Thursday, August 9, 2018
Why Are Liberal Media Outlets Not Questioning Russiagate? Q&A (Pt 4/5)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrUpqkA4r7w
Hate Groups March in Portland, Oregon and Police Attack Counter-Protesters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXZ1Av4lhqY
Why Did Saudi State Media Threaten a 9/11 on Canada?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=uDlc-61mCCw
Why We All Should Care About the Unionization of Adjunct Faculty in Higher Ed
Submitted by eea on
Fri, 2018-05-04 12:00 PM
Adjuncts today are the
"gig economy" workers in academia—a growing class of faculty who
often work with low pay and no job security or benefits. For around 50 years,
the proportion of faculty hired off the tenure track has been soaring, reaching
76 percent nationally when graduate student instructors are added to the mix.
This shift is particularly troubling in higher education because, as research
conducted by the Delphi
Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success indicates,
research suggests an overreliance on poorly paid and unsupported part-time
faculty hurts student retention and achievement.
Why are colleges and
universities increasingly leaving tenure-track positions unfilled and hiring
short-term adjunct faculty? Professors
in the Gig Economy: Unionizing Adjunct Faculty in America brings
together scholars from a range of fields to answer this question and address
the history, context, processes, and outcomes of unionization among adjunct
faculty.
Adjunct faculty aren't a new
phenomenon. Faculty unions in the U.S have been around for a long time and have
typically included adjuncts. They trace their roots back 100 years to the
founding of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) local 33 at Howard
University. What has changed over the past two decades is the rise of a
national movement to unionize adjunct faculty in separate bargaining units.
This shift is a response to the fact that colleges and universities have
increasingly left tenure-track positions unfilled and begun relying more
heavily on part-time adjunct instructors who often work with low pay, no job
security, adequate resources, and no health benefits.
As more and more colleges and
universities home come to rely on gig faculty labor, adjunct faculty members
have begun to fight back. Some of the nation's largest labor unions have
stepped up to help, including the AFT, the National Education Association, the
United Auto Workers, the Service Employees International Union, and the United
Steelworkers. After the NLRB ruled on August 23, 2016 that graduate students
who work as research assistants and teachers can form or form unions, the
United Electrical Workers, the Communications workers of American, and
UNITEHERE stepped in to help.
Today unionization shows no
sign of slowing down. Three years after SEU launched its national Faculty
Forward campaign in 2013, part-time and full-time contingent faculty at more
than 40 institutions had voted to affiliate with the union, often despite
fierce opposition from employers. A 2017 study found that 20
new faculty unions had been certified just the previous year, with nearly two-thirds
representing both full- and part-time adjunct faculty. Unionization continues
today on campuses across the country. On March 14, 2018, University of South
Florida adjuncts voted to form a union, despite opposition from the
administration. On April 13, adjunct faculty at the University of Chicago
ratified their first union contract, gaining significant pay increases, greater
job security, and parental leave. After around two years of collective
bargaining and a strike on April 4, adjuncts at Loyola University in Chicago
reached a tentative agreement on April 16.
Faced with rising tuition,
increased living costs, and stagnant pay, graduate student workers at 13
colleges and universities have also voted to unionize, despite recent efforts
by the presidents of Columbia, Yale, Boston College, the University of Chicago,
and Loyola of Chicago to avoid collective bargaining by trying to overturn a
2016 National Labor Relations Board decision allowing grad students to
unionize. Four of the country's major unions—the American Federation of
Teachers (AFT), the SEIU, United Auto Workers (UAW) and UNITE HERE—have joined
together in a national
campaign to make these universities bargain in good faith.
Why should we care? We
should care deeply, because he unionization of adjunct faculty is one of the
most important recent developments shaping higher education today. It is
critical for all those who work in higher education to understand the
significance and relevance of adjunct faculty unions in the context of today’s
gig economy.
The poor working conditions of
adjunct faculty affect the entire professoriat. The increasing reliance on
low-paid, part-time instructors has eroded the availability of tenure-track
positions at many institutions. Moreover, the same desire for cost savings that
has motivated colleges and universities to rely heavily on gig adjunct faculty
has led to worsening working conditions for tenure-track faculty in the form of
growing teaching loads, a lack of administrative support, and diminishing funds
for research on many campuses.
Anyone who cares about the
quality of education in higher education should care about this issue.
