New issue launch Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor #35 (2024-2025)
Articles in Workplace #35 address a variety of labour issues on campus and beyond, including the first in a series of articles by graduate student participants in the Global Labour Research Centre Symposium at York University.
Find the Workplace #35 here: https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/workplace/index
Posted in Academic freedom, Academic Labor, Contingent labor, Corporate University, Critical University Studies, Diversity, Employment rights, Equity, Ethics, Faculty, Publications, Research, Solidarity, Strikes, Strikes & Labor Disputes
Tagged global labor supply, Global Labour Research Centre Symposium, migration
You are invited to submit proposals for a special issue of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor focusing on Third Space labor in higher education. Despite most colleges and universities’ equity and inclusion commitments, labor in higher education is organized, valued, and supported along a false and exclusionary dichotomy. On one side, the “academic” domain — occupied by faculty — is the site of expertise, critical nuance, and knowledge production. On the other, the “non-academic” domain — occupied by staff — is the site of non-intellectual and largely replaceable managerial activity. This labor binary underpins most aspects of university life, radiating into a culture of exclusion regarding professional support systems, agency in governance structures, labor contracts, and policy environments.
Although this dichotomy pervades almost all college campuses, the nature of academic labor is far more complex (Stoller, 2021). Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, colleges and universities have increasingly depended upon what Whitchurch terms Third Space academic labor (Whitchurch, 2013).
Working through problems of division and exploitation between so-called First and Third Worlds, Bhabha (1990; 2004) introduced the concept of Third Space as a creative, disruptive space of cultural production. Following Bhabha, in social theory Third Space has been used to resolve a range of binaries through the conceptualization of identities that trouble conventional ways of being and behaving. Scholars have used Third Space to examine disability, race, gender, and sexuality, where fluid identities disrupt rigid social categorizations and the cultural hierarchies that inevitably follow. Third Space identities are risky and dangerous because they span and complicate defined cultural categories. They are also spaces of creativity and innovation that open new cultural possibilities (Soja and Hooper, 1993).
Whitchurch uses Third Space to identify a non-binary social class within higher education: emerging groups of professionals who disrupt the false distinction between “academic” and “non-academic.” Third Space professionals work in diverse areas of the institution, such as academic advising, writing programs and centers, quantitative reasoning centers, honors programs, first-year experience and transitions programs, women’s and LGBTQ centers, accessibility resources, and teaching and learning centers among others.
By spanning, interweaving, and disrupting traditional notions of academic labor, Third Space professionals bring tremendous value to their institutions and students. They hold deep academic expertise in teaching and learning, increasing the university’s capacity for immersive and engaged pedagogies (Ho, 2000; Gibbs and Coffey, 2004). They also support the DEI missions of colleges and universities. Almost all Third Space professions developed in response to traditional faculty being unable or unwilling to serve students from marginalized, minoritized, and under-resourced backgrounds (Astin, 1971; Boquet, 1999; Carino, 1996; Groark and McCall, 2018). Because of their organizational positionality and academic expertise, they uniquely understand the student learning experience, and they are positioned to advocate for policy, structural, or curricular changes needed to create more equitable learning environments. Third Space professionals work across departmental lines and can identify and develop opportunities for cross-campus partnerships and interdisciplinary collaborations (Bickford & Whisnant, 2010). They create new forms of scholarship (Eatman, 2012, 2014) and have pluralistic forms of scholarly impact (Arguinis, Shapiro, Antonacopoulou, & Cummings, 2014). They advance multiple university goals, often using scholarly approaches to improve a campus’s understanding of an issue and use their knowledge to develop praxis-based scholarship that shapes national and international change movements (Janke, 2019). Because they have advanced degrees and often teach and conduct research, they also enhance the college’s portfolio and can enrich its curriculum.
Like other non-binary identities, Third Space professionals fall outside normative social categories and therefore face interpersonal, cultural, and structural challenges specific to their work and professional identities. Their work is consistently miscategorized within the academy’s false labor binary, resulting in it being reduced to a “mere” administrative activity (Stefani & Matthew, 2002; Green & Little, 2017), or an “illegitimate” form of scholarship (Rowland et al., 1998; Harland & Staniforth, 2003). Faculty often frame Third Space professional contributions in oppositional (rather than complementary) terms (Handal, 2008). Because they are coded as “non-academic” and not tied to “home” departments, their expertise is rendered invisible in the epistemic economy of the university (Solomon et al., 2006). They rarely have access to institutional support structures for their academic work (e.g., teaching, research, grants, and fellowships), although their contracts often include these activities as part of their professional duties (Bickford and Whisnant, 2010). Third Space professionals are often barred from receiving institutional recognition, such as institutional designations, named professorships, and teaching and research awards, simply because of their class category (Post, Ward, Longo, & Saltmarsh, 2016). Despite their academic expertise and connection to the teaching and research mission of the university, they are systematically excluded from university governance structures (Bessette, 2020a). They also have no clear pathways for professional growth (Kim, 2020; Bessette, 2020b) and yet are often criticized for “abandoning” their institutions for professional gain. Because their labor often performs a “helping” function, it is often coded as “feminine” and devalued as a result (Tipper, 1999; Leit et al., 2007; Bernhagen & Gravett, 2017). Conversely, because traditional academic labor is culturally assumed to be more desired and desirable, Third Space professionals are often coded as “failed” academics (Whitchurch, 2015, p. 86).
This cultural denigration of their labor means they are frequently the subject of bullying and micro- aggressions by traditional faculty, but because faculty enjoy the protections of tenure there is no possibility of accountability for workplace abuses suffered by Third Space professionals (Henderson, 2005; Perry, 2020).
This issue seeks articles that identify and conceptualize problems cutting across the diverse forms of Third Space labor, and articles that propose pathways forward. Questions addressed by articles might include but are not limited to:
For inquiries or to submit proposals, contact Aaron Stoller at astoller@coloradocollege.edu. Prospective contributors should submit a proposal of 1-2 pages plus bibliography and a 1-paragraph author bio to Aaron Stoller astoller@coloradocollege.edu. Final contributions should be between 5,000 – 8,000 words and follow APA style.
Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor is a refereed, open access journal published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies (ICES) and a collective of scholars in critical university studies, or critical higher education, promoting dignity and integrity in academic work. Contributions are aimed at higher education workplace scholar-activism and dialogue on all issues of academic labor.
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Posted in Academic Labor, CFPs, Contingent labor, Corporate University, Critical University Studies, Research, Staff
Tagged CFPs, Third space academic labor, Workplace, Workplace Journal
Special Issue of Workplace
Edited by
Karen Lynn Gregory & Joss Winn
Articles in Workplace have repeatedly called for increased collective organisation in opposition to a disturbing trajectory in the contemporary university… we suggest that there is one response to the transformation of the university that has yet to be adequately explored: A thoroughgoing and reflexive critique of academic labor.
Table of Contents
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Posted in Academic freedom, Academic Labor, Accountability, Adjuncts & Sessionals, Administration, Contingent labor, Critical University Studies, Equity, Ethics, Governance, Institute for Critical Education Studies, Solidarity, Strikes & Labor Disputes, Student Movement, Technology, Unions, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, academic labor, Contingent labor, Governance, Strikes & Labor Disputes, Unions, Working conditions
Noam Chomsky, AlterNet, Reader Supported News, March 1, 2014– The following is an edited transcript of remarks given by Noam Chomsky via Skype on 4 February 2014 to a gathering of members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, PA. The transcript was prepared by Robin J. Sowards and edited by Prof. Chomsky.
On hiring faculty off the tenure track
That’s part of the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call “associates” at Wal-Mart, employees that aren’t owed benefits. It’s a part of a corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility. When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the last generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the population, their business model means that what matters is the bottom line. The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the universities. The idea is to divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the “plutonomy” (a term used by Citibank when they were advising their investors on where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally but concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other group, the rest of the population, is a “precariat,” living a precarious existence.
This idea is sometimes made quite overt. So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more. That’s the way you keep societies efficient and healthy from the point of view of the corporations. And as universities move towards a corporate business model, precarity is exactly what is being imposed. And we’ll see more and more of it.
That’s one aspect, but there are other aspects which are also quite familiar from private industry, namely a large increase in layers of administration and bureaucracy. If you have to control people, you have to have an administrative force that does it. So in US industry even more than elsewhere, there’s layer after layer of management-a kind of economic waste, but useful for control and domination. And the same is true in universities. In the past 30 or 40 years, there’s been a very sharp increase in the proportion of administrators to faculty and students; faculty and students levels have stayed fairly level relative to one another, but the proportion of administrators have gone way up. There’s a very good book on it by a well-known sociologist, Benjamin Ginsberg, called The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford University Press, 2011), which describes in detail the business style of massive administration and levels of administration-and of course, very highly-paid administrators. This includes professional administrators like deans, for example, who used to be faculty members who took off for a couple of years to serve in an administrative capacity and then go back to the faculty; now they’re mostly professionals, who then have to hire sub-deans, and secretaries, and so on and so forth, a whole proliferation of structure that goes along with administrators. All of that is another aspect of the business model.
But using cheap labor-and vulnerable labor-is a business practice that goes as far back as you can trace private enterprise, and unions emerged in response. In the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts and graduate students. Graduate students are even more vulnerable, for obvious reasons. The idea is to transfer instruction to precarious workers, which improves discipline and control but also enables the transfer of funds to other purposes apart from education. The costs, of course, are borne by the students and by the people who are being drawn into these vulnerable occupations. But it’s a standard feature of a business-run society to transfer costs to the people. In fact, economists tacitly cooperate in this. So, for example, suppose you find a mistake in your checking account and you call the bank to try to fix it. Well, you know what happens. You call them up, and you get a recorded message saying “We love you, here’s a menu.” Maybe the menu has what you’re looking for, maybe it doesn’t. If you happen to find the right option, you listen to some music, and every once and a while a voice comes in and says “Please stand by, we really appreciate your business,” and so on. Finally, after some period of time, you may get a human being, who you can ask a short question to. That’s what economists call “efficiency.” By economic measures, that system reduces labor costs to the bank; of course it imposes costs on you, and those costs are multiplied by the number of users, which can be enormous-but that’s not counted as a cost in economic calculation. And if you look over the way the society works, you find this everywhere. So the university imposes costs on students and on faculty who are not only untenured but are maintained on a path that guarantees that they will have no security. All of this is perfectly natural within corporate business models. It’s harmful to education, but education is not their goal.
In fact, if you look back farther, it goes even deeper than that. If you go back to the early 1970s when a lot of this began, there was a lot of concern pretty much across the political spectrum over the activism of the 1960s; it’s commonly called “the time of troubles.” It was a “time of troubles” because the country was getting civilized, and that’s dangerous. People were becoming politically engaged and were trying to gain rights for groups that are called “special interests,” like women, working people, farmers, the young, the old, and so on. That led to a serious backlash, which was pretty overt. At the liberal end of the spectrum, there’s a book called The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki (New York University Press, 1975), produced by the Trilateral Commission, an organization of liberal internationalists. The Carter administration was drawn almost entirely from their ranks. They were concerned with what they called “the crisis of democracy,” namely that there’s too much democracy. In the 1960s there were pressures from the population, these “special interests,” to try to gain rights within the political arena, and that put too much pressure on the state-you can’t do that. There was one special interest that they left out, namely the corporate sector, because its interests are the “national interest”; the corporate sector is supposed to control the state, so we don’t talk about them. But the “special interests” were causing problems and they said “we have to have more moderation in democracy,” the public has to go back to being passive and apathetic. And they were particularly concerned with schools and universities, which they said were not properly doing their job of “indoctrinating the young.” You can see from student activism (the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movements) that the young are just not being indoctrinated properly.
Well how do you indoctrinate the young? There are a number of ways. One way is to burden them with hopelessly heavy tuition debt. Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It’s a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can’t get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy. They can even garnish social security if you default. That’s a disciplinary technique. I don’t say that it was consciously introduced for the purpose, but it certainly has that effect. And it’s hard to argue that there’s any economic basis for it. Just take a look around the world: higher education is mostly free. In the countries with the highest education standards, let’s say Finland, which is at the top all the time, higher education is free. And in a rich, successful capitalist country like Germany, it’s free. In Mexico, a poor country, which has pretty decent education standards, considering the economic difficulties they face, it’s free. In fact, look at the United States: if you go back to the 1940s and 50s, higher education was pretty close to free. The GI Bill gave free education to vast numbers of people who would never have been able to go to college. It was very good for them and it was very good for the economy and the society; it was part of the reason for the high economic growth rate. Even in private colleges, education was pretty close to free. Take me: I went to college in 1945 at an Ivy League university, University of Pennsylvania, and tuition was $100. That would be maybe $800 in today’s dollars. And it was very easy to get a scholarship, so you could live at home, work, and go to school and it didn’t cost you anything. Now it’s outrageous. I have grandchildren in college, who have to pay for their tuition and work and it’s almost impossible. For the students that is a disciplinary technique.
And another technique of indoctrination is to cut back faculty-student contact: large classes, temporary teachers who are overburdened, who can barely survive on an adjunct salary. And since you don’t have any job security you can’t build up a career, you can’t move on and get more. These are all techniques of discipline, indoctrination, and control. And it’s very similar to what you’d expect in a factory, where factory workers have to be disciplined, to be obedient; they’re not supposed to play a role in, say, organizing production or determining how the workplace functions-that’s the job of management. This is now carried over to the universities. And I think it shouldn’t surprise anyone who has any experience in private enterprise, in industry; that’s the way they work.
On how higher education ought to be
First of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden age.” Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. These efforts were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory.
These are not radical ideas, I should say. They come straight out of classical liberalism. So if you read, for example, John Stuart Mill, a major figure in the classical liberal tradition, he took it for granted that workplaces ought to be managed and controlled by the people who work in them-that’s freedom and democracy (see, e.g., John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, book 4, ch. 7). We see the same ideas in the United States. Let’s say you go back to the Knights of Labor; one of their stated aims was “To establish co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system” (“Founding Ceremony” for newly-organized Local Associations). Or take someone like, John Dewey, a mainstream 20th-century social philosopher, who called not only for education directed at creative independence in schools, but also worker control in industry, what he called “industrial democracy.” He says that as long as the crucial institutions of the society (like production, commerce, transportation, media) are not under democratic control, then “politics [will be] the shadow cast on society by big business” (John Dewey, “The Need for a New Party”[1931]). This idea is almost elementary, it has deep roots in American history and in classical liberalism, it should be second nature to working people, and it should apply the same way to universities. There are some decisions in a university where you don’t want to have [democratic transparency because] you have to preserve student privacy, say, and there are various kinds of sensitive issues, but on much of the normal activity of the university, there is no reason why direct participation can’t be not only legitimate but helpful. In my department, for example, for 40 years we’ve had student representatives helpfully participating in department meetings.
On “shared governance” and worker control
The university is probably the social institution in our society that comes closest to democratic worker control. Within a department, for example, it’s pretty normal for at least the tenured faculty to be able to determine a substantial amount of what their work is like: what they’re going to teach, when they’re going to teach, what the curriculum will be. And most of the decisions about the actual work that the faculty is doing are pretty much under tenured faculty control. Now of course there is a higher level of administrators that you can’t overrule or control. The faculty can recommend somebody for tenure, let’s say, and be turned down by the deans, or the president, or even the trustees or legislators. It doesn’t happen all that often, but it can happen and it does. And that’s always a part of the background structure, which, although it always existed, was much less of a problem in the days when the administration was drawn from the faculty and in principle recallable. Under representative systems, you have to have someone doing administrative work but they should be recallable at some point under the authority of the people they administer. That’s less and less true. There are more and more professional administrators, layer after layer of them, with more and more positions being taken remote from the faculty controls. I mentioned before The Fall of the Faculty by Benjamin Ginsberg, which goes into a lot of detail as to how this works in the several universities he looks at closely: Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and a couple of others.
