Last fall an adjunct professor, who wishes to remain anonymous, created a Facebook page titled “National Adjunct Walkout Day” and posted the following: “On February 25, 2015, adjuncts across the country will come together to insist on fair wages and better working conditions.”
Since 2000, various faculty and union groups have participated in Campus Equity Week to increase awareness of the inequities faced by contingent faculty members. But this call for a walkout is a different strategy that has attracted interest across the country—and rightly so, because though the approach may be new, the problem is not.
In the 1970s, colleges and universities, mimicking corporate America, embarked on a policy whereby students would be taught by a huge cadre of faculty members teaching off the more lucrative and secure tenure track, largely earning low pay, few or no benefits, and no job security. These contingent faculty members now account for about 75 percent of the professoriate, surpassing one million in number.
This separate-but-unequal labor system, where the minority of tenured faculty members rule over the majority of contingents, is mirrored in academic unions, which have been chiefly run by and for the tenured faculty. Union contracts generally treat the tenured faculty members like full academic citizens, while the contingents are denied equal treatment at every turn.
These unions often violate a fundamental labor principle by failing to exclude management from the bargaining unit so as to avoid conflicts of interest and the impulse to form a “company union,” despite the fact that, in 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in NLRB v. Yeshiva University that tenure-track faculty members at private institutions are managers.
Some states still allow (and some require) mixed units: tenured professors in the same bargaining unit with the adjuncts they often hire, supervise, evaluate, assign classes to, and rehire (or not). While there is a presumption that the faculty recommends and administrators decide, tenured professors make personnel decisions about adjuncts. Workload assignment is a management function, yet many tenured faculty members may voluntarily elect to teach overtime (course overloads) for additional income, depriving their nontenured colleagues of work, which is a further example of the conflict of interest between tenured and nontenured faculty.
In any case, collective bargaining in its present form will not “solve” the adjunct problem, because it is simply not enough to increase adjunct salaries by a modest amount while ignoring increases in tenure-track pay. The goal must be to reduce and ultimately eliminate the overall disparity, and this the unions have been unwilling to do.
Washington State is a good example of the problem. From 1996 to 2009, the state allocated about $40-million to community and technical colleges to improve adjunct salaries in two-year colleges and reduce the disparity between tenured and nontenured faculty members. Yet the actual dollar disparity is higher now than it was in 1995, with adjuncts now earning only about 60 percent of what their tenured or tenure-track counterparts get for teaching a full-time load.
This has come about because over the years local union chapters have bargained for raises for all of the full-timers but not for most of the part-timers, and they bargained for turnover money (the savings when a senior faculty member is replaced by a more junior member) to be used for future full-time salaries but not for part-time pay. Meanwhile, legislatures gave equal percentage-based cost-of-living raises to both groups, which resulted in much more money to full-timers.
It is possible that tenured professors, realizing that their numbers and power are dwindling, will eventually see that it is in their best interests to join contingent faculty members, fight to professionalize the working conditions of their colleagues, and abolish the two-track system. But in the meantime, organizations like the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association must come out in favor of truly equal pay, benefits, and job security.
No national union, including the Service Employees International Union, which is organizing adjuncts in the private sector, has done so. This represents a profound failure of political vision, a capitulation to the corporate model, and a denial of “the duty of fair representation” required of all unions in return for being granted the right to serve as the exclusive bargaining agents for all the faculty. There can be no genuine solidarity wherever a separate but unequal two-tier wage system exists.
If adjuncts have any hope of substantial gains, they must have the goal of equality. They may have to turn to legislators and state and federal agencies to insist on equal treatment. The Accreditation Group of the U.S. Education Department has thus far ignored repeated complaints of violations of academic freedom and standards, so adjuncts may have to appeal to Congress to see that the agency fulfills its mission.
If union models do not fundamentally change, contingents will have to create independent organizations to advocate for equality, which means a single salary schedule, a single raise scale, and a single set of procedures for job security and grievances. It is my hope that National Adjunct Walkout Day signals a significant step in that direction.
Keith Hoeller, an adjunct professor of philosophy at Green River Community College, in Auburn, Wash., is co-founder of the Washington Part-Time Faculty Association and editor of Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System (Vanderbilt University Press, 2014).