The students who are applying
to colleges and universities should care. The parents and other family members
who will help pay their children's tuition should care. Tenure track faculty at
every institution should care enough to begin planning ways to make their
academic departments more supportive of adjunct faculty, and they should openly
support the unionization of their adjunct colleagues once a union drive begins
on campus. College and University administrators who espouse a social justice
mission on the website and claim to prioritize the quality of their students'
learning should not oppose the unionization of adjunct faculty and graduate
students, and they should bargain with their employees in good faith.
It is essential to prevent
colleges and universities from slipping into a corporate culture in which they
forget their historic purpose and focus primarily on the bottom line.
Since the founding of our
nation, the purpose of higher education has been to provide the most empowering
education to students, one that promotes analytical and creative thinking and a
capacity for problem solving. American colleges and universities have always
sought to develop thoughtful citizens fully capable of contributing in
meaningful ways to our democratic society. But hese aims will never be
realized with a professoriat composed largely of underpaid instructors who
often work without job security or benefits and no real hope of finding a
full-time position or earning a living wage.
Kim Tolley is a professor
of education at Notre Dame de Namur University. She is the author of Heading
South to Teach: The World of Susan Nye Hutchison, 1815–1845 and The
Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective. She is also
the author of Professors
in the Gig Economy: Unionizing Adjunct Faculty in America
Unionized College Faculty Are Winning Themselves a Lot
Unions are not just a
feel-good sort of thing to do. New research about higher ed unions shows just
how much workers have actually gained from organizing, in a short period of
time.
One of the most active areas
of new union organizing in America is higher education: adjunct
professors and other academic and non-academic workers on college campuses, who
tend to have shockingly low pay and poor job security even though they tend to
be highly educated and work in prestigious settings. Those are the sort of
ingredients that can motivate people to unionize. And voila: it has been so.
And the gains have been clear. Duke University non-tenured faculty members who
signed their first union contract this summer immediately
got double digit raises and improved job security.
Researchers at the SEIU, one
of the unions most active in
organizing college faculty, have taken a crack at quantifying the actual gains that workers in that
industry have made so far, through unionizing—faculty at more than two dozen
colleges across the country, including more than 4,000 people in the Boston
area alone. And here is what they came up with:
“In Boston, 20% of adjunct
faculty at traditional private colleges were represented by a union in 2012.
Now 48% have a union and 4,100 have united in SEIU alone. In the Bay Area,
union density grew from 21% in 2012 to 71% today. Nearly 40% (3%) of Chicago
adjuncts are unionized, up from 25% in 2012. There were no adjunct unions at
private colleges in Minneapolis/St. Paul metro in 2012. Today, 27% have a
union.”
“63% of the SEIU Faculty
Forward first contracts include pay raises of at least 20% for the lowest paid
faculty, and 43% of contracts have pay raises of 30% or more for the lowest
paid.
“Over 70% of new SEIU Faculty
Forward contracts include a professional development program worth over
$550,000.”
This is all just to
illustrate, with numbers, a fact that has always been true, whether you are a
college professor or a janitor: If you unionize your workplace you will get
more than you have now, and the reason your boss does not want you to do so is
because they don’t want to give you more.
But it’s all just sitting on
the table, waiting for you to pick it up.
New Study Charts Recent Proliferation of Faculty Unions
January 27, 2017 by Peter Schmidt
The number of faculty unions
at the nation’s colleges has surged, with most of the growth the result of
efforts by the Service Employees International Union to organize private
colleges’ non-tenure-track instructors, a new study has found.
In the first nine months of
2016 alone, the National Labor Relations Board certified 20 new
collective-bargaining units at private colleges, concludes the study, published
online this week in the Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy. SEIU’s organizing
campaign accounted for 90 percent of that figure, which could rise or
fall depending on the results of litigation over union drives.
“The growth in private-sector
faculty representation and bargaining constitutes a major new shift in higher
education,” says an article summarizing the study’s findings. Although
public-sector faculty unions remain much more common, the growth in their
numbers has been much slower, it says.
The article credits the
activism of groups such as New Faculty Majority and the Coalition of Contingent
Academic Labor for part of the union growth. Of the 20 new faculty unions
certified in the first nine months of last year, 19 represented
non-tenure-track faculty members at private colleges, with nearly two-thirds
representing both full- and part-time contingent faculty members, just over
one-fourth exclusively representing part-timers, and about a tenth exclusively
representing full-timers.
At private colleges that held
union elections, an average of nearly 73 percent of faculty members who cast ballots
voted in favor of forming collective-bargaining units.
The tally of unions
successfully organized last year could fluctuate based on the results of
litigation over such efforts, the article says. At the center of many of the
disputes are clashing interpretations of new guidance on private-college
unionization that the NLRB offered in 2014 in a decision
involving Pacific Lutheran University.