Meanwhile, the faculty are increasingly reduced to a category of temporary workers who are assured a precarious existence with no path to the tenure track. I have personal acquaintances who are effectively permanent lecturers; they’re not given real faculty status; they have to apply every year so that they can get appointed again. These things shouldn’t be allowed to happen. And in the case of adjuncts, it’s been institutionalized: they’re not permitted to be a part of the decision-making apparatus, and they’re excluded from job security, which merely amplifies the problem. I think staff ought to also be integrated into decision-making, since they’re also a part of the university. So there’s plenty to do, but I think we can easily understand why these tendencies are developing. They are all part of imposing a business model on just about every aspect of life. That’s the neoliberal ideology that most of the world has been living under for 40 years. It’s very harmful to people, and there has been resistance to it. And it’s worth noticing that two parts of the world, at least, have pretty much escaped from it, namely East Asia, where they never really accepted it, and South America in the past 15 years.
On the alleged need for “flexibility”
“Flexibility” is a term that’s very familiar to workers in industry. Part of what’s called “labor reform” is to make labor more “flexible,” make it easier to hire and fire people. That’s, again, a way to ensure maximization of profit and control. “Flexibility” is supposed to be a good thing, like “greater worker insecurity.” Putting aside industry where the same is true, in universities there’s no justification. So take a case where there’s under-enrollment somewhere. That’s not a big problem. One of my daughters teaches at a university; she just called me the other night and told me that her teaching load is being shifted because one of the courses that was being offered was under-enrolled. Okay, the world didn’t to an end, they just shifted around the teaching arrangements-you teach a different course, or an extra section, or something like that. People don’t have to be thrown out or be insecure because of the variation in the number of students enrolling in courses. There are all sorts of ways of adjusting for that variation. The idea that labor should meet the conditions of “flexibility” is just another standard technique of control and domination. Why not say that administrators should be thrown out if there’s nothing for them to do that semester, or trustees-what do they have to be there for? The situation is the same with top management in industry: if labor has to be flexible, how about management? Most of them are pretty useless or even harmful anyway, so let’s get rid of them. And you can go on like this. Just to take the news from the last couple of days, take, say, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank: he just got a pretty substantial raise, almost double his salary, out of gratitude because he had saved the bank from criminal charges that would have sent the management to jail; he got away with only $20 billion in fines for criminal activities. Well I can imagine that getting rid of somebody like that might be helpful to the economy. But that’s not what people are talking about when they talk about “labor reform.” It’s the working people who have to suffer, and they have to suffer by insecurity, by not knowing where tomorrow’s piece of bread is going to come from, and therefore be disciplined and obedient and not raise questions or ask for their rights. That’s the way that tyrannical systems operate. And the business world is a tyrannical system. When it’s imposed on the universities, you find it reflects the same ideas. This shouldn’t be any secret.
On the purpose of education
These are debates that go back to the Enlightenment, when issues of higher education and mass education were really being raised, not just education for the clergy and aristocracy. And there were basically two models discussed in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were discussed with pretty evocative imagery. One image of education was that it should be like a vessel that is filled with, say, water. That’s what we call these days “teaching to test”: you pour water into the vessel and then the vessel returns the water. But it’s a pretty leaky vessel, as all of us who went through school experienced, since you could memorize something for an exam that you had no interest in to pass an exam and a week later you forgot what the course was about. The vessel model these days is called “no child left behind,” “teaching to test,” “race to top,” whatever the name may be, and similar things in universities. Enlightenment thinkers opposed that model.
The other model was described as laying out a string along which the student progresses in his or her own way under his or her own initiative, maybe moving the string, maybe deciding to go somewhere else, maybe raising questions. Laying out the string means imposing some degree of structure. So an educational program, whatever it may be, a course on physics or something, isn’t going to be just anything goes; it has a certain structure. But the goal of it is for the student to acquire the capacity to inquire, to create, to innovate, to challenge-that’s education. One world-famous physicist, in his freshman courses if he was asked “what are we going to cover this semester?”, his answer was “it doesn’t matter what we cover, it matters what you discover.” You have gain the capacity and the self-confidence for that matter to challenge and create and innovate, and that way you learn; that way you’ve internalized the material and you can go on. It’s not a matter of accumulating some fixed array of facts which then you can write down on a test and forget about tomorrow.
These are two quite distinct models of education. The Enlightenment ideal was the second one, and I think that’s the one that we ought to be striving towards. That’s what real education is, from kindergarten to graduate school. In fact there are programs of that kind for kindergarten, pretty good ones.
On the love of teaching
We certainly want people, both faculty and students, to be engaged in activity that’s satisfying, enjoyable, challenging, exciting-and I don’t really think that’s hard. Even young children are creative, inquisitive, they want to know things, they want to understand things, and unless that’s beaten out of your head it stays with you the rest of your life. If you have opportunities to pursue those commitments and concerns, it’s one of the most satisfying things in life. That’s true if you’re a research physicist, it’s true if you’re a carpenter; you’re trying to create something of value and deal with a difficult problem and solve it. I think that’s what makes work the kind of thing you want to do; you do it even if you don’t have to do it. In a reasonably functioning university, you find people working all the time because they love it; that’s what they want to do; they’re given the opportunity, they have the resources, they’re encouraged to be free and independent and creative-what’s better? That’s what they love to do. And that, again, can be done at any level.
Read More: RSN
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Posted in Academic freedom, Adjuncts & Sessionals, Contingent labor, Corporate University, Critical University Studies, Equity, Ethics, Faculty, Job market, Politics, Shared governance, Students, Tenure & Promotion, Unions, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, adjuncts, Contingent labor, Equity, Organizing, Students, Unions
The Faculty Association of UBC (FAUBC) recently surveyed its members about preferences for the University’s management of its members’ Career Advancement Plan (CAP). Most of the 3,300 faculty members and librarians do not realize UBC manages their CAP, and perhaps most would conclude that their CAP is mismanaged.
In short, the CAP is performance pay—$2m in discretionary salary funds for Management to allocate to a select few FAUBC members each year (i.e., merit pay, performance salary adjustment). A large majority of members do not share in the spoils and the FAUBC’s part-time faculty or Sessional members (approx. 1,000) are excluded by status.
Exclusion, whether systematically or by status, from a CAP is mismanagement by definition: if your career is not advancing according to plan, you may have the employer that manages the plan, UBC, to blame.
Moreover, UBC’s Management does not fairly allocate this exceptionally large amount of potential salary increases. Alternatively, this $2m could be included in an across the board or general salary increase for the Sessionals, adding at least $2,000 per year to each part-time members’ meagre year-end wages. Instead of a divided FAUBC by status, this would mean the Association stands further united.
Just say no way to Performance Pay. Faculty associations, please pay attention.
PAY EQUITY :: Equal Pay for Equal Work :: Pay the Sessionals what it costs for a FT faculty member buyout = about $10,000 per course. Faculty associations, please wake up.
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Posted in Academic freedom, Accountability, Adjuncts & Sessionals, Administration, BC Education, Contingent labor, Employment rights, Faculty, Government, Organizing, Solidarity, Unions, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, adjuncts, Administration, Contingent labor, Equity, Faculty, Unions, Working conditions
The post-secondary academic workforce has undergone a remarkable change over the last several decades. The tenure-track college professor with a stable salary, firmly grounded in the middle or upper-middle class, is becoming rare. Taking her place is the contingent faculty: nontenure-track teachers, such as part-time adjuncts or graduate instructors, with no job security from one semester to the next, working at a piece rate with few or no benefits across multiple workplaces, and far too often struggling to make ends meet. In 1970, adjuncts made up 20 percent of all higher education faculty. Today, they represent half.
Read more: The JIT Professor
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Posted in Academic freedom, Academics, Accountability, Adjuncts & Sessionals, Administration, Advocacy, Budgets & Funding, Contingent labor, Corporate University, Critical University Studies, Economics, Employment rights, Faculty, Job market, Organizing, Solidarity, Student Movement, Students, Unions, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, Academics, adjuncts, Administration, Budgets & Funding, Contingent labor, Equity, Ethics, Faculty, Organizing, Students, Working conditions
Audrey Williams June, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 7, 2014– Maria C. Maisto, president of New Faculty Majority, answered via email select questions submitted by viewers of The Chronicle’s online chat about adjunct issues. The questions and her responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q. Some adjuncts have access to health-care benefits already and don’t need to be covered by the Affordable Care Act. Do you support an exemption so that we could keep our current teaching loads (and paychecks) rather than face colleges cutting our hours so they don’t have to cover us?
A. In this scenario, is the institution getting an exemption from the employer mandate, or is the adjunct with health insurance getting an exemption from having his/her workload reduced? (Don’t like the latter.)
As we indicated in our comments to the IRS, we think that (1) institutions should not be allowed to avoid or circumvent the letter and spirit of the law, namely that no one should be uninsured; (2) educational quality and commitment to the mission of education, particularly as a public good, should be driving institutional response to the ACA, so avoiding excessive course loads is actually a good thing if it is accompanied with the kind of compensation that reflects the real importance of the work. Since these aims can conflict with one another in this context, administrators need to closely collaborate with faculty, with unions, and with students to craft solutions for each individual institution that achieve both aims in a financially sustainable (and legally compliant) way.
Personally I believe with many of my colleagues that fighting for higher course loads may be beneficial for some individuals in the short term but highly problematic for the quality of education and the profession in the long term. I realize that can be hard to face when one has had one’s course load and income reduced, but it’s something that we have to confront honestly as members of the educational profession. And I think it’s reprehensible that so many of our colleagues continue to be forced into positions where their personal economic survival is being pitted against the professional responsibilities to which they have committed as educators.
Q. I don’t think universities will do anything drastic to improve the plight of adjuncts overnight. But what are some ways in which universities can gradually move toward better treatment of adjuncts?
A. Step 1 is to acknowledge the problem—it’s a huge first step. Do a self-study to find out what the conditions actually are on one’s campus and how they compare to conditions locally, regionally, and nationally. The most important aspect of this step is to LISTEN to the contingent faculty on campus (including through anonymous surveys) and to commit to protecting their right to give honest answers—no retaliation allowed. There are good resources at the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success.
Most important: Commit to change and get broad campus and community buy-in. Don’t assume that anyone is not a potential ally. Ground the work in the research and understanding that transforming the working conditions of contingent faculty will benefit students, the campus, and the community in the long run.
Q. What do you say about claims that colleges would have to raise tuition to pay adjuncts more and give them health benefits?
A. I think that’s a scare tactic that has been effectively challenged by the kind of work that the American Association of University Professors has done to analyze the audited financial statements of colleges and universities. Money is there, and faculty and administrators and students should all be working together to put pressure on states to reinvest in higher education. See also Delphi’s “Dispelling the Myths.”
Q. Does New Faculty Majority want colleges to turn adjunct jobs into full-time jobs?
A. NFM believes that part-time faculty, especially those that have been long-serving, should be given first preference for full-time jobs that open up. But we also believe that part time should really mean part time—100 percent pro rata compensation—it should not mean full-time work for less than part-time pay. On this issue we have to be careful to remember that people who need part-time work are often caregivers, especially women, and people with disabilities, so we don’t want to forget about them in our recognition that there is a need for full-time positions and a huge number of people who are willing and able to fill them.
Read More: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Comments Off on Step 1 is acknowledge the problem: Plight of adjunct faculty #highered #edstudies #criticaled #bced #ubc #ubced
Posted in Academic freedom, Academics, Accountability, Adjuncts & Sessionals, Administration, Advocacy, BC Education, Budgets & Funding, Contingent labor, Corporate University, Critical University Studies, Employment rights, Equity, Ethics, Government, Job market, Organizing, Solidarity, Student Movement, Students, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, Academics, adjuncts, Administration, Budgets & Funding, Contingent labor, Equity, Ethics, Students, Working conditions
Richard Moser, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 13, 2014– The increasing exploitation of contingent faculty members is one dimension of an employment strategy sometimes called the “two-tiered” or “multitiered” labor system.
This new labor system is firmly established in higher education and constitutes a threat to the teaching profession. If left unchecked, it will undermine the university’s status as an institution of higher learning because the overuse of adjuncts and their lowly status and compensation institutionalize disincentives to quality education, threaten academic freedom and shared governance, and disqualify the campus as an exemplar of democratic values. These developments in academic labor are the most troubling expressions of the so-called corporatization of higher education.
“Corporatization” is the name sometimes given to what has happened to higher education over the last 30 years. Corporatization is the reorganization of our great national resources, including higher education, in accordance with a shortsighted business model. Three decades of decline in public funding for higher education opened the door for increasing corporate influence, and since then the work of the university has been redirected to suit the corporate vision.
The most striking symptoms of corporatization shift costs and risks downward and direct capital and authority upward. Rising tuition and debt loads for students limit access to education for working-class students. The faculty and many other campus workers suffer lower compensation as the number of managers, and their pay, rises sharply. Campus management concentrates resources on areas where wealth is created, and new ideas and technologies developed at public cost become the entitlement of the corporate sector. The privatization and outsourcing of university functions and jobs from food service to bookstores to instruction enrich a few businessmen and create more low-wage nonunion jobs. Increasingly authoritarian governance practices have become the “new normal.”
Read More: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Comments Off on Overuse and Abuse of Adjunct Faculty #highered #adjunct #edstudies #criticaled #ubc #bced #bcpoli
Posted in Academic freedom, Academics, Accountability, Adjuncts & Sessionals, Administration, Advocacy, BC Education, Contingent labor, Corporate University, Critical University Studies, Economics, Employment rights, Equity, Ethics, Governance, Job market, Organizing, Solidarity, Student Movement, Students, Working conditions
Tagged Academic freedom, adjuncts, Administration, Budgets & Funding, Contingent labor, Equity, Ethics, Faculty, Organizing, Students, Working conditions
Oftentimes, the academic job market for full-time (FT) faculty is inversely related to economic recessions. Not anymore. In this prolonged Great Recession, turned Great Depression II in parts of North America and across the world, youth have been particularly hard hit, more pronounced by race. The most common description for this current economy for youth is “a precipitous decline in employment and a corresponding increase in unemployment.” In Canada and the US, unemployment rates for the 16-19 year olds exceeds 25%. At the same time, one of the most common descriptions for postsecondary enrollment and participation in Canada and the US is “tremendous growth at the undergraduate level… the number of graduate students has grown significantly faster than the number of undergraduate students over the last 30 years.” With “school-to-work” and “youth employment” oxymoronic, corporate academia and the education industry are capitalizing on masses of students returning to desperately secure advanced credentials in hard times, but no longer does this matter to the professoriate.
If higher education enrollment has been significant, increases in online or e-learning enrollment have been phenomenal. Postsecondary institutions in North America commonly realized 100% increases in online course enrollment from the early 2000s to the present with the percentage of total registrations increasing to 25% for some universities. In Canada, this translates to about 250,000 postsecondary students currently taking online courses but has not translated into FT faculty appointments. More pointedly, it has eroded the FT faculty job market and fueled the part-time (PT) job economy of higher education. About 50% of all faculty in North America are PT but this seems to jump to about 85%-90% for those teaching online courses. For example, in the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Master of Educational Technology (MET), where there are nearly 1,000 registrations per year, 85% of all sections are taught by PT faculty. In its decade of existence, not a single FT faculty member has been hired for this revenue generating program. Mirroring trends across North America, support staff doubling as adjunct or sessional teach about 45% of MET courses in addition to their 8:30-4:30 job functions in the service units. These indicators are of a larger scope of trends in the automation of intellectual work.
Given these practices across Canada, in the field of Education for example, there has been a precipitous decline in employment of FT faculty, which corresponds with the precipitous decline in employment of youth (Figure 1). Education is fairly reflective of the overall academic job market for doctorates in Canada. Except for short-term trends in certain disciplines, the market for PhDs is bleak. Trends and an expansion of the Great Recession predict that the market will worsen for graduates looking for FT academic jobs in all disciplines. A postdoctoral appointment market is very unlikely to materialize at any scale to offset trends. For instance, Education at UBC currently employs just a handful (i.e., 4-5) of postdocs.
