The Chronicle: The Proper Advocates for Adjuncts
Are faculty organizations adequately representing adjuncts’ interests? asks Keith Hoeller, a co-founder of the Washington Part-Time Faculty Association who teaches philosophy in Washington’s community-college system.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i41/41b01101.htm
From the issue dated June 16, 2006
The Proper Advocates for Adjuncts
By KEITH HOELLER
Higher-education institutions now employ half a million adjunct professors nationwide. In most cases, the working conditions that those adjuncts endure are abysmal. According to the American Association of University Professors, “part-time non-tenure-track faculty are paid approximately 64 percent less per hour” than their full-time counterparts. Many adjuncts do not enjoy health-care or retirement benefits, and few have any job security from quarter to quarter, let alone from year to year.
In the last decade, the three major faculty organizations — the AAUP, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association — have emphasized organizing and collective bargaining as the means to improve the lot of adjuncts. They have all issued strong policy papers in support of adjuncts and begun to actively recruit them. Their newsletters regularly hail the formation of a new bargaining unit, usually expressing hope about the many gains adjuncts can now expect.
The AAUP deserves special mention for its adjunct advocacy. As well as placing adjuncts on its national committees, the association has helped create both the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor and Campus Equity Week, coalitions of organizers and activists who are working together to counter the exploitation of adjunct faculty members. The AAUP has also established a national Committee on Contingent Faculty and the Profession and staffed it with both part-time and full-time activists dedicated to equality. That committee has encouraged regional organizing in Boston, which has resulted in adjunct unions at Emerson College and Suffolk University.
Yet several questions remain: Since the number of adjunct faculty members began to grow rapidly in the 1970s, why did all three faculty groups begin to vigorously organize adjuncts only in the late 1990s? Why have adjunct gains been so modest, even where adjunct faculty members have been unionized for years? And why have so few adjuncts chosen to join those organizations?
In response to the first question, labor leaders often cite the 1980 NLRB v. Yeshiva University decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that faculty members, through shared governance, were in fact part of management and therefore not entitled to the benefits of collective bargaining. But Yeshiva applied only to private colleges and universities, not public ones, and no one has ever claimed that adjunct professors are management. So Yeshiva cannot be the real reason for the failure to organize adjuncts until recently.
Still more puzzling is the fact that even where adjuncts have been unionized for decades, their plight is little better than unorganized migrant farm workers. For example, since the 1970s, the AFT and the NEA have represented adjuncts in the community colleges in the state of Washington, where I have taught for 15 years. Yet we still earn only 57 cents on the dollar compared to our full-time colleagues. Nearly half of the adjuncts do not receive health or retirement benefits, and most have little, if any, job security. Our classes are regularly canceled at the last minute, either because of low enrollment or because a full-time professor had low enrollment and took our class to fulfill his or her contractual obligations.
At each college, our union contracts forbid us from teaching full time, even though the very same contracts allow full-time faculty members to teach extra courses over and above their full-time load. And while all 34 of the local unions have bargained incremental step raises for full-time professors, half have failed to bargain any increments for their part-timers, while the others have bargained only a few tiny steps, which I have nicknamed “dinkrements.” From 1999 to 2004, full-time faculty members received 90 percent of almost $15-million for such raises, even though adjuncts taught nearly half of all classes.
That points to the fundamental reason for the continuing second-class status of adjuncts: Across the country, they have been organized into organizations run for and by full-time tenured faculty members. It would be safe to say that adjuncts have yet to reach even token leadership positions within the three faculty organizations, whether at the local, state, or national level. Even when adjuncts do hold leadership positions, they are often hand-picked, or elected, by a majority of full-timers. Such mixed bargaining units are the rule nationwide, with a few notable exceptions. While the AFT has 135 higher-education local bargaining units, only 17 consist solely of part-timers.
