Part-Time Professors: Little Pay, No Pensions, No Health Care, No Seniority, Now Organizing Unions.

[Omaha Steve]

http://labornotes.org/node/1572

— Paul Abowd


Photo: Bryan Pfiefer

One at a time, the teachers came out of the sub-zero January cold and into the lobby of Wayne State University’s McGregor Hall in Detroit. By the time the board of governors meeting began—where the teachers had three minutes total to detail their concerns—they were together in force.

Before they went inside, staff organizer Bryan Pfiefer held out a green folder full of names. These were the part-time teachers who lost work last fall when the university cut its humanities department and interdisciplinary studies program.

“We had a teacher who was here for 10 years, and they told him his class was cancelled the day before the semester began,” said Pfiefer, who organizes contingent faculty for Michigan’s American Federation of Teachers (AFT) branch. “Without a union, what can you do?”
DELAYED REACTION

The part-timer phenomenon has its roots in the 1970s, when college administrators suffering from funding cuts scrambled to reduce costs just as demand for post-secondary education rose. Campus populations were changing, as “non-traditional” students appeared in classrooms, struggling to find a place in the weak job market.

“Schools could no longer project how many sections of English 1A they needed to staff, and they lived in terror of the fact that full-time faculty might go idle,” said Joe Berry, a labor educator at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and author of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower.

To stay flexible, schools began to hire more contingent faculty and reduced tenure track positions. The result was a new workforce employed for lower pay and fewer benefits, with precarious job security.

FULL story at link.

[catgirl]

1. A big kick!

Thanks Steve! I know this has been in the works for a long time.