To put it in mild, simple terms: Universities changed their priorities and values by devaluing academic budget lines. Now in inverse relationship to the increases in revenue realized by universities through the 2000s, academic budgets were progressively reduced from 40% or more to just around 20% for many of these institutions. One indicator of this trend is the expansion of adjunct labor or PT academics. In some colleges or faculties, such as Education at UBC, the number of PT faculty, which approached twice that of FT in 2008, teach from 33% to 85% of all sections, depending on the program.
Another indicator is the displacement of tenure track research faculty by non-tenure track, teaching-intensive positions. For example, in Education at UBC, about 18 of the last 25 FT faculty hires were for non-tenure track teaching-intensive positions (i.e., 10 courses per year for Instructor, Lecturer, etc.). This was partially to offset a trend of PT faculty hires pushing Education well over its faculty salary budget (e.g., 240 PT appointments in 2008). Measures in North America have been so draconian that the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was compelled to report in 2010 that “the tenure system has all but collapsed…. the proportion of teaching-intensive to research-intensive appointments has risen sharply. However, the majority of teaching-intensive positions have been shunted outside of the tenure system.” What is faculty governance, other than an oligarchy, with a handful of faculty governing or to govern?
Read More: Petrina, S. & Ross, E. W. (2014). Critical University Studies: Workplace, Milestones, Crossroads, Respect, Truth. Workplace, 23, 62-71.
Posted in Academic freedom, Accountability, Adjuncts & Sessionals, Administration, BC Education, Contingent labor, Corporate University, Critical University Studies, Economics, Employment rights, Equity, Faculty, Governance, Job market, Organizing, Research, Solidarity, Student Movement, Students, Technology, Working conditions
Tagged AAUP, adjuncts, Administration, Budgets & Funding, CAUT, Contingent labor, Faculty, Governance, Students, Unions, Working conditions
As we state in our Commentary, “This Issue marks a couple of milestones and crossroads for Workplace. We are celebrating fifteen years of dynamic, insightful, if not inciting, critical university studies (CUS). Perhaps more than anything, and perhaps closer to the ground than any CUS publication of this era, Workplace documents changes, crossroads, and the hard won struggles to maintain academic dignity, freedom, justice, and integrity in this volatile occupation we call higher education.” Workplace and Critical Education are published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies (ICES).
Commentary
Articles
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Posted in Academic freedom, Accountability, Adjuncts & Sessionals, Administration, BC Education, Budgets & Funding, Contingent labor, Critical University Studies, Diversity, Economics, Employment rights, Equity, Ethics, Free speech, Governance, Job market, Organizing, Publications, Research, Solidarity, Student Movement, Students, Technology, Working conditions
Tagged AAUP, Academic freedom, adjuncts, Administration, Budgets & Funding, Equity, Faculty, Free speech, Research, Students, Working conditions
The Institute for Critical Education Studies (ICES) is extremely pleased to announce the launch of Workplace Issue #22, “The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students” (Guest Editors Bradley J. Porfilio, Julie A. Gorlewski & Shelley Pineo-Jensen).
Articles:
The scope and depth of scholarship within this Special Issue has direct and immediate relevance for graduate students and new and senior scholars alike. We encourage you to review the Table of Contents and articles of interest.
Our blogs and links to our Facebook timelines and Twitter stream can be found at https://blogs.ubc.ca/workplace/ and https://blogs.ubc.ca/ices/
Thank you for your ongoing support of Workplace,
Sandra Mathison, Stephen Petrina & E. Wayne Ross, co-Directors
Institute for Critical Education Studies
Critical Education
Comments Off on The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students: new issue of Workplace #occupyeducation
Posted in Adjuncts & Sessionals, Contingent labor, Employment rights, Equity, Ethics, Job market, Organizing, Politics, Protests, Research, Solidarity, Student Movement, Students, Unions, Working conditions
Tagged Contingent labor, Equity, Protests, Students, Unions
(AP Photo/Richard Drew)
The walkout by service workers in the US on August 29 marked a number of efforts over the past year to organize and make a statement on cost of living ground lost amidst inflation and a tanking economy. Economic reports in Canada and the US for August merely indicate the long trend toward part-time McJobs as youth are more and more often finding that their competition is their grandmothers or seniors unable to make it without additional income. Requests by the workers is an increase in the federal minimum wage from the current $7.25/hr to $15/hr and the right to unionize without interference from employers. Obama democrats are proposing a modest increase to $9/hr.
Like the McJob trend, the large balance of college and university jobs are now part-time and low wage. Many with the McAdemic job, defined by low pay and limited prospects, work just above minimum wage when it’s all said and done. Although among the most exploited of part-time workers given their expertise and education debt-load, adjunct, contingent, or sessional faculty members in Canada and the US retain an element of autonomy for their job. Whether with a modicum of a wage per course or a piecemeal per student wage for online instructors, many by and large take home a pay that hovers just above minimum wage after hours in are calculated. Unlike the basic McJob, which has a definitive beginning and end to the workday, the academic job has no limits to the amount of time expended to prepare, teach, counsel, and assess. And given that, like for most with a McJob, there is a dignity to a McAdemic job and most put in long hours (e.g., 10x contact hours required) that knowingly reduce their wages to something just above the minimum.
In BC, the minimum wage is merely $10.25, which today after exchange and purchasing power parity is about $7.25/hr USD. At UBC, the step 1 salary for contingent or sessional faculty is $5,970 per 3 credit course (about $4,305 USD after exchange and PPP). Comparisons of McAdemic job with McJob and of stratification within the two sectors are not exaggerated, as Postdoctoral Fellow Brian Haman wrote in “What Contingent Faculty Can Learn From Fast-Food Workers:”
As universities and departments downsize and the numbers of Ph.D. graduates outpace available jobs, many adjuncts accept grossly underpaid positions with long working hours and virtually no benefits with the expectation that a foot in the door will somehow lead to the promised land of a tenure-track position. Supply and demand dictates otherwise and the vast battalions of well-paid academic administrators are more than happy to continue to exploit such naïve and misguided expectations in the name of efficiency…. Clearly, something must change. It seems, therefore, sensible, entirely feasible, and just to stand in solidarity with fast-food workers, many of whom earn as much as adjuncts. Their struggles are our struggles. Moreover, their lessons can be our lessons. The efficacy and consequences of collective action are unambiguous.
Comments Off on From McJob to McAdemic: Labor activism and unrest as economy tanks #bced #yteubc
Posted in Academics, Accountability, Administration, Advocacy, Contingent labor, Equity, Ethics, Job market, Organizing, Politics, Protests, Solidarity, Strikes, Student Movement, Students, Unions
Tagged adjuncts, Equity, Organizing, Protests, Strikes & Labor Disputes, Students, Working conditions
Sarah Kendzior, Aljazeera, April 11, 2013– On April 8, 2013, the New York Times reported that 76 percent of American university faculty are adjunct professors – an all-time high. Unlike tenured faculty, whose annual salaries can top $160,000, adjunct professors make an average of $2,700 per course and receive no health care or other benefits.
Most adjuncts teach at multiple universities while still not making enough to stay above the poverty line. Some are on welfare or homeless. Others depend on charity drives held by their peers. Adjuncts are generally not allowed to have offices or participate in faculty meetings. When they ask for a living wage or benefits, they can be fired. Their contingent status allows them no recourse.
No one forces a scholar to work as an adjunct. So why do some of America’s brightest PhDs – many of whom are authors of books and articles on labour, power, or injustice – accept such terrible conditions?
“Path dependence and sunk costs must be powerful forces,” speculates political scientist Steve Saidemen in a post titled “The Adjunct Mystery“. In other words, job candidates have invested so much time and money into their professional training that they cannot fathom abandoning their goal – even if this means living, as Saidemen says, like “second-class citizens”. (He later downgraded this to “third-class citizens”.)
With roughly 40 percent of academic positions eliminated since the 2008 crash, most adjuncts will not find a tenure-track job. Their path dependence and sunk costs will likely lead to greater path dependence and sunk costs – and the costs of the academic job market are prohibitive. Many job candidates must shell out thousands of dollars for a chance to interview at their discipline’s annual meeting, usually held in one of the most expensive cities in the world. In some fields, candidates must pay to even see the job listings.
Given the need for personal wealth as a means to entry, one would assume that adjuncts would be even more outraged about their plight. After all, their paltry salaries and lack of departmental funding make their job hunt a far greater sacrifice than for those with means. But this is not the case. While efforts at labour organisation are emerging, the adjunct rate continues to soar – from 68 percent in 2008, the year of the economic crash, to 76 percent just five years later.
Contingency has become permanent, a rite of passage to nowhere….
Is academia a cult? That is debatable, but it is certainly a caste system. Outspoken academics like Pannapacker are rare: most tenured faculty have stayed silent about the adjunct crisis. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it,” wrote Upton Sinclair, the American author famous for his essays on labour exploitation. Somewhere in America, a tenured professor may be teaching his work, as a nearby adjunct holds office hours out of her car. On Twitter, I wondered why so many professors who study injustice ignore the plight of their peers. “They don’t consider us their peers,” the adjuncts wrote back. Academia likes to think of itself as a meritocracy – which it is not – and those who have tenured jobs like to think they deserved them. They probably do – but with hundreds of applications per available position, an awful lot of deserving candidates have defaulted to the adjunct track.
Read More: Aljazeera
Comments Off on Academia’s Indentured Servants
Posted in Adjuncts & Sessionals, Advocacy, Contingent labor, Equity, Faculty, Organizing, Solidarity, Students, Working conditions
Tagged Adjunct & Sessional Labor, Contingent labor, Equity, Organizing, Students, Working conditions
NOTE: Many subscribers to COCAL UPDATES are also scholars who write for publication in academic journals, or know those who do. I am personally on the Editorial Board of Labor Studies Journal, the peer reviewed journal of the United Association for Labor Education, published by Sage. For you folks I have two requests:
1. If you write in a field related in any way to labor, please try to include citations to articles from LSJ if possible. This makes our ranking in the journal world go up and also increases the visibility of pro-labor academic writing generally. LSJ is fully indexed online back to 1998 at http://lsj.sagepub.com/content/by/year and previous indexing is printed in the back of hard copies annually. It is also indexed in a number of online and hard copy indexes. See <http://www.sagepub.com/journals/Journal201857/abstractIndexing>
2. Many of you also go to conferences, including labor related conferences, where you and others present papers on contingnet faculty and other related topics. Please consider submitting this writing to LSJ for publication. The guidelines for authors can be accessed at http://www.sagepub.com/journals/Journal201857/manuscriptSubmission. Articles have 2-3 blind reviewers prior to possible revision and/or publication both online and hard copy.
UPDATES IN BRIEF AND LINKS
1. Two of the best reactions to the Boston Marathon bombings I have seen
2. More on the University of Indiana strike
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLDnXPm0LhM
3. Michigan teachers, profs and grads deal with right to work.
http://www.labornotes.org/2013/04/coping-michigans-right-work-law
4. SEIU urges ACA coverage for adjuncts
http://www.seiu.org/2013/04/seiu-urges-aca-coverage-for-part-time-workers-adju.php
5. Sign petition for lesbian teacher at Catholic high school who was fired after her sexual orientation became public and a parent complained.
6. Our colleague, Chester Kulis, at Oakton CC and OAFA, IEA/NEA gives a good argument about why we should include all contingents, even one class adjuncts, in the bargaining unit and why they should want in too. See below
7. Our colleague Tim Sheard (of the Lenny Moss mystery series) is now publishing other worker-writers at his Hardball Press. He is looking for good manuscripts by worker writers. <hardballpress.com> or contact Tim directly at Tim Sheard <sheard2001@gmail.com>. This could be a great opportunity for some contingent faculty and/or some of our students.
8. Recent positive arbitration on employer changes in retiree health insurance. See below for details.
9. Petition on computer grading of high stakes essay tests
http://humanreaders.org/petition/
10. New journal of contingent labor, “Cognitariat”
http://oaworld.org/index.php/cognitariat
11. New UUP faculty bulletin from SUNY New Paltz chapter (Peter Brown, Chair) . Lots of contingent news.
12. Another piece on the metro organizing strategy
13. U of IL, Chicago, shop steward for SEIU Local 73 suspended for doing his job
http://www.fightbacknews.org/2013/4/19/uic-local-73-steward-suspended-union-activity
14. Pieces by Marc Bousquet on NLRB and religious exemptions for colleges.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/beyond-yeshiva-nlrb-tackles-both-church-and-state/31246
and http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2012/09/20/clergy-fellas-vs-the-steelworkers/
15. Job opening at National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) See below.
16. May 1 action at U of Akron (OH)
http://optfa.com/optfa-rally-for-equity-at-the-university-of-akron-on-may-1/
17. More on colleges cutting hours to avoid ACA mandates
http://chronicle.com/article/Colleges-Curb-Adjuncts-Hours/138653/
and results of IRS hearing where many organizations testified about proposed rules for counting adjuncts’ hours
http://chronicle.com/article/Adjuncts-Advocates-Call-for/138757/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
and a great blogpost by Maria Maisto, NFM President
http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/04/23/colleges-cheating-adjunct-professors-health-insurance
18. Loyalty and adjuncts
19. New book by our colleague Keith Hoeller out next January, 2014 (edited volume with chapters by many of our leading colleague-activists.)
http://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/index.php/books/571/equality-for-contingent-faculty
20. Fast food and retail (nearly all contingent and pt) workers set to walk out in Chicago
http://portside.org/2013-04-23/fast-food-walkout-chicago
and a good blog about it from a Chicago labor educator
21. Worker Memorial Day (for workers killed on the job)
http://huckkonopackicartoons.com/making-a-killing-texas-style/
22. Paid sick leave needed for all workers
Another group of contingent and precarious workers, like us, takes successful collective action, Los Angeles port truckers. See below.
2. Two articles on another huge group of contingent workers who are organizing worldwide – domestic workers
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/09/domestic_workers_worldwide_lack_legal_protections/?source=newsletter
and
http://www.dw.de/many-domestic-workers-without-labor-protection/a-16508972
3. Report on many adjunct activities at MLA convention
http://www.copy–paste.com/mla-2013-convention-and-the-year-of-the-adjunct/
4. More on hours cuts for adjuncts due to bosses attempts to avoid giving us health care under the health care act
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/08/irs-adjunct-faculty_n_2432924.html?utm_hp_ref=college
and
http://www.adjunctproject.com/unintended-consequences-of-the-affordable-care-act/
and http://www.mpnnow.com/topstories/x1781255788/FLCC-Health-care-law-impacts-adjunct-professors
and on MSNBC http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/01/14/colleges-roll-back-faculty-hours-in-response-to-obamacare/
5. Colorado CC adjuncts organizing group and events (now postponed until later in March or April) and also setting up crowd sourced data base on adjunct conditions in cc in CO. See below
6. More on U of Phoenix accredition review
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/01/10/university-phoenixs-accreditation-review
7. Bob Samuels, Pres. of U of CA, AFT Council, on a recent meeting of online tech ed providers. Very interesting
http://changinguniversities.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-failure-of-interaction-report-from.html
8. Interesting comment by Chicago adjunct activist on technology and online learning
See below
9. Bil Fletcher on his new book, “They’re Bankrupting Us and 20 other myths about unions”.
http://labortribune.com/whats-needed-to-prevent-right-wing-from-destroying-unions/?utm_source=CCDSLinks+weekly+-+Jan+11%2C+2013&utm_campaign=CCDSLinks&utm_medium=email
10. Courageous teachers in Seattle have refused to administer some standardized tests. Is there a lesson here for us?
http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2013/01/when-teachers-refuse-tests
11. Review of new book about organizing in Catholic hospitals and non-profits. Some lessons here for contingents in Catholic and private non-profit higher ed.
http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2013/01/book-review-god-our-side
12. See latest issue of “Rethinking Schools” magazine, on “rethinking teacher unions”. K-12 focus, but lots relevant to us in it too.
