (although I don't find it completely plausible) while you are bristling at the idea of those uppity adjuncts promoting a work stoppage and having a promising plan to change the status quo and challenge your beloved college administrators. Of course, neither of you has to do anything, so it's all just talking.

[Wahoo Redux]

A big part of the adjunct problem is that good, well-qualified people will teach for peanuts along side lousy, unqualified people who are just credentialed enough to stand in front of a classroom and nothing more----colleges have no incentive for making adjuncts anything but adjuncts, even when (as in our school paper) the problem is profiled in a very public manner. 

The tenure track needs to make adjuncts out to be inferior, or at least, let the perception exist without disrupting it. Otherwise their pay and path to ultimate job security can't be justified. It is a system that undermines itself.

I personally have never run into this.  Most TT folks I know do respect those adjuncts who deserve respect. 

Many adjuncts do all the things that TT folks do----publish, service, teach well, earn terminal degrees----but there are a number of adjuncts who, as Polly says, simply check a box-----unqualified (some wouldn't have the qualifications to teach high school), not good at their jobs, never publish more than a post on Facebook.  The latter folks do not have anyone's respect, even the people who hire them.  These people have jobs because they are cheap and expendable.

They should have the respect of the TT for doing the job they are (barely) paid for. Teaching the class in a satisfactory way. Publishing is not part of the job. An adjunct should not be expected to be qualified for a job (TT) that someone else, not himself, has.
Traditionally, adjuncts have been identified as practitioners in the field, the business. Artists, lawyers, chemists et al. They are not there for research. They may not have the terminal degree, but they know the field. They work in it. That's how they stay current. Some of the weakest adjuncts I've seen are good old boys from the faculty club. PhD, but not in the field in which they are hired to adjunct. Tenured through another department. And they certainly never published in that field. And now everybody's getting their PhD. It's not as rare as it was.

Yes.  I did not mean that adjuncts should publish or have a PhD as part of their jobs----I was just pointing out that many actually do publish, sometimes more than the TT faculty at their institutions, and that many have the same credentials as the TT faculty on paper.

And yes.  Many are very fine teachers and have the respect of their colleagues.   

[polly_mer]

Polly claims to respect the proposed strike and the people carrying it out (although I don't find it completely plausible) while you are bristling at the idea of those uppity adjuncts promoting a work stoppage and having a promising plan to change the status quo and challenge your beloved college administrators. Of course, neither of you has to do anything, so it's all just talking.

Why do you think Marshwiggle and I disagree?  People who aren't being paid enough by a lot should flat out refuse to do the job.  When people can't be found willing to do the job for peanuts, then the pay rate will either have to be raised or the job has to be changed (e.g., the institution accepts fewer students, the institution changes the general education requirements or grants a ton of waivers, full-timers are given the choice of teaching more without a substantial increase in pay or finding another job).  A union can help only to the extent that people being represented by the union agree on what the union should do and the resources exist to meet the union's demands. 

This case is very interesting because the union negotiated a crummy deal and the represented people are unwilling to just accept the crummy deal.  However, from the information provided, what the represented people want is not something the union is going to be able to negotiate because it's just too much money.  The administration will have to make other changes instead of trying to find enough money to maintain the current number of adjuncts and pay them all substantially better.  I'm very interested to see how the administration changes the structure or limits enrollment or whether enough people who aren't currently adjuncts can be found to replace those who have decided enough is enough.

I absolutely respect people who say, I won't work for that pittance because I am a professional and my pay rate is $X.  However, just because an individual states a pay rate of $X doesn't mean hundreds of other people won't say, I'll do it for some value substantially less than $X including free.  Again, if hiring manager can find good enough people willing to work for much less, then few managers are going to pay more than the going rate because that money will be needed elsewhere.

When "everyone" who can do the job insists on a much higher going rate, then that going rate goes up.  I saw that difference between filling a humanities slot (almost always at $1.8k per 3 credit class) and science with labs classes (almost always about $5k instead of the $2.4k based on the published rate).

In my current job, HR keeps wondering why some of these slots are hard to fill.  Well, when Google and other competitors offer $100k + benefits on the spot at job fairs for people who will graduate in May with their BS and we're saying, go look at website for our fabulous jobs that pay $80k and take a good six months before we complete the interview process, then we've brought a bar of soap to a gun fight.

It's good to remember one's principles and value one's effort/knowledge/skills appropriately.  It's also a very good idea to know how one stacks up against the competition and what the actual going rate for those same effort/knowledge/skills are.  Being average tends to mean one will be paid the average, even if that's far below what one wants or needs to do the job.  As one of my colleagues puts it, being a novelist feeds his soul; being a physicist feeds his family. 

[mahagonny]

However, from the information provided, what the represented people want is not something the union is going to be able to negotiate because it's just too much money. 

But obviously the information provided isn't enough to know anything like that.

I'm very interested to see how the administration changes the structure or limits enrollment or whether enough people who aren't currently adjuncts can be found to replace those who have decided enough is enough.

I bet you are. A disruption in the steady supply of cheap labor that you can easily throw stones at? Bummer!

