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From
(NAFFE)
Mainichi Daily News
August 18, 2003, Monday
SECTION: Page 8; DOMESTIC
LENGTH: 453 words
HEADLINE: Japan's part-time lecturers getting raw deal
BODY:
A third of all part-time lecturers in Japan's universities and junior
colleges earn under 2 million yen a year -- five times less than professors
and full-time lecturers, a survey has found.
And
almost half of them have had their job contracts terminated, the survey,
conducted by three unions of university part-time lecturers in the Tokyo,
Osaka-Kobe, and Kyoto and Shiga areas, revealed. The poll, carried out
between November last year and March this year took replies from 482
part-time lecturers and arranged data from 302 of them who did not have
another main job. The average age of the part-time lecturers was 42.4,
and they had 10.3 years experience on average. Overall, each of them
worked at an average of 2.7 schools, holding 9.1 classes a week lasting
an average of 13.7 hours.
Yearly
wages for the lecturers stood at an average of 2.87 million yen, but
34 percent earned under 2 million yen a year. Professors and full-time
lecturers earned about five times more than this. Most universities
offered the part-timers no expenses for materials, and they spent an
average of 290,000 yen a year out of their own pockets on buying materials
and other items, the survey found. A total of 48 percent of the lecturers
said they had experienced having their contracts terminated, for such
reasons as that the number of classes had dropped. Thirty-four percent
of them had experienced academic harassment, being hassled by full-time
lecturers or their superiors. In the survey, several part-time lecturers
said their classes had suddenly been dropped, and that they were subjected
to unfair demands then threatened with dismissal when they refused.
Ministry
of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology figures list a
total of 66,000 part-time lecturers in Japan but ministry officials
estimate the actual number at about one-third of this. Many of the part-time
lecturers work on one-year contracts that are renewed. It is common
for universities to bring in full time lecturers as part-timers in highly
specialized subjects, but in language courses and other subjects that
have a large number of classes, the institutions often advertise for
candidates to
fulfill cheap, part-time positions. About 40 percent of classes at private
universities are thought to be filled by part-time teachers. The level
of classes that students demand from full-time lecturers and part-time
lecturers is the same, but in spite of this there is a huge wage disparity,
a representative of the Union of University Part-time Lecturers in Osaka-Kobe
Area said. There is a problem with the structure of university education
that treats part-time lecturers as cheap labor.
(Mainichi
Shimbun, Japan, Aug. 18, 2003)
LOAD-DATE: August 19, 2003
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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