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/opt-in/130111.shtml
13. Another college, Palm Beach State in FL, says it will cut adjuncts’ hours to avoid health insurance payments
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/10/palm-beach-state-college-health-insurance_n_2441927.html
14. New TESOL president-elect is ally of contingents, has been at COCAL conferences
See below.
15. New AFT “On Campus” magazine has two articles about us, p. 4 on grad employees victory at U of IL Champaign-Urbana and, p5, on the downsizing of adjunct loads to avoid paying health insurance
http://www.aft.org/emags/oc/oc_janfeb13/index.html#/2/
and an aft 60 minute webinar on implications of Affordable Care Act and adjuncts, including employer penalties and law’s definition of FT employee. Jan. 22 2 PM ET or Jan 23, 2 PM ET. register at http:/tinyurl.com/cv9hpn8
16. Good blog post from Canada on the recent poor quality coverage of higher ed and faculty in mainstream for-profit publications. This online publication, “University Affairs/Affaires Universitaires”, is a good Canadian parallel to CHE or IHE and might be worth checking out regularly for activists, even non-Canadian ones.
17. AAUP seeking nomination for excellence in higher ed reporting award. See below.
18. Colorado CC Adjuncts organizing and seeking crowd sourced info on others in CO. See below for press release.
19. Very good protest at City College of SF where large number of faculty walked out on the Chancellor’s back-to-school speech and rallied for better budget priorities and a real fight against the rogue accreditors persecuting the college. Many media there, but no electronic coverage. Please call media and protest. See below for numbers. National too.
20. Oregon Labor Board say RA’s can unionize
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/01/14/oregon-labor-board-research-assistants-can-unionize
21. Need to do more for contingent writing faculty
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/college-ready-writing/starting-do-more-contingent-faculty
22. Check out the great billboard (scroll down as bit) on the current issue of Too Much (edited by the former NEA publications Director, Sam Pizzigatti)
http://www.toomuchonline.org/tmweekly.html
23. New petition for Mexican teacher fired for showing the movie “Milk” to middle schoolers.
http://www.change.org/petitions/lomas-hill-school-officials-publicly-apologize-to-cecilia-hernandez-for-unfair-dismissal-after-showing-milk?utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=url_share&utm_campaign=url_share_before_sign&alert_id=LNAXNeOJGw_vImpmMRLtI
24. REport of national meeting of Labor for Single Payer Health Care in chicago recently
http://www.laborforsinglepayer.org/
Updates in full
1. For Immediate Release: Wednesday January 9, 2013
Contact: Coral Itzcalli, 310-956-5712
TJ Michels, 415-213-2764
Truck Drivers Clinch New Power with First Union Contract at L.A. Ports; Collective Workplace Action Cited as Key to Winning 50% Hourly Raise, Retirement, and Real Health Care
Triumph over Global Employer Toll Group Fuels Hope for More U.S. Workers Organizing to End Low Wages, Poor Conditions in Retail, Food, and Supply Chain
LOS ANGELES –A set of truck drivers who haul shipments of imported merchandise from our shores to America’s brand name stores will kick start 2013 with a raise that doubles their hourly pay. The extra $6+ change is part of a first-ever contract that shifts a bulk of their health care costs to their employer, grants overtime, paid sick leave and holidays, offers guaranteed hours and other terms for job security – not to mention a pension plan. The collective bargaining gains in an otherwise union-free private sector rival 21st century agreements in long-organized markets.
“Justice…it’s sort of indescribable and overwhelming to finally have the American Dream at our reach,” said Jose Ortega Jr., a driver for global logistics giant Toll Group who served on his co-workers’ bargaining committee along with representatives from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters/Local 848 in Long Beach, Calif. The Australian corporation operates at port complexes on both U.S. coasts and handles accounts for Guess?, Polo, Under Armour, and other sportswear lines sold at big box and department retailers like Walmart and JC Penney.
The Toll drivers’ efforts mirror the collective action that has recently erupted in retail and fast food chains. The landmark agreement culminates more than 24 months of worker struggle and employer resistance in which these truckers – aided by a community coalition, their children, and clergy – borrowed bullhorns, leafleted consumers, gathered signatures, practiced their picket lines, staged noisyprotests, and crashed shareholder meetings in a dogged campaign to end the Third World working conditions they once endured.
U.S. port drivers are the most underpaid in the trucking industry: A typical professional earns $28,873 a year before taxes. Their net incomes often resemble that of part-time or seasonal workers though they clock an average of 59 hours a week. They possess specialized skills and licensing to safely command an 80,000 lb. container rig, but they fit the profile of America’s working poor. Food stamps, extended family, or church pantries are needed to get by; their children often lack regular pediatricians or only receive care at the public ER.
With American wages in freefall due to the imbalance of power enjoyed by multinational corporations, the scope and significance of such a labor accord with a transportation titan that operates in some 55 countries is a jaw dropper alone. What observers further find remarkable: The 65 workers who secured these middle-class benefits with their $8 billion employer are blue-collar Latino-Americans who hold jobs within a deregulated, virtually union-free industry at the ports.
“It upends the common wisdom that a workforce that lacks rights on the job cannot build the strength to take on the Goliaths of the global economy. But these drivers, like the workers at the warehouses and Walmart and Wendy’s, cannot raise families on such low wages, so they are coming together to rewrite the playbook,” noted Dr. John Logan, the director of Labor and Employment Studies at the College of Business at San Francisco State University. “The faces of this new movement are ordinary parents and churchgoers and community members who value the influence of a local priest as much as the expertise pouring in from strong trade unions overseas. Not only do they have the guts to strike – they have the faith they can win.”
Their collective resolve paid off. Mr. Ortega, a single father who works the night shift, will see his new per-hour rate of $19.75 reflected on his next paycheck, along with any overtime that will now be paid at a time-and-a-half rate of $28.
“As a truck driver, I wanted the assurance that things would be okay for my daughter if I was injured, that I could take her to see the doctor if she got sick,” the 36-year-old explained. “When we started organizing ourselves, we weren’t asking for anything out of this world. Dignity. A fair day’s pay for a hard day’s work. Decent, sanitary facilities to make a pit stop, rest, eat…you know, to perform our jobs safely.
“But we knew winning respect would take a fight at every turn. So if we were afraid to lose our jobs, we asked our allies for help. When it was time to take action, we prayed for courage to speak out. And we always stuck together, and never gave up.”
Elected leaders quickly praised the union contract as both a middle-class builder and noted its high-road business merits.
“We’re talking about the men and women who are the backbone of our regional and national economy, yet they have never shared in the prosperity of the corporations they make so profitable,” said Los Angeles Councilman Joe Buscaino, whose district includes the largest port in America. “The standards that Toll Group, its workers, and Teamsters Local 848 set make it possible to reward and attract responsible port businesses that want a level playing field to compete on innovation and quality, rather than who can pay Los Angeles’ vital workers the least.”
Contract Highlights include (Click here for a full summary & graphic comparison):
Fair wages –The day shift hourly rate increased from $12.72 to $19, and the night shift hourly rate from $13.22 to $19.75. In addition to the over $6/hour increase in hourly pay rates, drivers won $0.50/hour per year raises over the life of the contract, giving Toll port drivers over a 60% hourly wage boost over the life of the 3-year contract. Overtime pay of time-and-half kicks in after a typical full time 40 hour week, which is extremely rare in an industry where truckers are exempt from federal overtime laws and an average week hovers around 60 hours.
Secure retirement –Prior to the contract, less than a dozen Toll drivers could spare any extra dollars, even pre-tax, to participate in the corporate 401(k) plan. As Teamster Local 848 members, they have been automatically enrolled in the union’s Western Conference Pension Trust. Such a retirement plan at the port has rarely been seen since trucking was deregulated in 1980. Toll will make a pension contribution of $1/hour per driver until 2014, and a $1.50/hour per driver by 2015.
Affordable health care – The Toll Group health care plan was financially out of reach for most of its truck drivers. The few who managed to meet the premium, deductibles, and copayments will now keep significant more money in their pocket without sacrificing coverage, and the rest of their co-workers finally have access to quality, affordable health insurance coverage, including dental and vision care. The company will pay 95% of the premium for individuals and 90% for family coverage. Drivers who previously had to shell out $125/month for individual or $400/month per family will drop to roughly $30 or $150, respectively.
Stable work hours and paid time off – Most truck drivers lose a day’s pay if they cannot work, are penalized by dispatchers for being unable to haul a load, and lack paid sick or holiday leave, making it stressful for family budgets and planning. But Toll drivers made substantial gains in all these areas. They will receive seven paid holidays, three paid personal days, and six paid sick days annually. They will accrue one or two weeks of vacation within the first two years of service, with longtime employees earning up to a month. They can also bank on guaranteed full- or half-day of pay regardless of seasonal slowdowns if they are scheduled to work.
Competitive growth incentives to raise market and living standards – The agreement establishes a high-road business model that recognizes Toll’s competitors have not yet embraced fair wages and conditions. Provisions to encourage a level playing field and wide-scale unionization allow drivers to re-negotiate more gains when a simple majority of the regional market is organized.
“We commend these truck drivers for their leadership in challenging the status quo at the ports. Workers everywhere are standing up to say enough to poverty wages, and Toll drivers have demonstrated that working families will fight for middle-class paychecks in America,” said Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa.
“For too long companies in the global supply chain have gamed the system by undercutting U.S. businesses that actually create good jobs. Toll Group and its drivers have raised the bar for responsible competition, and the Teamsters will not stop until the rest of the nation’s port drivers have a shot at the American Dream.”
Additional Background
The landmark contract caps over two years of struggle for union recognition that workers took online, to the truck yard, and in the LA streets; they zig-zagged to other U.S. seaports to shore up support, and even continent-crossed to meet their Aussie union workmates who stood in solidarity at their joint employer’s doorstep.
In so doing, this group of Latino immigrants became an unlikely symbol of hope for their underpaid counterparts – union and not-yet-union, working in an adopted homeland as well as American-born workers – who must endure low-wage jobs in other profitable sectors in the U.S. food, retail, and global supply chain industries.
The victory is also being celebrated across the Pacific Ocean where the Melbourne-based Toll Group employs some 12,000 of Australian drivers united in the Transport Workers Union (TWU). The members view their U.S. counterparts as their “workmates” and have supported the port drivers from Day One to ensure that as Toll enters new global markets, the company replicates the constructive labor-management relations that made it so profitable Down Under.
“We couldn’t be prouder of our mates in America. From the beginning we said ‘your fight is our fight’ and today we say your victory is our victory,” said TWU Acting National Secretary Michael Kaine. “The standards of fairness and respect for workers should be upheld by Toll no matter where they operate. The message to industry is clear, in this global economy workers and unions across continents are already in alliance with each other and we will continue to support one another until we have a strong voice in our workplaces everywhere.”
The newly-inked contract with the Teamsters further gives another shot in the arm to the movement of port drivers fighting to overcome “misclassification” – illegally denying workers W-2 employment and benefits, a scam that keeps the American Dream out of their reach.Workers are coming forward with evidence for state and federal authorities as part of a coast-to-coast multi-industry crackdown on employers who disguise their employees as independent contractors to evade taxes, commit wage & hour violations, and quell unionization. The controversial practice is widespread in the deregulated trucking sector.
###
See here for an infographic and a summary of the contract. For more background on the Toll drivers’ campaign for justice, visit their website . Information on the blue-green coalition behind the nationwide movement to drive up worker standards and clean up U.S. seaports can be found here: www.CleanAndSafePorts.org
_______________________________________________
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http://eight.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/ualeindiv
———————
5.
>
>>>
>>> On Dec 31, 2012, at 4:05 PM, C. M. Lawless wrote:
>>>
>>> Dear Joe Berry,
>>>
>>> I am writing to you on behalf of Colorado Adjuncts, a nascent group
>>> advocating for change in Colorado’s community colleges (a system that
>>> employs approx. 4,000 adjuncts). Our group is small but we have made many
>>> strides in our first year. You can see some of our work on our Web site,
>>> Colorado Adjuncts under “Did You Know?” We are in a difficult situation on our campus. We are
>>> banned from putting any communication in faculty mailboxes, using the
>>> faculty e-mail system, etc.
>>>
>>> However, we have done so much in our first year, and are now forming an AAUP
>>> chapter.
>>> https://sites.google.com/site/coloradoadjunctswiki/home
>>>
>>> At present, we are promoting your book, “Reclaiming the Ivory Tower,” and
>>> are asking adjuncts and adjunct supporters to make a comment on our
>>> anonymous, online book blog. We follow your COCAL updates, of course.
>>> Everyone who has read the first chapter of the book is buzzing with
>>> confirmation, ideas, energy, etc.
>>>
>>> We are planning a second Film Series event in February, with a panel of
>>> state legislators and AAUP officials to field questions from the audience.
>>> We have no money, of course. However, I was curious if perhaps you might be
>>> in Colorado in February on some other business and would like to be on our
>>> panel. Our first Film Series/Panel was modestly successful, and we got some
>>> coverage on the local NPR affiliate. We would go after that again, of
>>> course, and in our press release explain your background and national
>>> stature in the movement. I would like to see if this NPR affiliate would do
>>> a longer interview with you prior to the event.
>>>
>>> I realize ours is a very poor request, but I am making it, regardless, on
>>> the off-chance you might be out this way in February on other business. Even
>>> if you cannot attend our modest event, I wonder if you might be willing to
>>> post a small comment on our anonymous book blog (on our Web site). It would
>>> be like a shot in the arm, Mr. Berry.
>>>
>>> Thank you for any consideration you give this idea and even if you can do
>>> none of this, thank you for your excellent, helpful book. It is like a
>>> bright light in a dark storm to us, you can imagine.
>>>
>>>
>>> Caprice Lawless
>>> Co-Founder, Colorado Adjuncts
>>> coloradocaprice@gmail.com
>>> Ph. 720-939-3094
>>> 601 Lois Drive
>>> Louisville, CO 80027
>>>
>> —————–
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Jan. 10, 2013
Contact: Caprice Lawless, Communications Director, Colorado Adjuncts
coloradocaprice@gmail.com
Ph. 720-939-3094
Colorado’s Community Colleges 99% Speak Out
While no official in the State of Colorado would admit that higher education for Coloradans doesn’t matter, the Colorado Community College System places such a low value on higher education that it pays its part-time faculty (also known as adjuncts, who are 71 percent of its faculty) no benefits and an average of $15,000 per year. It has done so for more than five years. These adjuncts, many of whom teach ¾ time, teach 70 percent of all classes. They earn a tiny fraction of what campus full-time teachers, deans, administrators, specialists and even custodians are paid.
Community college enrollments have skyrocketed to 151,000. Budget-minded students (and their parents) benefit from low-priced courses, as compared to Colorado’s four-year colleges and universities. The general public is unaware, however, of the devastating blow this Wal-Mart model is delivering to higher education.
It is not uncommon for community college adjunct faculty to apply for food stamps, county services and emergency family assistance to meet their bills. They qualify for (and receive) hardship and charity-status at local health clinics and hospitals. Because they have neither health insurance nor sick leave pay, they go to work when ill. They work two or three jobs to make ends meet, and their teaching often reflects the stress. They cannot qualify for unemployment between semesters because they have no long-term contracts with the CCCS. As a result, hundreds of community college teachers are leaving the profession each year. Many qualified to teach walk away from job offers when they discover the low pay. What happens when there are no more qualified teachers, and word gets out in graduate schools that teaching in colleges is a dying profession? How will Colorado attract good jobs if its front-line teachers work in a type of academic apartheid?
Meanwhile, according to a recent CCCS report, the system has a $3 billion impact on the state each year, and taxpayers receive a $1.70 return on every dollar spent. The rosy pictures painted by such studies fail to include hidden costs to taxpayers when low wages in higher education are the norm. The growing Colorado Adjuncts Index (available on our Web site) reveals the thorns amid the roses. Take a look, and send us your thoughts. Your comments will be useful to us in our forthcoming presentations to Colorado lawmakers.
