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Campus
Equity Week’s Offspring Takes a Few Steps:
Contingent Faculty Organizing in Metro Chicago
by Joe Berry
(Working
USA, Spring 2003)
By
2000, efforts to organize and mobilize contingent faculty (adjuncts,
part timers, grad employees, and full-time temporaries) had reached
a level that it seemed inevitable that a national network linking these
efforts would happen. There were state-level organizing efforts in California,
Washington , and elsewhere, metro organizing in Boston, and growing
grad organizing nearly everywhere. There were changes in the leadership
of two of the largest faculty local unions (the California Faculty Association
in the huge California State University system and the Professional
Staff Congress in the City University of New York) that promised more
attention and activism on contingent faculty issues.
The
national network was gestated at the national Coalition of Contingent
Academic Labor (COCAL) meetings in Boston in 1999 and in San Jose in
2001; it was paralleled by the establishment of a foundation-funded
coalition of contingent worker unions and other groups called NAFFE,
the National (now North American) Alliance for Fair Employment, whose
Campus Action Group included many COCAL organizers as well as veterans
of the successful statewide activities (Part-time Equity Week) in the
California Community Colleges. This fertilization produced a plan to
hold a week of strategic actions on campuses across the US and Canada
in October 2001, to be called Campus Equity Week.
This
article focuses on the results of Campus Equity Week (CEW) as they impacted
the higher education organizing efforts in Chicago since last October.
Metro
Chicago, sometimes called Chicagoland by its denizens, may well be the
workplace for upwards of 20,000 contingent academics, counting only
those in traditional academic institutions. No one really knows the
number and therein lies a major part of the story. Since historically,
the only truly accurate counts of contingent academics have been done
by unions or in the context of organizing drives, and since the vast
majority are unorganized in the Chicago area, it is almost axiomatic
that the numbers are unclear and almost all estimates are low. With
over 100 institutions of higher education, and many ancillary workplaces,
contingent academics probably make up one of the ten largest discrete
workforces in Metro Chicago. The fact that many of them are part-time
and multiply employed does not diminish the significance of this fact
and may increase it since their very instability and movement gives
them a broader knowledge of the sector in which they work than is common
for workers generally. Second, their dispersed individual employment
puts them in contact with a much wider variety of people -- namely students
and colleagues, not to mention bosses -- than is normal in the workforce
generally. In short, the contingent academic workforce has been both
a sleeping and invisible elephant in the living room.
Campus
Equity Week, while not the first cause by any means, was in fact the
marker to demonstrate to all who cared to look that the elephant was
waking up and thereby making itself visible as well.
The
contingent academic workforce in Chicago is both more mixed and more
evenly divided as to institutions than is the case on either the East
or West Coast. There are large segments of public employment (community
college, state university and research university), private non-profit
university and colleges (religious and secular, university, small liberal
arts, and specialty), and also one of the largest for-profit sectors
in the nation, led by DeVry Institute. As the new home of many immigrants,
and the financial and business center of the Midwest, Chicago is also
the site of a great deal of non-credit adult education, especially ESL
which is delivered in an uncountable (and uncounted) number of contexts
and employment relationships. It goes without saying that these sub-workforces
overlap, flow together, pool separately and morph in infinite variation.
However, these overlaps have not resulted in anything resembling market-driven
standardization of wages, benefits, conditions or legal employment relationship.
Wages, for instance, range from under $1,300 to over $5,000 for a three-unit
semester course.
This
workforce is overwhelmingly unorganized, with the exception of a minority
of contingent academics in the various state universities, partial units
in a few community colleges, one for-profit trade school, and, recently,
two of the private non-profit institutions. This is despite the fact
that nearly all of the tenure-track faculty in the public institutions
have been successfully unionized for years, some of them even before
the collective bargaining law of 1984. Part of the reason for the lack
of contingent unionization is a very restrictive public education labor
relations law that has been further narrowed by negative court decisions.
The other part, however, is the persistent lack of interest, and occasional
hostility, shown by full-time tenure-track faculty union leadership.
Ever
since the 1980s, the idea of organizing contingent academics Chicago
metro-wide has bubbled on the back burner (Suhrbur, 1998, and ) but
only with the late 1990s organizing of Columbia College, followed by
Roosevelt University, and then College of DuPage and Campus Equity Week,
did this discussion break into the open, at least for most activists.
