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“Time for a New Deal”
for Contingent Academic Labor:
A Report on the Conference on Contingent Academic Labor V
held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Oct. 4-6, 2002
By: Ann Larson

About midway through the COCAL V in Montreal, Quebec, after more than a day of debate about the current state of contingent academic labor in North America, and after several panels addressed everything from mobilizations to academic freedom, a woman from Greensboro, North Carolina stepped up to the microphone. In a bold voice that seemed out of place coming from such a small person, she proclaimed that she was both inspired and disheartened after listening to the day’s presentations. “You see,” she said, “all this talk about how to get people involved and what to strive for once the people are involved is missing an important point and that is that in North Carolina, teachers’ unions are illegal.” The American Association of University Professors representative sitting on the stage reminded the attendees that half of the fifty states currently have laws against the unionization of teachers. This was one of several COCAL V moments that broadened my perspective and helped me see academic labor beyond the boundaries of my own situation, or even beyond the walls of the LIU [Long Island University], a place I love to come to everyday.

It’s only after expressing my affection for LIU that I can begin to list the despicable treatment contingent faculty-this term includes adjuncts and Non-Tenure Track laborers-endure in higher education today. I could rattle off a host of statistics, but perhaps the most important is simply this: at LIU, there are approximately 450 adjunct faculty members, more than double the number of full-timers. This is not out of step with national trends. A large majority of these workers, including those at LIU, have no access to health care and their rate of pay makes the purchase of independent medical insurance prohibitive to say the least. In addition, no adjunct at LIU has access to unemployment benefits or disability insurance. Another way to put this is that globalization trends have finally hit home. When the free market determines everything from which toothpaste you buy to who gets to see a doctor, universities turn into corporations, contingent faculty become “employees” and their students are “customers.” The National Education Association representative at COCAL V called this trend “an erosion of the social contract reflected in a societal change in employment.” In other words, if we oppose globalization and the exploitation of laborers, we have to start at the local level.

One of the most disturbing perspectives to come out of COCAL V, and one most adjuncts do not talk about nearly enough, is the issue of job security. An adjunct has none. Every semester adjuncts, dedicated to their students and committed to their professions, wonder if they will be employed. Sometimes, classes are cancelled at the last minute, leaving teachers scrambling to find work. I submit that this lack of job security would not be tolerated at many other levels of society. People with families and bills and responsibilities deserve steady, secure employment. Many of the schools represented at COCAL V reported that their administration successfully avoided providing job security to contingent laborers by reducing a fundamental right to mere semantics. These administrators insisted that they did not want to provide job security because they did not want to compromise adjuncts’ “flexibility.” These administrators also knew that their contingent laborers were not active enough in their union to challenge this rhetoric.

LIU is a place of political activism. The professors and administrators-both in the courses they teach and in their work outside the university-have shown that they care about labor and human rights. But the fact that more than half of the university’s teachers have no job security, and could be “let go” any day for any reason seems not to faze them.

Another reason job security is so important is because the most crucial tenet of a teacher’s employment is academic freedom. Adjuncts don’t have any. The stipulations of their employment keep them constantly aware that their jobs may depend on them toeing the party line, or censoring their remarks, or just shutting up all together. After 9/11, there have been more than enough examples of professors whose jobs were suddenly in jeopardy after something they said or wrote. Academic freedom is one of the fundamental rights a university can offer its workers, and adjuncts don’t have any. Without job security, there is no academic freedom. End of story.

What do we need to do at LIU? We need a vision. We need an alternative vision to the one proposed by those in power. Their vision is clear and we see it play out day by day. What is ours? We need to re-establish the notion of a university as, not only the place where freedom and democracy play out, but where those liberties are conceived. We need to do a better job of articulating the connection between job security, benefits, and freedom and democracy for the people of our nation. We need goals. We need to see action as a means to an end, not an end in itself. We need to encourage adjuncts to take advantage of their right to vote in their union. We need more adjuncts on the Executive Committee and at the bargaining table this summer.

At COCAL V, there were plenty of examples of organizations that have won real gains for their constituents. At the University of Washington, for example, adjuncts get full health benefits after working one quarter at half time. They are currently bargaining for unemployment insurance and sick leave. Adjuncts at Montreal’s Concordia University, where the conference was held, had no benefits before1995. Today they have health care that supplements Canada’s national system, sick leave without loss of pay, and short-term disability. They are currently preparing to negotiate for an added supplement to the health care supplement they already won-one that would cover things like braces, acupuncture, and orthopedic shoes.

These examples represent the vast spectrum of the state of contingent academic labor in North America. From the teacher in North Carolina who must lobby to change the law before she can begin to organize, to Concordia University where they have completely changed the face of part-time labor on their campus since 1995. Unfortunately, though there are no laws preventing LIU adjuncts from organizing, we are near the low end of this spectrum. With no access to benefits, job security, or academic freedom, we might as well be barred by law. In fact, recent problems with the payroll bureaucracy on this campus which resulted in dozens of adjuncts not receiving their pay checks attest to just how unimportant adjunct concerns are to the administrators. They have repeatedly been in breach of the Collective Bargaining Agreement without suffering any consequences. At the most recent (and best-attended) Adjunct Committee meeting, a full-time professor noted that payroll problems have been a staple at this campus for fifteen years. The conference theme at COCAL V comes to mind: “It’s time for a new deal.”

 

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