Caprice Lawless, Sandra Keifer-Roberts and Carolyn Elliott
Co-Founders, Colorado Adjuncts
https://sites.google.com/site/coloradoadjunctswiki/
Colorado Adjuncts Index
Percentage of faculty in the Colorado Community College System (CCCS) who are adjunct: 71% 1
Percentage of all courses taught by adjunct faculty: 70% 2
Annual average, before-tax income, CCCS adjunct faculty members: $15,000 3
Annual median salary, Colorado State Employee Custodian III: $33,420 19
Living wage, minimum, Jefferson County, Colorado, one adult: $19,275 4
Number of adjuncts at work in CCCS, 2006-07(recent figure unavailable on CCCS Web site): 3,500 5
Number of times the terms “adjunct,” or “adjunct faculty” appear in the CCCS Strategic Plan: 0 6
Ranks of concern for salaries for full-time faculty and deans in 2011 CCCS Salary Survey: Top two 7
Recommended change to adjunct wages , 2011 CCCS Salary Survey: 0 7
Average salary, full-time faculty (9-months/year), per 2011 CCCS Salary Survey: $46,618 8
Average salary, CCCS deans, per 2011 CCCS Salary Survey: $74, 959 8
Average salary, CCCS vice-presidents, in 2010 per 2011 CCCS Salary Survey: $101,845 8
Average salary, CCCS level III directors, per 2011 CCCS Salary Survey: $86, 703 8
Annual Salary, CCCS President Nancy McCallin, 2009: $266,695 9
Total CCCS revenue, all sources (tuition and government), 2009-10: $543.494 million 10
Total CCCS expenses, 2009-10: $493.196 million 11
Total CCCS full and part-time faculty and staff, 2009-10: 5,634 12
Total CCCS full and part-time faculty and staff, 2009-10 less 3,500 adjunct faculty: 2,134
Total CCCS combined payroll, 2009-10: $268.633 million 13
Estimated CCCS adjunct payroll (3,500 x $15,000), 2009-10: $52.5 million 14
Number of students, CCCS statewide, 2009-10: 151,000 15
Value of unpaid labor CCCS adjunct faculty annually donate to Colorado taxpayers: $19 million 16
Price tag, one-stop student center, completed 2012, Westminster campus: $5.253 million 17
The number of people teaching in American colleges and universities: 1.5 million 18
The number of those teachers who are adjunct or contingent faculty: 1 million 18
Sources
1 Colorado Community College System. “Our Funding,” Colorado Community College Sourcebook,
2008, p. 4. Web Jan. 6, 2013.
http://www.cccs.edu/Docs/Communication/sb/Funding.pdf
2 Colorado Adjuncts. “An Informal Q&A with President Andy Dorsey.” Adjunct Network, 1.2, p.
4, Spring, 2012, Web 6 Jan. 2013.
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxjb2xvcmFkb2FkanVuY3Rzd2lraXxneDo2OGEzMmU3MzczOTUwNGQ0
3 Colorado Community College System. “Our Funding,” Colorado Community College Sourcebook,
2008, p. 3. Web Jan. 6, 2013.
http://www.cccs.edu/Docs/Communication/sb/Funding.pdf
4 Gastmeier, Amy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Living Wage Calculation,
Jefferson County, Colo.” Living Wage Calculator: Poverty in America, 2012, Web 6 Jan. 2013.
http://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/08059
5 Cashwell, Allison. “Factors Affecting Part-time Faculty Job Satisfaction in the Colorado
Community College System.” Diss. Colorado State University, 2009, p. 5. Web 21 May 2012.
http://digitool.library.colostate.edu///exlibris/dtl/d3_1/apache_media/L2V4bGlicmlzL2R0bC9kM18xL2FwYWNoZV9tZWRpYS84MDMyNQ==.pdf
6 Colorado Community College System. Strategic Plan, n.d., CCCS, Web 6 Jan. 2013.
http://www.cccs.edu/Docs/About/StrategicPlan.pdf
7 McDonnell, Barbara (Executive Vice President, CCCS). Salary Survey Discussion. State Board of
Community Colleges and Occupational Education, May 11, 2011, p.1, Web 6 Jan. 2013.
http://www.cccs.edu/Docs/SBCCOE/Agenda/2011/05May/051111-WrkSessionAgnda%20I-J-Salary%20Survey%20Discussion.pdf
8 Heier, Cynthia (Executive Director, Human Resources, CCCS). Salary and Benefits Comparison. State
Board of Community Colleges and Occupational Education, May 11, 2011, pp. 63-87, Web 6
Jan. 2013.
http://www.cccs.edu/Docs/SBCCOE/Agenda/2011/05May/051111-WrkSessionAgnda%20I-J-Salary%20Survey%20Discussion.pdf
9 Perez, Gayle. “CSU Chancellor Lower Pay Not Uncommon,” The Pueblo Chieftain, July 25, 2009,
Web 6 Jan. 2013.
http://www.chieftain.com/news/local/csu-chancellor-s-lower-pay-not- uncommon/article_29919f7a-7540-5305-ae0c-31ee7393f26e.html
10 Economic Modeling Specialists, Int. Economic Contributions of the Colorado Community College System,
Main Report, Jan. 2012, p. 11. CCCS, Web 7 Jan. 2013.
11 Economic Modeling Specialists, Int. Economic Contributions of the Colorado Community College System,
Main Report, Jan. 2012, p. 12. CCCS, Web 7 Jan. 2013.
12 Economic Modeling Specialists, Int. Economic Contributions of the Colorado Community College System,
Main Report, Jan. 2012, p. 11. CCCS, Web 7 Jan. 2013.
13 Economic Modeling Specialists, Int. Economic Contributions of the Colorado Community College System,
Main Report, Jan. 2012, p. 11. CCCS, Web 7 Jan. 2013.
14 Cashwell, Allison.)“Factors Affecting Part-time Faculty Job Satisfaction in the Colorado
Community College System.” Diss. Colorado State University, 2009, p. 5. Web 21 May 2012.
http://digitool.library.colostate.edu///exlibris/dtl/d3_1/apache_media/L2V4bGlicmlzL2R0bC9kM18xL2FwYWNoZV9tZWRpYS84MDMyNQ==.pdf (using Cashwell’s figure of 3,500 adjuncts, 2006-07) and annual salary, per adjunct, of $15,000 per: Colorado Community College System. “Our Funding,” Colorado Community College Sourcebook, 2008, p. 3. Web Jan. 6, 2013.
http://www.cccs.edu/Docs/Communication/sb/Funding.pdf
15 Economic Modeling Specialists, Int. Economic Contributions of the Colorado Community College System,
Main Report, Jan. 2012, p. 12. CCCS, Web 7 Jan. 2013.
16 Colorado Adjuncts. “Signs for Library Display, Campus Equity Week Oct. 22, 2012.” Colorado
Adjuncts, Web 7 Jan. 2013.
https://sites.google.com/site/coloradoadjunctswiki/home/the-books
17 Colorado Community College System. “Our Funding,” Colorado Community College Sourcebook,
2008, p. 15. Web Jan. 6, 2013. http://www.cccs.edu/Docs/Communication/sb/Funding.pdf
18 Bérubé, Michael. “From the President: Among the Majority.” Modern Language Association, n.d.,
Web Jan. 6, 2013.
http://www.mla.org/blog?topic=146
19 Nesbitt, K., Layton-Root, D. “Appendix B: Salary Survey Reference.” Annual Compensation Survey Report for
FY 2013-2014, Colorado Department of Personnel & Administration. Aug. 1, 2012, p. 30. Web
10 Jan. 2013.
http://www.colorado.gov/cs/Satellite?blobcol=urldata&blobheader=application%2Fpdf&blobkey=id&blobtable=MungoBlobs&blobwhere=1251812147170&ssbinary=true
# # #
—————
8. YES, but do it quickly before I end up under the Oakton train.
From: Joe Berry
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2013 3:42 PM
To: Chester Kulis
Subject: Re: HYBRID COURSE (LOW CLASSROOM OVERHEAD) + ADJUNCT (CHEAP EXPLOITED LABOR) = $$$ PROFITS
can I circulate this on COCAL Updates?
Joe
On Jan 10, 2013, at 12:14 AM, Chester Kulis wrote:
> Adjunct unions need to take up issue of adequate training and compensation for implementing new technology such as Pearson’s MyLab textbook and D2L.
>
> Adjuncts are not opposed to new technology. But administrators should give us an estimate about how many hours adjuncts were expected to spend learning about MySocLab and D2L and then actually incorporating them into their courses. These hours are beyond their office hours, class time, and normal preparation of the material. We should also be fairly compensation for the additional time we spend.
>
> For an adjunct who teaches just one or even two courses a semester, making this commitment is problematic. We are already overworked and underpaid. Do any of us want our kids to be an adjunct?
>
> There also seems to be inconsistent expectations and rules. Some colleges and departments suggest that we should try to incorporate these new technologies gradually and at our comfort level, while others expect them to be implemented yesterday and make technology part of the evaluation process. Often the technology still has glitches.
>
> Training for these new technologies is usually geared to the FT faculty during the daytime, often during their Orientation Week when they have to be on campus. Training is not offered in the evening or on weekends when adjuncts might be available. FT faculty learn these technologies as part of their salaried responsibility, while adjuncts don’t get additional compensation and much of their effort is on their own time at home. Administrators even expect adjuncts who work FT elsewhere to use their vacation time to get trained at their college during the day.
>
> Per Board policy Oakton Community College will be developing 40 “hybrid courses” (1 1/2 hour in class and 1 1/2 hour online) within the next four years. I thought that using adjuncts was the cheapest way to go. But now Oakton has come up with an even cheaper pedagogy. Using adjuncts + hybrid courses = cheap labor exploitation + less overhead in classroom use. The bottom line: more profits for the educational establishment and higher salaries for administrators.
>
> D2L technology even allows teachers to “spy”on their students to see whether they did readings or assignments, since the program will actually show when a student began and ended a chore. I was surprised to hear of this capability and asked whether the students were told about it. No, an administrator replied, they had not, but the “spying was for a good purpose.” I replied that so is waterboarding and drones.
>
> One administrator was unapologetic about this new technology which he claimed is the future. “It’s about time that everyone realizes that the train is leaving the station.” Maybe some faculty might end up under the train. He suggested that adjuncts could be personally trained by him and that would be our training, if we cannot make it to training during the day.
>
> Many adjuncts have spent 20-30+ hours just mastering the basics of these two new technologies and implementing them into their courses – without adequate training and fair compensation.
>
> At a recent meeting the D2L system crashed during the orientation.
>
> I just hope that the administration did not have D2L cameras in the ceiling spying on us.
>
> Chester Kulim
> Member
> Oakton Adjunct Faculty Association
———————–
14. I just learned that Dr. Yilin Sun, from Seattle Central Community College
has been elected President-Elect of TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers
to Other Languages).
She is a tenured professor of ESL, but has been supportive of non-tenured
faculty issues. She’s attended two COCAL conferences, COCAL IV in San Jose
in 2001 and COCAL VIII in San Diego in 2008. I got to know her in the late
1990’s as when she chaired the Sociopolitical Concerns committee of the
Washington state affiliate of TESOL (WAESOL).
She will assume her position as President-Elect at the March 2013 TESOL
convention in Dallas and then will become TESOL president at the 2014
convention in Portland, Oregon.
Best wishes,
Jack Longmate
———
17. —– Forwarded Message —-
From: aaup-news
Sent: Sat, January 12, 2013 9:41:25 AM
Subject: FW: Iris Molotsky Award for Excellence in Coverage of Higher Education
In 1970 the AAUP established a Higher Education Writers Award, which was presented for outstanding interpretive reporting on higher education. The award was presented annually until 1986, when its presentation was suspended. Because of AAUP’s strong belief in the importance of providing the public regularly with reliable and informed information about higher education issues, the Association is again offering the award, renamed the Iris Molotsky Award for Excellence in Coverage of Higher Education. Ms Molotsky served as the AAUP’s Director of Public Information for 19 years.
The purpose of the award is to recognize and stimulate coverage of higher education nationally and to encourage thoughtful and comprehensive reporting of higher education issues. The AAUP Award is given for outstanding coverage of higher education exhibiting analytical and investigative reporting. Entries will be judged on the basis of their relevance to issues confronting higher education.
Entries for the award must have been published between January 1 and December 31 of the prior year. Entries may be single articles or a series, but editorials and columns will not be considered for the award.
Submissions may be made by media organizations or employees. Applicants may be self-nominating. Each application must be accompanied by an entry form. Download information and the application form. (.pdf)
Entries must be postmarked by April 15.
Please contact Robin Burns at the AAUP’s Washington office for more information.
Robin Burns
Assistant Director for Media Relations
American Association of University Professors
1133 19th St., NW, 2nd Floor
Washington, DC 20036
rburns@aaup.org
http://www.aaup.org/AAUP
Follow the AAUP on Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.
_______________________________________________
adj-l mailing list
adj-l@adj-l.org
http://adj-l.org/mailman/listinfo/adj-l_adj-l.org
>
>
————-
19 Hi everyone,
Yesterday CCSF had a very successful activity to let San Francisco voters know about the situation with Proposition A funds and how it is affecting our students. The media was there during the press conference. However, I have not seen this activity repeated in many TV news programs.
• Please call the following TV channels and request the program director to show the footage in their news programs.
• If you are outside the Bay Area, ask the program director that you would like to be informed about what is going on in CCSF and to please show the footage of the CCSF activity.
Now is the time you can help in our struggle.
KCSM (650) 574-6586
KRON (415) 441-4444
KTVU (510) 834-1212
KPIX (415) 756-0928
KQED (415) 864-2000
These telephone numbers are the general information numbers. If you have other telephone numbers or emails addresses, spread the word.
Thank you for your cooperation,
Hugo Aparicio
Business Instructor
City College of San Francisco
Business Department C-310 Box 128
50 Phelan Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94112
(415) 239-3695
——————————————
Please use
510-527-5889 phone/fax
21 San Mateo Road,
Berkeley, CA 94707
“Access to Unemployment Insurance Benefits for Contingent Faculty”, by Berry, Stewart and Worthen, published by Chicago COCAL, 2008. Order from
“Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education”. by Joe Berry, from Monthly Review Press, 2005. Look at
See
See
To join international COCAL listserve email
or, send “Subscribe” to
Updates in brief and links
1. Chicago Teachers vs the Fat Cats — a great new You Tube Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1eV8EHII5Q
2. Good letter to the editor of Cape Cod local paper by our colleague Betsy Smith
http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130101/OPINION/301010339&cid=sitesearch
3. Good piece on administrative bloat at I of Minnesota (see below)
4. Piece on musicians and adjunct faculty by our colleague Paul Haeder
http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/01/symphony-blues-low-wages-no-benefits-but-plenty-of-applause/
and another of his blogs at
http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/01/i-am-an-english-teacher/
and http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/01/what-the-majority-is-to-the-minority/#more-47090
5. Advice for parents of prospective college students re: Adjuncts.
http://thenewfacultymajority.blogspot.com/2012/07/quick-reference-guide-for-parents-on.html
and http://www.thecollegesolution.com/the-dangers-of-being-taught-by-part-timers/
and http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505145_162-57554450/do-colleges-exploit-their-professors/
6. New NLRB complaint issued against East-West U in chicago over firing (non-re-employmnent) of adjunct union activists there (see below)
7. “For Profit” play to be shown at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine. See below for details or http://www.bates.edu/mlk/
8. How the FBI and others coordinated the crackdown on Occupy last fall. some lessons for us here.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy
9. Adjunct Project 2.0 website up. Check it out.
http://www.adjunctproject.com/new-year-new-website-new-victories/
10. Plans for Campus Strike at Indiana U, Bloomington
http://socialistorganizer.org/campus-strike-indiana-university/
11. Private for-profit businesses are now taking over hiring an d employment of school workers for some districts.
see http://www.source4teachers.com/
12. More on IRS and calculating adjunct hours and % of load for health care act purposes: proposed rules out for comment
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/01/07/irs-starts-address-issues-adjunct-faculty-hours
and http://chronicle.com/article/IRS-Says-Colleges-Must-Be/136523/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
13. More on new Adjunct Project site with CHE
http://chronicle.com/article/Adjunct-Project-Show-Wide/136439
14. Chris Eckhardt dies, one of the original protestors in the famous Tinker vs Des Moines Board of Ed black armband anti-war demonstration case in 1965-6, from which came the famous quote, “neither students nor teachers leave their first amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate.” Wish it were more honored now. (Personal privilege, I, Joe Berry, was also one of this small group of protestors and knew Chris Eckhardt at the same Theodore Roosevelt High School. One of the proudest moments of my life, but very scary too.)
