By Steve Brier
It is important for us to remember, as members of a university community, that this is also a workplace, a place where people labor in “traditional” jobs like building maintenance, skilled trades like engineering and carpentry, food service, and, of course, as intellectual workers who teach and do research. Most of the workers in the former group are covered by union contracts and enjoy a modicum of protection in terms of their wages and working conditions. The most exploited members of the latter group — contingent or adjunct teachers — are the low wage worker base upon which much of the teaching responsibility in the contemporary university (especially in large, public institutions like CUNY) rests. CUNY is by far not the worst such case nationally, and yet, fully 50 percent of all our student contact hours are taught by adjunct faculty. Like adjuncts everywhere, many CUNY adjuncts are paid $2,500 or even less to teach a full semester-long course. As bad as that rate of pay is for current graduate students who are doing adjunct work while finishing their degrees, imagine the personal struggle of “adjuncting” (an especially ugly new word used to describe the situation) as a full-time job, where you string together four or five such teaching assignments each semester, often in several different colleges, and end up making barely $25,000 annually. Not fast food pay, but pretty damned close.
Adjuncts have been organizing with some success at CUNY for years, via the Adjunct Project, based at the Graduate Center and supported by the PSC-CUNY, our faculty and staff union. But it has been much harder across the country to bring together contingent faculty members to fight for better pay and working conditions. Last Wednesday, Feb. 25th, ended up being an important step in gaining recognition of adjunct exploitation, with the successful call for a National Adjunct Walkout Day. Demonstrations were held across the country at academic workplaces large and small. While there were small but enthusiastic demonstrations in New York City outside the CUNY Graduate Center and the New School, the biggest rallies were held at colleges and universities in the west, as this extensive report in Inside Higher Education indicates. Many adjunct demonstrations were supported on the picket lines by full-time faculty members, who marched alongside their adjunct co-workers. As university administrators search for new ways to trim college labor costs, many of those full-time faculty positions are at risk in the future of seeing their full-time jobs morph into contingent ones. This is a moment for all academic workers, especially those involved in teaching and learning, to learn the oldest, most fundamental lesson of the labor movement: we’re only able to protect ourselves if we stand together and fight for what’s right and fair for all workers.
Dr. Steve Brier is a Murphy Institute Consortial Faculty Member and Prof. of Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center.