In
Chicago, the Campus Equity Week Coalition in 2001 put together a series
of activities including public hearings, petitioning and tabling on
campuses, demonstrations, teach-ins and forums, concerts and parties,
media events and outreach; all culminating in a conference. The Chicago
CEW Conference, besides speakers and workshops (and Barbara Wolf presenting
her new film on contingent organizing, “A Simple Matter of Justice”)
concluded with the decision to continue the work of Campus Equity Week
through the vehicle of the creation of Chicago Coalition of Contingent
Academic Labor (COCAL), based partially on the Boston COCAL Metro Strategy
model.
Campus
Equity Week in Chicago demonstrated three important facts. One: that
it is very, very difficult to get contingent academics physically together
in one place at one time, but that it is relatively easy to gain their
active support in other ways. Two: that active support can constitute
sufficient pressure to force the historically warring faculty unions
in the Chicago area, and Illinois generally, to sit down at the same
table. Three: it demonstrated that as a practical matter, not merely
theoretically, any victory was everybody’s victory.
Since
Campus Equity Week in October, both the level of activity among contingent
academics and the attention that it has drawn have increased well beyond
the expectations of any of the organizers. The first official meeting
of the open steering committee of COCAL attracted not only virtually
100% of all those who said they would come, but also representatives
-- for the first time -- of all three layers (state, national and local)
of the AFL-CIO. Their attention was no doubt heightened by the fact
of the recent organizing victory at College of DuPage where a minority
contingent faculty bargaining unit was established subsequent to a years’
long grassroots campaign that linked up with the Illinois Education
Association in its final months. As perhaps the largest community college
on one campus in the United States, College of DuPage necessarily plays
a flagship role.
Another
important development in the weeks following CEW was the increased activity
and militancy of the Illinois Federation of Teachers-affiliated Graduate
Employees Organization struggle for union recognition at the University
of Illinois. At the Urbana campus a work stoppage shut down many buildings
and at the Chicago campus GEO staged a solidarity sit-in at the president’s
office.
Perhaps
most important, one of the largest groups of contingent faculty actually
mobilized in some way by CEW were part-timers in the City Colleges of
Chicago, who constitute the largest single workforce in the sector and,
naturally, also the largest unorganized one. When, at a meeting during
the run-up to Campus Equity Week, over 100 of these folk signed petitions
for better wages and working conditions literally under the noses of
the Chancellor and his assistant, it was clear to all in the room that
people were ready to move. Outrage had finally overcome fear.
In
the wake of Campus Equity Week and the forming of COCAL, events in the
City Colleges of Chicago have outraced both expectations and structure.
Activists brought together by CEW have begun an independent organizing
effort, now named City Colleges Contingent Labor Organizing Committee
(CCCLOC) and are now building a network of the upwards of 2,000 unorganized
teachers throughout the seven colleges. This increased attention and
activity, as has always been the case in the labor movement, has brought
with it new questions, controversies, rivalries and difficulties. The
problem is no longer starting some motion and gaining some attention:
the problem is now how to steer and develop the activity and project
a strategy and a vision for the future. This new plate of problems is
desperately to be hoped for in all areas of the country where the movement
has not yet emerged. Nevertheless, the new plate is immediately full,
of problems as well as opportunities.
Old
organizational rivalries have reemerged as the reality of organizing
has increased. Additionally, differing conceptions of unionism and organizing
are now in play. On the one hand, there is traditional, dues-unit, top-down,
staff driven, business unionism, with its focus upon building stable,
even if small, bargaining units as quickly and cheaply as possible.
On the other hand is a vision of grass roots, do-it-yourself, participatory
organizing which focuses upon volunteer organizers building a movement
encompasing all unorganized faculty, not just those most likely to successfully
gain legal bargaining rights in the short run. The coming months and
years will, of course, tell the tale, but it seems a safe bet that Chicago-area
higher education is being permanently altered in the process.
References:
Suhrbur,
Tom. “Adjunct Faculty Association of Chicago, IEA/NEA.”
unpublished paper (1998).
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