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013301020030
14. A good movie recommendation by Bill Fletcher, leading union activist, labor educator and contingent faculty member.
http://atlantadailyworld.com/201301022818/Viewpoints/oliver-stone-s-untold-history-of-the-united-states-cannot-be-hushed-up-or-brushed-aside
15. Making the Case for Adjuncts (good comprehensive article)
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/01/09/adjunct-leaders-consider-strategies-force-change
16. U of Phoenix faces accredition problems, stock prices and enrollment drops
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/burying-lede
17. Accreditors respond negatively to Longmate complaint about Washington CC.
http://chronicle.com/article/Regional-Accreditor-Rejects/136527/
18. Overall article on state of contingents in Canada (Thanks to Frank Cosco)
[Note to Canadians and other internationals: please send me relevant articles like this when they appear so I can resend them.]
Comments Off on COCAL Updates in brief
Posted in Contingent labor
Tagged COCAL Updates, Contingent labor
Updates in Brief and Links
1. Former Obama aide now doing communications for Kaplan U, among other corporations.
2. Debra Leigh Scott on Washington DC radio show about us
Hey everyone —
Just wanted to give you a heads up that I’ve been invited to be on a radio program tomorrow morning at 11:00 am, “Clearing the FOG: Speaking truth to expose the Forces of Greed.” It airs live on 1480 am in Washington, DC, is livestreamed on WeActRadio.com and is archived on our website,ItsOurEconomy.us. Kyle McCarthy is guest hosting (he’s one of the movers and shakers in the student loan debt push back), and I’ll be second on the show, from about 11:15 to 11:30. One of Kyle’s associates from his organization will be first. I’ll be second. Then there’s someone named Steve Horn — does anyone know him? – who will be talking about the privatization push K-16.
I’m not sure if there is a call in part to the show, but if anyone is around and can call in, that would be great.
Best,
D
3. New blog on academic work and us
—
www.debraleighscott.com
Other Likely Stories by Debra Leigh Scott
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4. Article from America Mag (Catholic) about Duquesne adjuncts fight to unionize
5. Some updated analysis of the Adjunct Project’s accumulated dates by the originator, Josh Boldt
6. Unemployedworkers.org seeking stories about employment and benefits for presentations to Congress regarding renewal of UI extensions for 2013. Se below for details.
7. An interesting update on the fight at City College of SF. and also a letter from the union president, AFT 2121, Alisa Messer. See below.
8. Nippon TV of Japan looking to do a story on people with post-grad degrees who are on public aid or otherwise have trouble economically. See below for details.
9. Campus Equity Week report from U of Colorado. see below
10. Story about Freelancers’ Union Jill Horowitz
12. American U adjuncts nearing agreement on first contract
13. Results of new faculty study by Higher Ed Research Center at UCLA
14. Global Education Strike called for Nov. 14-22
15. Very good Angry Adjunct comic about austerity on campus
17. New blog entry on Adjunct Project, worth looking at
18. More remembrances of labor hero Jerry Tucker, these from Labor Notes.
Updates in full
6.
Dear Joe,
Are you currently unemployed? Have you been unemployed in the last few years and now back at work? Are you engaged in a long, tough job search?
If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions, your stories are needed right now. We are compiling these stories for a campaign we’re ramping up to do two things:
1. Renew the current federal unemployment insurance extensions for 2013, and
2. Expand and strengthen reemployment services for unemployed workers, including those who may have exhausted unemployment benefits as well as current recipients.
Right now, more than 2 million unemployed Americans are facing an abrupt and total cut-off of federal unemployment insurance between Christmas and New Year’s if Congress fails to renew the current Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) benefits program before it expires December 31st. Another 2.8 million currently receiving regular state unemployment benefits will not have access, if needed, to those federal EUC extensions in 2013 — unless Congress acts.
This is a looming disaster we just cannot let happen. Here’s how you can help right now:
There are three specific kinds of stories we are looking for:
• If you among the millions of Americans currently unemployed and receiving either federal EUC or regular state UI benefits, please click here to tell your story. We urgently need these stories from workers who would be cut-off of unemployment insurance if Congress fails to renew the federal extensions for 2013.
• If you were unemployed but are now back at work, and thankful for having had unemployment insurance to help sustain you and your family during your job search, please click here to tell us your story. Some who have opposed benefit extensions have falsely asserted that unemployment insurance discourages people from actively seeking or accepting new work. They say it’s a “disincentive”. We want to counter that false assertion — with stories from people who have found new jobs before their benefits ran out.
• If you are looking for work and experiencing a long, tough job search, please click here to tell us that story. Federal EUC benefit weeks were reduced in many states this year even as unemployment remains high and the average unemployed worker’s job-search still lasts about nine months. Finding new work is so tough for many unemployed workers that millions remain jobless even after unemployment benefits are exhausted. We need to renew federal EUC benefits for 2013, and make effective, expanded reemployment services readily available to more job-seekers, including benefit recipients as well as those who have exhausted benefits.
With your help, we’ll bring as many stories as we can to the halls of Congress over the coming weeks. But please, don’t delay — send us your story today!
And if you know of others who can help with their stories, feel free to forward this email to them.
Many thanks.
The UnemployedWorkers.Org Team
Mitchell, Chris, Maurice, Judy, Mike, Rick, George, Claire and Norman
www.Unemployedworkers.org
This email was sent to: joeberry@igc.org
To unsubscribe, go to: http://www.nelp.org/page/unsubscribe/.
To subscribe, go to: http://www.nelp.org/site/get_updates.
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7. On Oct 21, 2012, at 3:00 PM, steven Miller wrote:
The San Francisco Chronicle continued its role as Patron of Austerity and Popularizer of Privatization on Sunday, October 21, 2012 in their lead front page story. The full story is attached below these comments:
“The Mess at CCSF – how it all began”
Subheadline — “Faculty influence many have gotten too strong”
Strange conclusion, since it states later in the article: that CCSF has lost “$25 million… since 2008”.
The scolding tone of the article is full of similar statements, damning the school for successfully putting the faculty in leadership, actually paying them well, and then blaming them for the collapsing economy:
“The story of what brought a vast college to its knees could fill a business course syllabus or, better, a novel.”
In 1990, Chancellor Evan Dobelle, “rewrote the way the college was going to be governed.” Dobelle had a different vision that the corporate privatizers, their political minions and the corporate press, “There can never be a faculty that is too empowered.”
Dobelle cut back on administrators and gave the faculty lots of power. The Chronicle even states, “ ‘Problems with the system might have emerged sooner if money had been tight. But that wasn’t the case.’ ”
In other words, everything was fine until Wall Street broke the economy in 2008. It really isn’t about a strategy that didn’t work. The problem is with cuts and choices that California state government has made in implementing Austerity. We know these policies all too well as the “slash and burn” policies that government enforces against working people, against the poor, even as they refuse to raise taxes on corporations a single dime!
As with attacks on K12 public schools, the privatizers always go after the governance first. They have to break to control of the public, otherwise they cannot turn public education into private corporate profits.
The article also details significant underassessments of financial issues and the interesting conviction of past-Chancellor Phillip Day in 2011 for “diverting college funds into bond campaigns”. This crime was so severe that “a judge reduced the felonies to misdemeanors”. Wouldn’t it be nice if the criminal system was so kind to protestors who sit down in the street! This is just a diversionary tactic.
Governors Schwarzenegger and Brown both get for the Oscar for handwringing in public, while dispossessing the public in practice. They are unified in the typical Austerity lie, pronouncements that “there’s just no money” and “there’s nothing we can do.”
Well, there actually was a lot that people could have done, there’s a lot they still can do. Instead of protecting corporate loopholes and turning more of the budget over to guarantee corporate profits (high speed rail, cutting pensions, diverting water through the Delta Tunnels, maintaining corporate tax loopholes), either governor could have taken a simple step that would, just by itself, guarantee that budget cuts did not need to happen at all.
Every Californian pays more than 9% in sales taxes. However, corporations in California make vast purchases every day that run to many billions of dollars, and these are not taxed at all. We are talking about the hyper-mega market for speculation, accessed by banks, investors, hedge funds and financiers.
Every day these unsavory elements borrow money to speculate in financial markets. They make billions of dollars in purchases every day. These are computer-driven speculations, bets that can be made over the change of a price by a millisecond, a second, a minute, hour, day, week, month – whathaveyou. They can make money betting that the price will go up or go down.
Either way, none of these purchases are taxed. If they were taxed, say at 4.75% – half of sales tax – there would be billions of dollars in excess revenue for the state. Nothing would have to be cut! This form of tax is currently called the “Robin Hood Tax”, even though it hardly “robs” the rich to help the poor.
Forget the “Millionaires Tax” – this generates incredibly more amounts of money for people. We could easily return to the hallowed days of yore that prevailed in the early 1960s,when there were no tuition or fees at all in the state. This of course is exactly in line with the higher-education Mission Statements that the corporate boys tell us we now have to change.
So it’s a choice. It’s straight up just a choice. There is no getting around it. These are the only conclusions it is possible to draw from the Chronicle article. Of course, we are not supposed to consider what this all means.
Actually though, addressing this question is kind of urgent. As soon as the elections are over, the Democratic and Republican Parties have conjured up the on-going drama of the dreaded “Fiscal Cliff” soap opera. This will hit on January 1 and 2 when the “perfect storm” of federal automatic trigger cuts hits. The Bush tax brakes for the ultra-rich, as well as the so-called “Middle Class Tax Breaks”, will end. At the same time, the federal government will start getting smashed with automatic trigger cuts for every sector of the budget, supposedly even including the hallowed Defense Department.
These triggers are reversible only by legislation, something the new Congress and President might or might not take up. Thank Gawd that “Patriotic Americans” are already working on legislation to exempt the Defense Department from the barrage!
The cuts to social programs will be perhaps the greatest in the history of the United States – all in the name of Austerity! No one has yet calculated the devastation that they will cause across the country to public programs.
Of course, we could tax all the financial transactions in the country and then the only problem is how to keep spending the surplus to benefit people in new and exciting ways.
This option is could be a reality, but it is only a dream since the capitalist system cannot make the choice to reduce private corporate profits by a single penny. This is not “corporate greed” and goes way beyond “corporate personhood”. It is mandated and guaranteed by the Rule of Law: corporations must legally maximize their profit. Period.
Does anyone really think it is possible to reform this???
Since this train wreck is headed right at us, maybe we should consider what we, the public, can do. We can continue the never-ending discussions about quick fixes; we can keep hoping that somehow a new hero will appear; we can exhaust ourselves, running around the endless maze of electoral politics; we can keep hoping that the old days will return.
But when all is said and done, Austerity is a policy, a set of choices that we allow government to make that directly and openly benefit corporations. We can allow that choice to happen; in fact, we can’t stop it – even though it does appear as a set of legislative policies. We can’t stop it because the working class does not yet have the political power to do so.
This “choice” is a concerted part of a strategy of an entire class of capitalists, financiers and corporations that operates consciously and for-itself. This is the class that holds political power in this country. They are using their political power to make Austerity happen. This leads to privatization of every governmental function as a profit-making venture and fuels the Wall Street speculative market.
We can however begin to discuss how to enforce a program that attacks this head on. This program must go in the other direction: in a rich country, when it’s the choice of eliminating a program, make it free to all, with completely equal access, instead. Who cares if the corporations say they will not afford this?
Government in America is still based on the assumption that it’s value is to benefit people, not corporations. That too is still law. We must hold every politician accountable to the public good. They are forcing us to take up the issues of transformation. Let history not say that we were not up to the challenge.
CCSF is the college where the working people of San Francisco send their children for their one chance at education. How dare any politician work against this! Put every politician on the record on this one. That is the strategic direction to break the stasis and hold their feet to the fire.
Steven Miller
October 21, 2012
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SF City College money woes have long history
Nanette Asimov
This originally appeared on the SF Chronicle front page as:
The Mess at CCSF – how it all began
Subheadline — “Faculty influence many have gotten too strong”
Updated 11:11 p.m., Saturday, October 20, 2012
On a brisk November day in 1990, the new chancellor of City College of San Francisco offered a rare gift to employees who had felt ignored or trampled by the previous chief just ousted.
“We stand by like jackasses in a hailstorm, and we take it, and we take it, and we take it. And, by God, we are not going to take it anymore!” ChancellorEvan Dobelle proclaimed in his inaugural address to enthusiastic applause.
With that he announced the promotion of 11 employees, mostly faculty, to administrative posts and told reporters: “You just saw the faculty appointed to run the district.”
Soon he would fire more than a third of the 71 administrators, paring them to 46 at the school of 65,000 students. The number of administrators fell to 39 in 2012, though enrollment neared 90,000.
Dobelle’s topsy-turvy move was the beginning of a transformation at City College, a seed that today’s administrators say helped cultivate, 22 years later, the field of managerial and financial troubles that now threatens California’s largest public school with the loss of accreditation and possible closure.
By the time the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges issued its sharply worded report in July giving City College until March 15 to fix its problems – including too few administrators – a psychology professor had risen through the ranks to become chancellor himself, committed to shielding the college from layoffs and course cuts even as the economy and his budget crumbled around him.
Complicated tale
The story of what brought a vast college to its knees could fill a business course syllabus or, better, a novel. It’s a tale of innovation and self-protection, against a backdrop of generosity.
“The college had a very big heart and tried to do a lot for a lot of people,” interim Chancellor Pamila Fisher told the state Board of Governors for the college system recently. But she acknowledged that that was her “elevator speech about how our wonderful college got into this mess.” More to the point, she said, Dobelle “rewrote the way the college was going to be governed,” and a subsequent chancellor, Philip Day, spent money to keep it going.
The system Dobelle started let certain faculty members – department chairs with their own labor union – for the first time make key decisions that had financial implications, such as who would teach what classes and when, and to influence hiring and tenure decisions.
The deans who formerly made those decisions retired and were not always replaced. As their numbers dwindled, they “could no longer make decisions without the approval of people lower in the structure,” said John Rizzo, the current board president.
Dobelle, now president of Westfield State University in Massachusetts, remains committed to the system. “There can never be a faculty that is too empowered,” he said. But he declined to comment on the transformation’s long-term impact on the college.
The trustees accepted the move to faculty-centered governance, said Bob Varni, a trustee until 2001.
“We on the board really didn’t understand the whole concept, so we didn’t do anything to slow it down,” Varni said. “It seemed like a nice family operation. What do they say? Kumbaya.”
By 1998, when Day took the chancellor’s job, the U.S. economy was robust and California was in the midst of the dot-com boom.
“We had a lot of money, and Phil Day used it,” said Natalie Berg, a trustee since 1996. “The department chairs got a big boost in their pay. The unions got raises, too. We had the money to give.”
Problems with the system might have emerged sooner if money had been tight. But that wasn’t the case.
Not only did City College begin paying its faculty more generously than other colleges, including 23 paid holidays, but the college also began accumulating employees. The accreditation team would later marvel that City College employed almost twice the number of tenured faculty for every thousand students as did comparison college districts, with many more part-timers as well.
Costly labor agreements in place since the 1970s also persisted: lifetime health benefits kick in for any 50-year-old hired before 2009 who has worked just five years. And employees still don’t contribute to their retiree health program, a condition that set up the college for what is today an unfunded liability of at least $180 million.
