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In quest of fair treatment for adjunct teachers
Submitted by mnadmin on Thu, 10/13/2011 - 23:33
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Increasingly, professors and instructors have been hired as part-time adjuncts to teach courses at our colleges and universities. By this time adjuncts often far outnumber the full-time faculty, serving as budget-cutting, low-cost employees, hired by the term or year, with few benefits, without seniority or security. Teacher unions often represent both adjuncts and full-time tenured faculty because, it is generally recognized, they have common interests in improving the practical and professional standards of working in education. However, as our author suggests, sometimes there can be a conflict of interests. UDR invites comments.
By Jack Longmate, a discussion piece
Faculty unions in public colleges and universities often contain both tenured and non-tenured faculty. Tenure-track faculty are compensated at a much higher rate and are granted job protection and job security, while non-tenured are temporary, probationary workers even when they've taught for a decade or longer. Often these differences create a conflict of interests rather than a community of interests, which can give rise to the question of fair representation.
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the conflicts of interest that exist between tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty than the practice of allowing tenure-stream faculty to teach overtime, while restricting non-tenure-track faculty to far less than full-time work. This practice is common throughout the country; it takes courses and income away from the lower paid part-timers and gives them to the higher-paid full-timers.
On December 31, 2010, I published an editorial that called on the Washington state legislature to prohibit full-time tenured faculty from voluntarily teaching overloads (overtime). My editorial did not go over well with tenured faculty, especially with those who teach extra courses. Like many unions, my National Education Association affiliate has both non-tenure-track faculty and tenure-track faculty in the same union, even though the full-timers serve as supervisors of the part-timers.
Then, on February 3, I testified against a bill supported by the NEA and the AFT which gave automatic step raises chiefly to all of the 3,770 full-time tenured faculty in the state but not to most of the state's 9,700 part-time faculty. At 21 of the state's 34 community and technical colleges, no step raise salary schedules have been bargained for part-time faculty, which means that two-thirds of the teaching faculty would not receive automatic increases based on time served or improved academic training. Long-term experienced part-timers would earn no more than beginners (as is now the case.) I made clear I was not speaking for the union. I opposed the bill not because it improved conditions for the full-time faculty but because it short-changed the adjuncts.
I faced immediate retaliation in the union: The Washington Education Association's Higher Education chair withheld travel money for an upcoming union event. My own local's head negotiator and president called for my resignation as elected secretary.
While my union leaders abandoned the idea of recalling me, they decided to run someone against me to vote me out of office. They also passed a resolution publicly censuring me for opposing their unfair legislation. This process could hardly be described as democratic; mob rule might be a better descriptor. On April 5, I filed a formal complaint with NEA President Dennis Van Roekel citing instances where the NEA's bylaws and constitution had been violated on many occasions in the union's haste to punish me. In his response of April 18, Van Roekel sidestepped all the concerns I had raised, and instead, defended my local union and the Washington Education Association.
One of the most tangible violations deals with NEA Bylaws, 8-7, e, which calls for five-year reviews to ensure compliance with minimum standards for affiliation. If it is true that NEA affiliates are not in compliance with the standards for affiliation, their legitimacy as legal entities is put in question and, per NEA Bylaw 8-12, establishment of a trusteeship may be warranted to restore democratic processes. I have twice asked Mr. Van Roekel for copies of these five-year reviews of my local and the WEA, and he has refused to provide them. My union is going ahead with its plan of electing someone else to replace me. I am the only union officer with an opponent.
Throughout the country, faculty unions have bargained contracts that discriminate against contingent faculty, who now number 1 million. Adjunct faculty have lower pay, few benefits, and no job security, no matter how long they have taught. Since they are often in unions dominated by tenured faculty who hire, evaluate, and rehire them, adjuncts are reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them. Denial of fair representation and union democracy are the norm throughout academe.
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