The AFT’s “Standards of Good Practice in the Employment of Part-Time/Adjunct Faculty,” ratified in 2002, contained a set of eight basic principles that the union called a “bill of rights” for adjuncts. It tried to confront the problems of mixed unions, stating that “Part-time/adjunct faculty, often treated as second-class citizens at work, never should be treated as second-class citizens in their own union.” The Chronicle reported that the AFT document was supposed to contain a section stating that “local unions should create mechanisms for full- and part-time faculty members to settle disputes that arise over employment, compensation, and professional responsibilities.” But, unfortunately, no specific mechanisms of enforcement appeared in the final document.
Meanwhile, part-time faculty members who publicly support ideas opposed by tenured faculty members face serious risks. Many adjuncts fear they will lose their jobs if they become politically active, and some have reported that they, in fact, have lost their jobs.
In short, we adjuncts have not yet achieved equity even within our own unions. Where the adjuncts and the full-timers share a “community of interests,” that may not be problematic. But where we have a “conflict of interest,” the adjuncts are sure to lose with full-time faculty members in control. Throughout academe, the tenured professors are the ones who hire and fire the contingent professors — in other words, they are our bosses. Moreover, adjunct professors and tenured professors are often in competition with each other over which classes to teach, which classes are canceled, who gets raises, and who doesn’t. The full-time faculty members may even directly benefit from having large numbers of adjuncts on their campuses, as that ensures that tenured faculty members are highly unlikely to be laid off, even in an emergency — adjunct faculty members will be let go instead. Adjuncts provide, in effect, a buffer to the loss of tenured jobs.
Such conflicts of interest may explain why the unions have gone to such great lengths to keep adjuncts from forming our own unions and representing ourselves. In Washington State, the unions have secured a ruling from our Public Employment Relations Commission mandating only one faculty union per college. Members of the AFL-CIO are forbidden from raiding another member, and the AFT and the NEA, which have been discussing a merger for years, also have a noncompete agreement. Both the AFT and the NEA are also quickly moving to an “agency-shop” approach, whereby adjuncts must either join the union and pay dues or pay the union a representation fee.
Yet adjuncts and full-timers cannot coexist in the same unions unless both their similarities and their differences are honestly acknowledged. Union “solidarity” does not mean that one group is dominant and another group is subservient.
In their paper, “Best Practices for Assuring the Rights of Part-Time Faculty Within Unions,” Michael Dembrow and David Rives of the Portland Community College Faculty Federation of the AFT outline the pros and cons of mixed versus separate bargaining units for adjuncts and point out that “Many part-time faculty are profoundly unhappy” with mixed unions. Their union seriously considered two separate, parallel executive boards before deciding on “a merged structure with an equal number of representatives allocated to each group, and with several positions … open to either,” and in which “only part-timers vote for those offices designated part-time and only full-timers for the full-time representatives.”
The AAUP, AFT, and NEA should all develop strong policy statements specifying how adjuncts can achieve equal treatment within mixed bargaining units. If they are serious about equality for adjunct professors, they will not hesitate to guarantee that these same professors will be treated equally by their own unions. The national organizations should also develop compliance mechanisms to ensure their policies are followed by their state and local chapters. The best way to do that would be to create ombudsmen positions to investigate complaints from adjuncts who feel their rights have been violated by their unions.
Otherwise, adjuncts should insist on representing themselves and not have the full-time faculty members continue to decide their salaries, benefits, and working conditions. When the American colonists objected to British rule with the slogan, “No taxation without representation,” Britain replied that the colonists had “virtual” representation in Parliament, which ought to be sufficient. Of course, that was not satisfactory to the colonists, who rebelled for the purpose of forming a government in which they could represent themselves. If the faculty organizations do not move quickly to enforce their own adjunct policy statements and to restructure themselves to allow the adjuncts direct representation, they will soon find their adjunct subjects will have no choice but to start their own revolution and create their own national union.
Keith Hoeller is co-founder (with Teresa Knudsen) of the Washington Part-Time Faculty Association, as well as a member of the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association. He serves on the AAUP’s Committee on Contingent Faculty and the Profession. He teaches philosophy in Washington’s community college system.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 52, Issue 41, Page B11
Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
Subscribe | About The Chronicle | Contact us | Terms of use | Privacy policy | Help
Follow