“Our problems started when we started overpaying, which was not sustainable,” Berg said. “We should have been forewarned. It was the staff’s responsibility to tell the board. People did say, ‘This is the budget,’ but not in a way that made the board understand that this was a problem.”
Ambitious plans
Day, meanwhile, had big plans. Voters approved a $195 million school facilities bond in 2001, and another for $246 million in 2005, and Day laid the groundwork for new campuses in Chinatown and the Mission District, as well as a new athletic center and other buildings for the main campus at 50 Phelan Ave.
Those dreams coincided with a harsher reality. In 2006, it was City College’s turn for an accreditation review, which occurs every six years. An accreditation team identified eight major problems, including poor financial planning that kept reserves too low, gobbled too much of the budget on salaries and benefits, and jeopardized the college’s future with the ballooning retiree health obligation.
Although accreditation teams issue recommendations, not requirements, making the fixes are necessary for colleges to stay in business. California does not fund unaccredited institutions.
Had college officials taken the recommendations seriously, it’s unlikely that City College would now be in its desperate race for survival. But in April 2007, the first Chronicle article appeared revealing Day’s involvement in an illegal scheme to divert college funds into the facilities bond campaigns.
Instead of focusing on the problems cited by the accreditation team, Day found himself the subject of an investigation into money laundering by then-District Attorney Kamala Harris.
That wasn’t Day’s only problem. Rizzo, who joined the board in 2007, said he and trustees Julio Ramos and Milton Marks pushed for performance audits that uncovered $40 million of construction expenses unapproved by the board or approved after the money was spent.
“We found unfiled paperwork that filled 64 boxes – unpaid invoices, contracts the board never saw that we didn’t know existed,” Rizzo said. “It was amazing.”
Yet Day still enjoyed support from a majority on the board. He couldn’t be fired, so Rizzo and his allies hounded him out with unusual demands and nitpicking questions.
“We were making his life miserable,” Rizzo recalled.
Day left in 2008. Three years later he pleaded guilty to three felony counts of diverting $100,000 of college funds into the bond campaigns. A judge reduced the felonies to misdemeanors.
Day’s successor was Don Griffin, a veteran psychology professor who had risen through the ranks as department chair, dean of instruction and vice chancellor.
The state’s economic crisis hit just as he took office. Almost immediately, City College learned it would lose about $7 million a year in state funds earmarked for student services – Griffin’s former department – which included counseling and other nonacademic support.
Making one-time cuts
Mark Robinson, the new vice chancellor in charge of student services, presented a budget that proposed layoffs and across-the-board cuts to the many departments in his area. Griffin, however, balanced the budget with one-time cuts from elsewhere, in a move appreciated by faculty.
Robinson wasn’t the only administrator advocating for longer-term budget reductions.
But the short-term cuts continued.
“We cut everyone’s salary for the third year in a row,” said Peter Goldstein, vice chancellor of finance and administration. “We greatly restricted hiring, and we tried to save money through attrition.”
By 2011, that strategy blew up. City College faced a $13.75 million loss in state funding – part of $25 million lost since 2008. Trustees dipped into reserves, reducing the emergency fund to dangerously low levels that brought the college to the brink of bankruptcy.
Griffin, who retired in April to have surgery to remove a brain tumor, did not respond to requests for comment.
Fisher, the interim chancellor, took over in May.
Two months later, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges gave City College just nine months to repair all 14 significant problems that had been years in the making or lose its accreditation.
And because there was no guarantee that could be done, the accrediting team also ordered City College to prepare for closure.
“From the beginning, we’ve had people saying the accreditation report was part of a far-right conspiracy designed to take us down because we’re so liberal,” Fisher told the college system’s Board of Governors.
She said the intentions of those who led the college to this point reflect “San Francisco values of which we’re all very proud – but which sometimes get in the way of making good decisions.
“Yes, our board will have to make very hard, fiscal choices. Just making the fiscal decisions won’t save us. We’ll need the cooperation of all constituency groups.”
Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimov
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/education/article/SF-City-College-money-woes-have-long-history-3968316.php#ixzz29xvOycdr
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Friends,
Alissa hits it out of the ballpark here. FYI.
Bill
____________________________
Bill Shields
Chair, Labor and Community Studies
City College of San Francisco
1400 Evans Avenue, Room 224
San Francisco, California 94124
415-550-4473 (phone)
415-550-4400 (fax)
From: AFT 2121
Date: October 24, 2012 2:16:40 PM PDT
To: wshields@ccsf.edu
Subject: Progress? An open letter to the Board of Trustees, 10/24/12
Reply-To: aft@aft2121.org
October 24, 2012
To: Board of Trustees, City College of San Francisco
CC: Chancellor Fisher, Chancellor Scott-Skillman, college community
Re: Progress?
Despite what some naysayers predicted, the College has done it—produced a comprehensive document that maps out how CCSF will meet the gauntlet thrown down by the ACCJC. Because all constituencies have worked hard, a number of recommendations have already been met and the College has produced a progress report that should impress upon our critics how seriously the District takes this task. Even under a relentless timeline, the October 15 Special Report represents a significant response to the recommendations. It also represents significant changes.
As a College, we do well to remember that there are areas where we can improve. At an institution that has in some cases been too slow to make smart changes, we note that thoughtful, carefully implemented measures—and we do mean thoughtful, nuanced, and responsible measures—to improve enrollment and scheduling, streamline management, and implement improved technologies are possible. Such changes will make better use of shrinking resources and have less damaging impacts on students or the workers who serve them.
We are, however, fully concerned that some changes will have severely negative impacts on students and the education we offer them and on positive working conditions that support educational quality Change is not bad on principle, and maintaining our accreditation is essential, but reforms that are made thoughtlessly, too quickly, or without consultation will surely beget unintended, negative consequences. Some solutions are better than others, and some “solutions” are not solutions at all.
As we have said, even in these troubling times, we do not believe this College must wholesale shift its priorities away from quality education, the needs of our students and community, or care for the workers who serve those students. Some of the proposals the Board now has before it run just this risk, and in the extreme. The October 25 agenda item proposing drastic restructuring of our academic programs is an alarming example of an extreme and foolhardy swing of the pendulum.
This proposed restructuring has been made without consultation and without, as far as we can tell, necessary consideration of the education we provide. There has been no opportunity for discussion or understanding of these enormous changes that will affect every sector of the College. Questions abound. Whose “best practices” are these? What content knowledge and expertise will Deans and Chairs of multiple programs be able to bring to the day-to-day workings of our programs? Who will schedule hundreds of classes and faculty members, pursue and manage grants, and establish community links to employers and internships—just a few of the responsibilities our Department Chairs currently oversee? Without legally mandated oversight, how will our celebrated Career and Technical Education programs such as Nursing and Fire Science maintain their accreditations? And is the goal a more effective structure or to bust the Department Chairs’ Council, a certified bargaining unit? These questions necessitate bargaining, explication, and input from those who best understand the impacts.
This proposal needs to go back to the drawing board, so to speak; by no means should the Board approve it.
But this non-inclusive proposal is simply the latest and most extreme manifestation of a growing problem our college community is facing—the manner in which changes are being imposed at City College and the devaluation of the expertise of those doing the work of educating and supporting our students. This is not progress: unilateral, top-down proposals lead to deficient proposals.
Faculty expertise and students’ and workers’ concerns must be genuinely considered—at the bargaining table, on accreditation teams, in governance, and in all major decisions affecting the future of CCSF. Indeed the future of the college and the education we offer students depend on it. Decisions made without sufficient expertise and input can lead to disruption and confusion rather than improvement—and can jeopardize the College’s well-being.
We have already challenged the Board, collectively, to consider and address with integrity the task before you. We have called attention to the lack of transparency and the importance of constituency input. The wealth of expertise and dedication evident at CCSF should not be ignored or trampled.
We likewise reiterate our expectation that the Board respect collective bargaining and ensure that all negotiable items are brought to the appropriate bargaining tables. Labor and collective bargaining are not at fault here.
Even the CEO of FCMAT, Joel Montero, is clear on this point. “Labor is not the villain,” he pointed out to the Board of Governors earlier this month in speaking of City College’s difficult financial situation. “Those issues should not be laid at the feet of labor.” He went on to note that in public education “we spend most of our money in the category of people,” reporting that in the K12 system, for “salary and benefits, [districts are] spending in the neighborhood of $0.94 of every $1, up from $0.84 prior to 2007-2008.” That number is expected to rise “as the state’s issues continue to exacerbate funding and support programs at the local level.” We are hardly alone in our fiscal crisis; in fact, there is agreement among some that if Proposition 30 fails, the resulting trigger cuts would likely cause the demise—the actual disappearance—of several smaller community college districts in the state.
Faculty and employee groups have consistently stepped up to the plate in addressing the current crisis, yet we have been left out of any authentic decision-making process and unilateral changes are being implemented. We have also heard consistently from students that they are being excluded from the process. And it increasingly looks as though Board members, who say they invited a Special Trustee (rather than have one imposed) in order to retain their stewardship of the District, are nonetheless ready to abdicate their role in the decision-making process as well. Is it not our joint responsibility to maintain our accreditation, our fiscal solvency, and most importantly the ability to serve our students well?
We have been criticized for being “too generous” and told that we are flawed because we have “San Francisco values.” We reject these notions, and we reject the wholesale downsizing of a college that has done so much for San Francisco.
We have not been criticized for the quality of the education we provide to students or the dedication of those who do that work. It would be a tragedy beyond measure if the Accreditation Commission’s visiting team returned in March to find a College that was unrecognizable, a College no longer serving its community well, no longer able to meet the needs of its diverse and deserving student population.
Avoiding that tragedy depends in part on the outcome of November’s election—on passing Proposition A locally and Proposition 30 statewide. But it also depends on the “hard choices” this College makes and how they impact our students and those who do the work of educating and supporting them. It depends on the ability of the Board and administration to work with the entire college community collaboratively and with integrity to make smart—even if tough—decisions.
On behalf of AFT 2121,
Alisa Messer
President
Contact AFT 2121 at 415-585-2121 or visit us online at aft2121.org. Follow us on Facebook
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8. Colleagues,
The AAUP has been contacted by a producer for Nippon Television (NTV), Japan, looking to do a story on individuals with advanced degrees who are receiving public assistance, specifically food stamps (technically now under the acronym “SNAP,” by the way). If you are interested in speaking with this producer, the complete request and contact information are below. On a personal note, I would counsel you to think twice about whether you are interested in pursuing this; it could be a platform for useful advocacy, but it might also be a negative personal experience.
Many readers of this list will recall the Chronicle of Higher Education article on the same topic: “The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps” (May 6, 2012). Available athttp://chronicle.com/article/From-Graduate-School-to/131795/ (link may require subscription). That article turned out to be pretty well presented, I would say, but that is not always the case with media coverage of complex issues.
Regards,
John W. Curtis, Ph.D.
Director of Research and Public Policy
American Association of University Professors
1133-19th Street NW, Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036
(202) 737-5900 Ext. 143
E-mail: jcurtis@aaup.org
“Academic Freedom for a Free Society”
Support AAUP by joining today! http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/involved/join/
AAUP on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AAUPNational
From: Takuya Katsumura (NTV NY) [mailto:takuya@ntvic.com]
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2012 6:30 PM
To: John Curtis; ROBIN BURNS
Cc: NTV NY
Subject: Japan’s NTV’s Inquiry/Request: AAUP
Dear Mr. John Curtis and Ms. Robin Burns,
Hello, my name is Takuya Katsumura and I am a television news producer with Nippon Television (NTV), Japanese broadcaster.
NTV is the largest and oldest commercial television network in Japan and I am based in New York City.
I am contacting you because NTV is currently looking to cover a news story on the economy in the U.S. and it’s impact on people, especially those who have higher education degree.
In our story we will be talking about how regular Americans, even those with higher education, are struggling to pay the bills.
We understand that there is still a strong image that most media give their audiences that people that are on public assistance are dropouts or irresponsible.
This is why we are trying to show the reality of American society to our viewers.
We would like to fairly show that so many people are living on public assistance when they have a great education, career and jobs.
And it is our hope that our viewers can learn something out of our story and possibly break their stigmas against people receiving such aid. Moreover, I hope we all have an opportunity to think about how we can turn around the economy and the systems that allow defunding even higher education.
Mr. Curtis and Ms. Burns would you kindly be able to introduce us to someone who matches the criteria below?
We are looking for someone who has master/Ph.D degree and who is receiving food stamps, and who allows us to…
■ Film interview at home
■ Film him/her go shopping using food stamps.
■ Film him/her commute to the workplace (school/college/university)
■ Film him/her work at the school/college/university if it’s possible
We are looking to do this coverage by the end of this month. Hopefully this week.
I understand those people that are receiving assistance are having a tough time, but I hope you understand the possible learning opportunity this segment might be able to give our audiences to know what many people’s lives in America are like right now.
I would greatly appreciate it if you could kindly consider this request and reply this email.
You can always reach me on my mobile at 2016815127.
Thank you very much.
Best Regards,
Takuya
—
* * * * * * * * * *
Takuya Katsumura
NTV New York News Bureau
645 Fifth Avenue Suite 303, New York, NY 10022
Tel: 212-765-5076 (office main)
212-660-6966 (direct) 201-681-5127 (cell)
Fax: 212-265-8495
E-mail: takuya@ntvic.com
http://www.ntv.co.jp
P Please consider the environment before printing this email
**** A little bit about Nippon TV ****
Nippon Television Network (NTV) is Japan’s largest, oldest and most watched commercial television network. NTV was the first network in Japan to be granted a license to broadcast television in 1952 and has always focused on excellence in their programming, news coverage, sports coverage and entertainment. NTV has had some of the highest ratings of all Japanese networks for more than ten years.
NTV has the largest cable television news network in Japan called NNN or Nippon Network News. We have around 30 affiliate stations in Japan, and our coverage and our viewers broaden out throughout Japan. NTV is a leading provider of news with more than 6 million people tuning into their news broadcasts on a nearly nightly basis.
Nippon Television also covers the entire world with bureaus in Washington D.C., Moscow, Cairo, London, Paris, Beijing, Bangkok, Seoul and others. Together with 12 bureaus throughout the world connected by a sophisticated satellite network, NTV is able to bring its millions of viewers the most comprehensive news coverage amongst Japan’s many commercial television networks.
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9. Jeff –
As is likely the case on most campuses, adjuncts here fear losing their jobs, making it difficult to organize. Nevertheless, we’ve been focusing on Campus Equity Week for months, ever since we learned about it through AAUP. It’s been energizing. I’ll list a few details here so other adjunct groups strapped for resources might use an idea like this.
Looking ahead to October, earlier this summer we researched adjunct titles and then asked our library to order them. In August, we worked with library staffers to develop what is now a permanent collection of titles housed in a new section of the reserve area devoted to “Professional Development.” We want them kept on reserve in case certain, er, un-adjunct individuals would accidentally on purpose check them out indefinitely. Our thought is to make them available for browsing, at least, and perhaps the reading of a chapter or two at a nearby table, as reserve books cannot leave the library.
In September, we designed and printed colorful bookmarks announcing Campus Equity Week, with the instructions for an online book blog on the reverse side. These were 4-up to a sheet, so we made 160 for around $40.
On Oct. 19th, to promote both CEW and the book club, we put on display in the library’s 12 foyer windows our favorite adjunct titles, accompanied by posters beside each one. On the poster (sheet of legal-sized paper) for each book, in 36-point type, is its title, and below, in 20-point type, the blurb from the back page or inside flap of each book. The titles of some of the books are edgy and compelling, so having the posters in the windows draws passersby to take a closer look.
In two of the windows we’ve put “Did You Know?” posters about the adjunct working situation, and another containing a tally of estimated hours unpaid labor (prep, grading, advising) adjuncts on our campus are donating to state taxpayers annually.