The article predicts that the
number of unions representing graduate assistants and research assistants could
soon surge as a result of two other recent NLRB rulings: An August
decision, involving Columbia University, that declared such workers
eligible to collectively bargain, and a ruling this
week that cleared the way for Yale University’s graduate assistants to
form separate
unions for individual academic departments.
Such recent NLRB decisions
could be reversed, however, if President Trump fills vacant seats on the
five-member board with people who are unsympathetic to organized labor.
The new study was conducted by
William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of
Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, at Hunter
College of the City University of New York. On Friday he said his center
planned to conduct additional research to more thoroughly document the growth
in faculty unions since 2012, when the center published its most recent
national survey of them.
From the AAUP President: What Is a Union?
By Rudy H. Fichtenbaum
Recently I heard from Jeff
Halpern, the longtime chief negotiator for our Rider University chapter. He
inspired me to use this column to highlight events at Rider, because they show
what’s possible when faculty act collectively.
Like many institutions,
especially smaller private ones, Rider has declining enrollments. Demographic
changes are typically the cause of such declines. Most institutions react by
raising tuition discount rates.
This strategy is clearly
unsustainable. I am reminded of the story of two hikers who spot a far-off
grizzly running their way. The first hiker sits down to discard hiking boots
for running shoes. The second says, “Even with those shoes, you can’t outrun
that bear!” The first replies, “True—but I can outrun you!”
When administrators at Rider
finally realized they could not discount their way back to financial health,
they embarked on an alternative path, heeding the canonical advice not to waste
a crisis. They pursued a destructive path of “structural change.” Jeff said,
“We are in a struggle over who will be at the heart of the university. Will it
be the faculty as it has been until now? Or will it be a management that
imagines itself running just another business—a management with clear disregard
for the educational quality of the institution and obvious disdain for the
professional standing of faculty?”
As a private university, Rider
is subject to the 1980 Supreme Court decision in NLRB v. Yeshiva
University, which denies most full-time faculty members in private institutions
the right to pursue collective bargaining under the legal framework of the
National Labor Relations Act. The administration could simply refuse to
recognize the union: no federal statutes protect the right of faculty at Rider
to unionize. So how does AAUP-Rider function successfully as a union? The
chapter has about 98 percent membership, and members have shown they’ll do
whatever it takes to preserve their union, including striking.
The chapter, Jeff continued,
is committed to “the ideal of a university where real education is at the heart
of the mission. A university where the relationship between faculty and
students is recognized as the very essence of education. A university where the
pursuit and dissemination of knowledge are seen as inseparable.”
Seeing this relatively small
chapter battle so intently against such overwhelming odds is truly
inspirational. By staying together, faculty preserved their right to speak with
a collective voice.
Faculty often say, “I wish we
had a union, but I teach at a private university,” or, “I live in a
right-to-work state,” or, “My state ‘prohibits’ unions.” But what is a
union? It is only a group of employees who act collectively in order to have a
voice at work. You—everyone—can have a union, provided you and your colleagues
organize and act collectively. Remember, unions long predated enabling
legislation and state-sanctioned collective bargaining. Likewise, AAUP-Rider
lives and breathes, Yeshiva notwithstanding.
What does it take to have a
union? Faculty—you and your colleagues— must organize. You must collect “real
dues”; twenty dollars annually won’t do. Resources facilitate organizing:
conducting meetings; holding rallies and demonstrations; having a substantial
campus, online, and media presence; disseminating information; and employing
assistants to support such activities.
Any group of faculty can have
a union. Aim for 15 percent membership within the first year, then 20 percent,
and keep building. All the while, have chapter leaders speak out at every
opportunity, issue demands, and work on broadening the circle of active members
and leaders. Just building membership is not enough!
Organizing is a process.
Nobody can specify the exact membership threshold you must attain. But with the
support of a large majority of faculty willing to act together, the day will
come when you decisively influence events on your campus. That’s a union.
Faculty have immense power,
but in the absence of organizing that power is only unrealized potential.
Fruitful negotiating entails issuing demands and acting collectively to
realize that power. Of course, no group will get everything it wants. But
without organized, concerted activity, you’ll get either nothing or just what
the administration wants to give you.
The failure to exercise our
power has allowed the malignant corporatization of higher education to
metastasize. Faculty often seem reluctant to act because we worry about hurting
today’s students. But our failure to act now actually hurts generations of
students.
Frederick Douglass said it
well: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the
exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.”
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