Why do you think Marshwiggle and I disagree? 

Let's skip it. I did care, but I don't now. Sorry to have mentioned it.

[writingprof]

So CUNY is looking for spring '20 adjuncts?  How much do they pay, and can I teach online?  I have always wanted to be a scab.

[mahagonny]

So CUNY is looking for spring '20 adjuncts?  How much do they pay, and can I teach online?  I have always wanted to be a scab.

Actually, the Janus ruling means you don't have to be a member of the union to get the pay that they negotiate. This could force unions like the one at SUNY to do something for adjunct faculty, as they now have the option not to pay dues. things are not always what they seem to be at first glance...

[polly_mer]

So CUNY is looking for spring '20 adjuncts?  How much do they pay, and can I teach online?  I have always wanted to be a scab.

The complaints are regarding a minimum of $3222/three-credit course with a 2% raise per year for the next few years.

The goal by the loudest voices is to make that $3222 become $7000.  Mahagonny thinks more than doubling the minimum rate to more than the current maximum rate and doing so for 60% of the courses currently being taught needs a true mathematical calculation instead of just the assertion that that's a lot of money.  If CUNY had more than double the current adjunct budget lying around, then they wouldn't be paying adjuncts slightly above the national average for 4-year institutions and they probably would have more full-timers instead of relying so heavily on part-timers who clearly need the money enough that they are willing to risk losing their jobs and are recommending waiting tables as a substitute for the spring term.

If CUNY needed to look hard for good-enough adjuncts, then they would already be paying adjuncts comparable to the NYC-based elite institutions that the adjuncts keep citing as being standard pay above $7k.

[mahagonny]

What comes of years of letting looters infiltrate government.

[polly_mer]

What comes of years of letting looters infiltrate government.

So where were the unions when the looters started doing their thing?

Who was complicit in taking the crap wages while quietly saying, I deserve better?

It's nice that people are standing up now, but it'll be interesting to see whether the individuals stand together on the plank of professionals deserve more than this or whether enough people will say, that looks good to me; where do I sign?

I still remember the local union at a bank that went on strike and put their demands in the local media with the result of the bank receiving plenty of applications from people who said the equivalent of, whoo! that's better than my current deal.

[mahagonny]

What comes of years of letting looters infiltrate government.

So where were the unions when the looters started doing their thing?

Looks like...negotiating for more for the tenure track and treating the adjunct faculty the same way the administration does. As someone to be used and scorned.

[writingprof]

So CUNY is looking for spring '20 adjuncts?  How much do they pay, and can I teach online?  I have always wanted to be a scab.

The complaints are regarding a minimum of $3222/three-credit course with a 2% raise per year for the next few years.

The goal by the loudest voices is to make that $3222 become $7000. 

$3,222 is thirty percent more than adjuncts make at my place, and we have far more willing adjuncts than we have courses to assign.  One could argue, in fact, that we've set the price of labor at a higher rate than the market demands.  My guess is that CUNY has, too, and though that argument won't mean anything to the adjuncts, it explains why they will lose.

[mahagonny]

So CUNY is looking for spring '20 adjuncts?  How much do they pay, and can I teach online?  I have always wanted to be a scab.

The complaints are regarding a minimum of $3222/three-credit course with a 2% raise per year for the next few years.

The goal by the loudest voices is to make that $3222 become $7000. 

$3,222 is thirty percent more than adjuncts make at my place, and we have far more willing adjuncts than we have courses to assign.  One could argue, in fact, that we've set the price of labor at a higher rate than the market demands.  My guess is that CUNY has, too, and though that argument won't mean anything to the adjuncts, it explains why they will lose.

If they 'lose' it will be because the tenure track and other administration care about their own juicy salaries than they do about the students. But I do like you writingprof. At least you don't pretend to be a liberal.
Well, I suppose if you're around NYC in the spring there will be plenty of well read waitresses you could meet.

[Wahoo Redux]

So CUNY is looking for spring '20 adjuncts?  How much do they pay, and can I teach online?  I have always wanted to be a scab.

The complaints are regarding a minimum of $3222/three-credit course with a 2% raise per year for the next few years.

The goal by the loudest voices is to make that $3222 become $7000. 

$3,222 is thirty percent more than adjuncts make at my place, and we have far more willing adjuncts than we have courses to assign.  One could argue, in fact, that we've set the price of labor at a higher rate than the market demands.  My guess is that CUNY has, too, and though that argument won't mean anything to the adjuncts, it explains why they will lose.

When we taught in small-farm-town upper-cold-state uni they sometimes couldn't find qualified adjuncts and actually had to hire people with phys-ed masters degrees to teach a gen ed or two.  I cannot imagine that is the case anywhere in New York.

[writingprof]

But I do like you writingprof. At least you don't pretend to be a liberal.

Thank you. That's true. And you're right, too, to suggest that there's a lot of pretending going on here and in the broader culture. Lots of people are progressive until it's their speech being shouted down, their beliefs being dismissed as bigotry, or their industry being ruined by social "justice." Or, to put it another way, a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged by his own political allies.