This week we are handing the bookmarks to adjuncts when we see them, as we are barred from any distribution of anything in faculty mailboxes.
By moving our campaigning online and by capitalizing on library protocols in regard to freedom of information, we have been able to offer adjunct faculty some ideas and a place (online) to converse about them.
This is our first attempt at Campus Equity Week. We are having a great time with it and look forward to its expansion.
Colorado Adjuncts
On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 7:01 PM, Jeff
I want to thank everyone who responded to me. I will present the idea of promoting CEW at our next council meeting. Even if there is not a national effort, it would make sense to do it locally.
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Please use
510-527-5889 phone/fax
21 San Mateo Road,
Berkeley, CA 94707
“Access to Unemployment Insurance Benefits for Contingent Faculty”, by Berry, Stewart and Worthen, published by Chicago COCAL, 2008. Order from
“Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education”. by Joe Berry, from Monthly Review Press, 2005. Look at
See
See
To join international COCAL listserve email
or, send “Subscribe” to
2. New S CA adjunct resources page
6. Special radio show in Vancouver, Canada community radio station, on education in many aspects, including interview with Karen Lewis of CTU in Chicago, Joe Berry in CA and others. 10/20/12, Sat. Listen on line. See below for details.
10. IHE on CA prop 30 and possible tuition hikes if it fails
12. Legendary union reformer in UAW and other venues, Jerry Tucker, died this AM.
Comments Off on COCAL Updates
Posted in Contingent labor, Corporate University
Tagged adjuncts, COCAL Updates, Contingent labor
Updates in brief and links
1. More on adjuncts not being paid at York College, CUNY
2. A message from Weldon Cowan at Federation of Post Secondary Educators in BC, Canada about their recent (and historic) conference.
And after that below is a report of the weekend from Jack Longmate, who was also there.
4. SEIU Local 500 organizing adjunct at Georgetown U
http://blog.georgetownvoice.com/2012/10/01/seiu-local-500-seeks-to-unionize-adjuncts-at-georgetown/
and pursuing a metro (regional) strategy
6. More on Governor Brown’s (of CA) veto of right to a union for UC research assistants
7. Dec. 1, 2012, Contingent faculty conference in Washington, DC (see below)
8. BC (Canada) Education plan linked to private corporations
9. Rise of the Reluctant Part-timer Class
10. World Teachers Day Oct 5 and a video from Dawson College teachers union in Quebec (see below)
11. Temp warehouse workers at Walmart strike in LA and Chicago. [contingent workers on the move?] and an update from Chicago and an eruption of new strikes at other Walmart contractors
12. New IWW labor history calendar now available. details below
15. List of online teaching jobs open (see below)
18. Disappearance of public intellectuals, Henry Giroux
Note: Picture galleries from COCAL X Conference now online:
Almost 300 photographs of the COCAL X Conference that took place in Mexico City in August have recently been posted to the COCAL website. You can link to the three galleries from this webpage:
http://cocalinternational.org/events.html
COCAL Updates in brief and links
1. Contingent (through temp labor agencies) warehouse workers in Chicago on strike!! Need our support. See below for info and petition.
2. “State of Working America” new edition out. Well worth a look. We are not alone.
http://stateofworkingamerica.org/12th-edition-press-release/
3. Greek academics strike over proposed pay cuts
http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20120914102308972
and see below
4. And likewise, with student support, in Kenya
http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20120914092211936
5. Survey of higher ed student tuition and fees in OECD nations (US is among the highest)
http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20120913154615429
6. Media 101 Webinar Monday, Sept. 24 for contingent faculty activists and allies, sponsored by NFM, with Scot Jaschik of IHE (See below for details.)
7. R.E.S.P.E.C.T.: What teachers everywhere have gained from Chicago teacher’s strike http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=10500
8. Results of Chicago teachers strike
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=8841
and http://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/19/chicago_teachers_union_president_karen_lewis
and http://labornotes.org/2012/09/chicago-teachers-raise-bar
and a great video of a rap song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yN7cRZP58k&feature=related
9. Online education as the Nestle infant formula scandal of higher ed
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/debate/la-ol-online-classes-infant-formula-blowback-20120917,0,5678315.story
10. Chicago chooses sides
http://prospect.org/article/chicago-chooses-sides
11. Occupy not over, it has hardly begun
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=10505
12. We would be better off with more strikes
http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/10/opinion/rhomberg-unions-strikes/index.html
13. CUNY makes war on rebel English Dept., fires all adjuncts
http://studentactivism.net/2012/09/16/cuny-declares-war-on-rebel-english-department-day-two/
14. Henry Giroux on the Chicago teachers’ strike as an emerging revolutionary ideal
http://philosophers.posterous.com/the-teachers-strike-an-emerging-revolutionary
15. A wonderful story that will make you smile (the IWW at Domino’s Pizza)
http://www.frwu.net/2012/thedominosfall/
16. More on the Green River CC (WA state) controversy regarding former local union president Phil Jack’s embezzlement of union funds and accused retaliation against activist pters there in the NEA/AFt union local
http://www.adjunctnation.com/?p=4564
17. Request for support for a Columbian colleague, from Fred Lonidier, the president of the union local at UC San Diego. See below
18. Adjunct faculty win official as NLRB counts votes at Duquesne U election. 85% victory
http://www.adjunctproject.com/nlrb-announces-landslide-victory-for-the-adjunct-faculty-association-at-duquesne-university/
and http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/NLRB-to-count-Duquesne-U-adjunct-ballots-Thursday-3877245.php
and http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/09/21/duquesne-adjuncts-vote-unionize
19. A not-for-profit inside a for-profit corporation emerges as a new humanities college in UK (saying they want to follow the American funding model)
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/21/new-college-humanities-enrolls-first-class-amidst-questions-price-and-profits
20. Teachers Unions alliance with Democrats frays
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-education-dems-20120904,0,6567521.story
21. Very good piece on the “Villiany” (and villification) of teachers by Bruce Neuberger and circulated on Oakland’s Occupy Education list
See below.
22. It’s official. Quebec tuition hikes are history!
http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2012/09/20/its-official-quebec-tuition-hikes-are-history/
and http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/09/21-1
23. (Famous) Harper College (Chicago area) adjuncts settle contract with raises
http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20120921/news/709219827/
24. AFT highlights “People’s World” article on Center for Future of Higher Ed and CAW reports
http://peoplesworld.org/part-time-faculty-pay-reaching-poverty-level/
Updates in full
1.
Hi Joe & Jim,
I think you will be interested, since one of the big difficulties in organizing in the warehouses is that ALL the workers are “contingent” “part-time” (no-benefit, no seniority and mostly latino) supplied by labor agencies to the various shell corporations that stand between Walmart and its workforce.
WWJ is supported by the UE, but is an independent organizing initiative. Tough hill to climb! I know that the warehouse workers struck Walmart in Califas also.
J
Subject: FW: Walmart Warehouse Workers on STRIKE — Upcoming Actions
From: Warehouse Workers for Justice [info@warehouseworker.org]
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2012 3:54 PM
To: John Weber
Subject: ADV: Walmart Warehouse Workers on STRIKE — Upcoming Actions
About | Donate | Facebook | Follow @WarehouseWorker
Dear John,
We’re on Day 3 of our strike for an end to retaliation of those who have spoken out for safer jobs with respect at the Walmart warehouse in Elwood, IL.
Please stand with us TODAY!
For those of you in the Chicagoland area, join us tomorrow and Wednesday
• Tuesday (tomorrow) at 1pm with CTU for March and Action at Chatham Walmart (meet at Simeon Career Academy, 8147 S. Vincennes Ave, Chicago and then march to Walmart at 8331 S Stewart Ave, Chicago)
• Wednesday at 10am at the Downtown Chicago Walmart(570 W. Monroe)
We need to build our strike fundquickly so that those on strike are able to support their families during this difficult time. Please donate whatever you can.
Our biggest mobilization is scheduled for Oct 1 in Elwood, IL. RSVP today and let us know if you need help with transportation to Elwood.
Our strike comes shortly after our brothers and sisters just outside of Los Angeles at Walmart warehouses also went on strike. We stand in solidarity with them.
Thank you for standing with us!
Together in struggle,
Warehouse Workers for Justice
Sign Our Petition to Walmart
Join Us Tomorrow at 1pm at the Chatham Walmart with the Chicago Teachers Union
Play Video
You are receiving this email because you gave your email address to the UE, the UE Research and Education Fund, or one of our projects, theInternational Worker Justice Campaign, Warehouse Workers for Justice, or the UE International Program. If you no longer wish to receive emails from the UE Research and Education Fund, please click here to unsubscribe
———————–
3. Strikes in Greek Universities
During the past weeks there has been a wave of faculty strikes in Greek Universities. These are the reasons for these protests:
– The Greek government, as part of the latest austerity package dictated by the ‘Troika’ (European Union – International Monetary Fund – European Central Bank) has announced new extreme wage cuts. For faculty members these reductions will reach 35%, on top of reductions that have already been implemented in the past years. This will mean university lecturers getting less than 950 euros per month and professors less than 1900 (after 35 years of service)
– As part of the same austerity package there’s going to be new extra cuts on university budgets (excluding faculty and administrative pay, that comes directly from the ministry, budgets are already reduced by 60-70%) and a complete elimination of funding for adjunct faculty (it is already down by 65%) in universities and drastic cuts in Technical Higher Education Institutions, leading to the mass lay-offs of hundreds of adjunct lecturers and instructors. At the same time more than 700 elected faculty members wait for their appointment, with the government insisting that their appointment will take 7-8 years because of a Troika imposed freeze on new public sector hiring.
– The Greek government insists on implementing a neoliberal reform of Higher Education management (Laws 4009/11 and 4076/12) that will introduce oligarchic ‘University boards’ with representatives of the ‘business world’, reducing significantly the role of Senates and Department assemblies, turn rectors into university managements, eliminate student participation, impose tuition fees on graduate programs, eliminate the gratis provision of textbooks, undermine the autonomy of departments as the main academic units and – above all – be a decisive step in the attempt to impose “Bologna process” course and degree structures. This legislation was first introduced in August 2011 but a wave of protests, occupations and collective disobedience led to the postponement of most ‘university board’ elections.
– The Greek government has announced a plan for a ‘spatial restructuring’ of Higher Education meaning the closure of many university departments and schools and the shrinkage of Higher Education and reversing a historical trend towards the expansion of Higher Education.
All these have caused anger and despair among academics and students. Greece is already experiencing a ‘brain-drain’ through mass migration of young researchers. Even the openly pro-government POSDEP, the federation of university professors and lecturers, has called for strike action, albeit only against wage cuts, since it openly supports neoliberal reforms. However, the decisions for strike action in most University union assemblies oppose not only wage cuts but also budget cuts and the new neoliberal legislation and call for a common front of struggle with students and administrative / technical staff. The General Strike on September 26 offers an opportunity for the University Movement to meet in struggle with the rest of the labour movement.
Panagiotis Sotiris
Adjunct Lecturer, Department of Sociology, University of the Aegean,
vice president of the Union of professors and lecturers of the University of the Aegean
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6. Media 101 for Contingent Faculty Activists and Allies on Monday, September 24, 2012 at 12 noon EASTERN time (11 am Central/10 am Mountain/9 am Pacific).
http://thenewfacultymajority.blogspot.com/2012/09/media-101-webinar-free-to-nfm-members.html
Description:
Activists and other advocates for contingent faculty often express concern that the press do not report about contingent faculty issues widely or well. Yet better coverage will only take place when we learn how to work more effectively with the media. This webinar will provide basic information about how “the press” operates, describe common mistakes that we make when trying to pitch stories, provide information, or give interviews, and offer some suggestions for working productively with reporters and editors.
Featuring Scott Jaschik, Editor, Inside Higher Ed
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17. Lorena,
Attached is a letter from a member of UC/AFT Local 2034 and officer of the San Diego Faculty Assn./AAUP. My Local requests this be passed as a resolution at our next Delegate Meeting next Wednesday. It seems very important to support this as both academic freedom and union organizing in our global world.
Solidarity,
Fred
Dear Board members:
I hope you all had a restful and productive summer. I’m writing to see if you will be willing to support professor Renán Vega Cantor. Vega Cantor is a famous professor at the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional in Colombia and a winner of the Premio Libertador of Pensamiento Critico in Venezuela, among other distinctions. Renán has been fighting neoliberalism and the privatization of the university in the past several years. More recently, he was involved in the creation of a union, the Asociación Sindical de Profesores Universitarios (ASPU). Due to all of these activities, the administration of the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional has first questioned his academic credentials, and more recently he has received “death threats” (he has been “señalado” by paramilitary groups). Everything is explained in the letter that I am attaching, but basically he has been forced into exile to do what we try to do at the SDFA. We are coordinating an international campaign to support his return and we wanted to ask for your signature and to see if the SDFA, as a group, will be interested in endorsing the letter. Although there is a campaign in Europa, Latin America, and the Arab World, they believe that support from the US (for all the wrong reasons) would put a lot of pressure in the administration of the university to protect him and guarantee his return.
Those who want to sign individually as well can email me before Tuesday september 25 at lmartincabrera@yahoo.com
I’m also including this interview with Renán in Spanish for those who want further information about the case.
http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=155925
http://translate.google.com/#auto/es/
In unity,
Luis
P.S. Fred could you please forward to other labor groups for endorsement
————-
21. The Villainy of Teachers
We were having a conversation in the teachers’ room and discussing the Chicago teacher’s strike and remarking on how the politicians and media tried to bully the Chicago teachers with all this talk about how they were harming the interest of their students by having the nerve to walk out on strike and leave the kids without school. One of the teachers in the teacher room remarked, “I’m really tired of us teachers being made the villains, of being blamed, being villified. I’m really, really tired of being villainized.”
I sympathize. I recognize the truth there, but, I’m not sure I feel so bad about it. Maybe it’s because, like misery, villainy loves company. I mean think about it. We’re actually in fairly good company. Immigrants are being villainized. That’s a fairly sizeable group of people. And a lot of us would have a hard time finding anything to eat without them. Black people for centuries have been villainized. Young people, especially African American and Latino are really being villainized, disrespected, arrested and imprisoned in huge numbers. In WWII Japanese Americans were villainized and incarcerated. Native Americans have been villainized for centuries, too. Then there’s the public workers and unions. Even people who take retirement pay. In the 1950s, teachers and writers, film makers and union activists, anyone with progressive views or sympathetic to socialist countries were villains. Back the 1960’s those who protested the war or who became activists were villainized. Feminists have been villainized for years. So have gays and lesbians.
Looking outside this country the Filipinos were villainized at the end of the 19th century when they refused to accept U.S. “liberation”. I can remember when the Koreans were villainized, and then the Vietnamese. The Chinese were villainized when they were socialist, and now again, as they are capitalist and threaten U.S. hegemony in Asia, it seems like once again they will become the villains. The Soviets were villainized and the Russians could again earn that status. During the 1960s and 1970s people around the world who stood up against colonialism and fought in liberation struggles were villainized, guerrillas were villainized, Cuba, villainized for decades. I can remember in the 1980s when countries in Central America were villainized. Then came Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Muslims, Arabs and South Asians — all villainized. And what about Palestinians? Permanent villains. Romney’s trying to villainize 47% of the population that are, let’s face it, slackers. And I wonder if teachers are on that list, too? Would that make us villains x 2?
At one time or another, the label of villain has been pinned on a major part of humanity. About the only people who are not villainized are the bankers, the CEOs, the weapons makers, the drone makers, the spies, the Pentagon brass, the big politicians and, of course, the media, which they own. They are never villains because they define who has those qualities of villainy.
Given the attitude I find among a lot of teachers, the villainy is bound to grow. There’s no telling how villainous we might become.
And given the determination of the elite to knock teachers out of the way so corporate vultures can feed on the carcass of public education, it’s unlikely that we teachers are going to see any change in status for some time to come. So we might as well get used to it.
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Posted in Contingent labor
Tagged Chicago Teacher Strike, Contingent labor, news updates, Quebec
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