Inequality Within

AAA President Leith Mullings

AAA Moves to More Actively Address Contingent Workforce Issues

“Anthropologists are known for their attentiveness to social inequality,” writes Sarah Kendzior, a recent PhD, “but few have acknowledged the plight of their peers.” In an article appearing on Al Jazeera’s website shortly after the 2011 AAA Annual Meeting in Montreal, Kendzior laments the plight of adjuncts who can least afford to come to the meeting, yet have the most need to do so. A young graduate wrote to me in a similar vein: “The issues faced by junior scholars and adjuncts who lack TT (tenure track) positions, who are financially unstable, whose jobs are in constant jeopardy, and who may not even be able to afford to come to the AAA and voice their concerns, need to be brought to the fore. We should be having a national conversation about them.”

As I read her message, I could not help but think of one of my adjunct colleagues, a winner of the SANA prize, whose untimely death several years ago was in part attributable to her lack of health care access. Ironically, she was very active in urging the AAA to address the conditions of adjuncts. Recognizing that this growing pool of contingent labor is composed of our colleagues and students, the Executive Board (EB) and AAA’s Committee on Labor Relations (CLR) have agreed to expand CLR’s responsibilities to include providing “information about labor conditions relevant to the employment of anthropologists and [advising] them about possible positions and actions they might consider with respect to that information.”

Rise of the Contingent Labor Force in the Academy

The shift from full-time tenured, supported faculty to undersupported contingent workers in higher education has been advancing at a rapid rate in the US and in other parts of the world. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has concluded that the removal of tenure-track positions is one of the greatest threats to academic freedom today. They found 73% of the instructional workforce is teaching off the tenure track, the majority of which are part-time or full-time adjuncts. The rising proportion of classes taught by contingent and part-time instructors reflects deep structural conditions that have significantly and relentlessly transformed the academy.

Among the most compelling issues facing adjunct faculty is low compensation. One survey showed the median compensation rate to be $2,700 per three-credit course. At that rate, if an adjunct taught four courses one semester and five in the other (a high course load at public research universities), her annual salary would be $24,300. Consider also travel costs to different campuses to accrue that many courses, lack of health care and retirement benefits, and limited access to educational resources, including offices, libraries, telephones and computers. Job insecurity also translates into lack of academic freedom, which is the cornerstone of democratic education.

Campus Organizing

Despite a climate hostile to unions, successful organizing efforts have, in some areas, improved conditions for contingent faculty. For example, University of Oregon faculty successfully organized all instructional staff. At City University of New York, the Professional Staff Congress, which represents all faculty and some staff, won unusual gains for adjuncts: a professional development fund, a paid office hour for every six hours of teaching (per campus), and one-year appointments for long-serving adjuncts. The Congress also successfully defended an adjunct who was fired in violation of academic freedom.

In other instances, adjuncts have organized as local chapters of national unions. For example, American University adjuncts voted in February 2012 to join the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a union that already represented adjuncts at two other local institutions, as well 10,000 adjuncts nationally. At Duquesne University, adjunct faculty voted by a 5–1 margin to unionize with the United Steel Workers. The results of the administration’s appeal— on the grounds that Duquesne is a religious institution is pending.

Other organizations span campuses and borders. The New Faculty Majority, co-founded by anthropologist Alan Trevithick (see AN 51[9]: 4), is a national organization that advocates for contingent faculty. The Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL), a coalition of non-tenure track faculty from Canada, Mexico, and the US, recently held their tenth conference in Mexico City.

Scholarly Associations and Contingent Labor

Adequate funding, education expansion and democratization, and restoration of full-time faculty are among the long-term solutions to the deplorable conditions that growing numbers of anthropologists in the academy face. Scholarly associations cannot fully address the structural issues that have brought us to this point, but they have a role to play. Our sister associations, the Modern Language Association (MLA), Organization of American Historians (OAH), American Historical Association (AHA) and the American Sociology Association (ASA), have all created standing committees or task forces to inform the leadership and membership about conditions affecting contingent faculty and to take steps to address them. All four have produced recommendations, standards, or best practices for hiring adjuncts. These include employment conditions, evaluation policies, promotion eligibility regular employment opportunities, compensation issues, health care benefits, support services, and participation in governance and decision making. They also asked departments to maintain records, allowing them to track the shifting labor patterns and to share information about successes in meeting standards. The MLA and the AHA are sponsors of the Adjunct Project, a crowd-sourcing effort that collects national data about compensation and working conditions of adjuncts.

At its 2013 annual meeting, MLA featured a presidential forum of nontenured instructors to discuss strategies for organizing contingent faculty. In addition, MLA has called for $6,800 to be the going adjunct pay rate for a three-credit course, and the membership has passed a resolution designed to produce better data on salaries and working conditions for part-time and contingent faculty.

AAA and Contingent Labor

In the 1990s AAA sponsored panels on adjunct labor, published Transforming Academia: Challenges and Opportunities for an Engaged Anthropology (1999) that included a chapter by Jagna Scharff and Hannah Lessinger on part time workers, conducted a survey of departments and joined the interdisciplinary Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW). It is time to again turn our attention to better informing ourselves and to doing all we can to improve the conditions our colleagues and students confront. By the 2013 annual meeting, the CLR intends to: administer a short survey to department chairs about adjuncts in anthropology; organize sessions about the contingent workforce for the annual meeting; report on their survey findings in AN, analyze the results of the CAW 2010 Survey of Contingent Faculty Members and Instructors; and present a resolution to the membership for their consideration. These are only the first steps in returning to a more activist stance in addressing this most critical issue.

I would like to thank Sophie Bjork-James, Courtney Dowdall, Peter Hogness and Ida Susser for their assistance with research for this column.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/05/02/inequality-within/