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1. Boston has the highest concentration of colleges and universities of any
city in the world. There are 58 institutions of higher learning within a
ten mile radius of the urban center. Along with medical and financial
services, the higher education industry is the city's biggest employer.
Each week its "human resources" departments send out paychecks to
tens of thousands of workers--custodians, clerical staff, cafeteria
employees, full-time professors, and a large and growing number of adjunct faculty
members.
2. The burgeoning character of the last-mentioned sector of the higher
ed workforce is of course in harmony with larger trends. Adjunct faculty
are now 47% of the teaching staff at colleges and universities nationally,
and will soon comprise an absolute majority. In general, Boston adjuncts
share the working conditions of their colleagues from Atlanta to Bangor,
from San Diego to Seattle. They are poorly paid, generally work without
medical or pension benefits, and have little or no job security.
3. Some Boston adjuncts conform to what was the dominant model 25 or 30
years ago: that of the professional person with a full-time job teaching a
course or two on weekends or evenings. But if that model is not quite an
anomaly, it nonetheless represents a shrinking percentage of the so-called
part-time teaching force. In 1999, the majority of Boston adjuncts are
career academics who can't get full-time work at any single workplace,
though many shoulder more than full-time loads by cobbling together courses
at two, three, sometimes four institutions. They are the direct producers
of the cheap credit hours that sustain an increasingly bloated and
well-paid administrative bureaucracy. Tired and often dispirited, they're
also becoming angry, and they're beginning to organize on a variety of
fronts.
Victory at UMass Boston
4. The recent upsurge in Bostonian adjunct activism began a year and a
half ago around the time of the Teamster strike to improve the conditions
of part-time workers at UPS. The Boston papers and television networks gave
especially prominent coverage to the strike since the picket line in the
nearby town of Sommerville was the most militant in the country. Over the
course of several days, police arrested 28 picketers for trying to block
truckers from scabbing. Inspired by the audacity and eventual success of
the Teamsters' struggle, a handful of UMass Boston adjunct faculty members
met in July 1997 to discuss the agenda they wanted their union to carry to
contract negotiations set to begin the following spring. The initial
meeting occurred under the auspices of the Faculty-Staff Union (FSU), an
affiliate of the National Education Association. The core group of
adjuncts, however, quickly realized that they would have to organize
independently if they were to stand a chance of winning anything
substantial.
5. A substantial number of part-time faculty members were included in
the FSU's bargaining unit at the time the union won recognition 22 years
ago. However part-timers must teach 5 bargaining unit courses over 3
consecutive semesters, or 8 over 5, in order to be admitted into the union,
a status now extended to 115 people. 109 part-timers teach in the so-called
"day university" but without carrying enough courses for
bargaining unit membership, while another 116 teach only in the Continuing
Education Division which is not unionized at all. Union negotiators claim
to have tried to loosen the prerequisites for bargaining unit membership,
but their efforts have been half-hearted at best, and little has been
accomplished in this respect.
6. Failure of the union leadership to mount a serious campaign to expand
bargaining unit membership is symptomatic of its underlying lack of
interest in part-timer concerns. Another symptom is the fact that, while
they are allowed 2 representatives on the FSU's 11 person Executive
Committee, part-time faculty members are prohibited by the union by-laws
from holding the offices of President or Vice President. For these and
other reasons, there can be little doubt that the union's principal
function has been to serve as an instrument for pursuing the interests of
full-time faculty, especially those who are tenured or tenure track.
7. Still, union leaders have been susceptible to organized pressure from
part-timers in the past. During the contract negotiations of 1986, a
Part-Time Faculty Committee formed and mounted a campaign on behalf of a
set of demands, most importantly involving a substantial wage increase,
that succeeded in winning the support of students, staff, and full-time
faculty. Just as importantly, Committee activists were sophisticated enough
to keep strategic pressure on union negotiators making it difficult for
them to abandon part-timers at the bargaining table. Although there was no
part-time faculty member on the union negotiating team, the Part-Time
Faculty Committee sent an observer to each of the negotiating sessions.
Moreover, at a crucial moment, the Committee and its supporters picketed a
session, angering union negotiators, but also forcing them onto the picket
line. By means of such savvy tactics, the Committee succeeded in winning an
increase in base pay for part-time faculty union members from $2000 to
$3000 per course.
8. Although the Committee continued to meet for a couple of years
following the 1986 victory, objective factors quickly made it impossible to
build on that achievement. Specifically, a serious crisis in the State
budget resulted in a reduction in force that ended by driving one third of
the part-time faculty out of UMB. Desperation to hang on to jobs replaced
the elan of the '86 campaign.
9. By 1997, the fiscal crisis had not only ended, but the State had
accumulated a one billion dollar budgetary surplus. Though much of the
surplus was rebated to taxpayers, and little of what remained was used to
satisfy social needs, the State's appropriation to UMass ceased to shrink,
and that made it feasible to make new part-timer demands. At the same time,
Republican Acting Governor Paul Celluci was involved in his first
gubernatorial race in a State in which Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to
1. In an attempt to counteract his disadvantage, Celluci courted labor
support, going so far as to appear on the UPS picket line. Fear of active
opposition by state workers led him to seek early resolutions of unsettled
contracts, creating an opening for part-time faculty to assert an agenda.
But activists knew that opening would be useful only if the FSU leadership
could be forced to walk through it.
10. In the Fall semester of 1997, the handful of activists who had met
around the time of the Teamster victory reconstituted the Part-Time Faculty
Committee. The Committee began by drafting a survey that asked part-time
faculty members both within and outside the union to determine what demands
they wanted pursued at negotiations, and followed the survey with a general
meeting of part-timers conducted over two days to accommodate those with
incompatible schedules. More than 40 people attended the two installments
of the meeting and overwhelmingly adopted health and pension benefits as
their top priority, a result also indicated by the survey.
11. Drawing from those who attended the meeting as well as other
face-to-face contacts, the original core group of 3 people expanded into an
active Committee whose frequent meetings were attended at any given time by
between ten and fifteen people.
12. Some of the FSU leaders complained that the Part-Time Faculty
Committee constituted a self-selected group, lacking the legitimacy to
represent part-timers. That viewpoint reflected a lack of understanding of
grassroots, participatory democracy. Since the members of the union's
Executive Committee are elected by the organized faculty, they certainly
govern by consent. However, the leadership makes little effort to involve the
membership, and in fact sometimes resists such involvement, preferring to
mediate between administrators and faculty members rather than helping the
latter to advocate for themselves.
13. In contrast, the Part-Time Faculty Committee refused to erect formal
or even informal barriers separating members and leaders. All part-time
faculty members as well as their full-time faculty supporters were
encouraged to attend weekly Committee meetings, propose, discuss, and vote
on issues, and implement decisions by serving on a wide range of
subcommittees. In response to occasional objections concerning its manner
of proceeding, the Committee did not simply defend its position or agree to
reevaluate its stance. It invited the discontented to attend Committee
meetings, even if only temporarily, to air and advocate for their position
on an equal basis.
14. From the general meeting of part-timers as well as survey results,
the Committee had a broad mandate to pursue health and pension benefits.
Because of a progressive element in Massachusetts law, there was an obvious
way to go about this. Any State employee who works half-time or more is
entitled to full health and pension benefits. The UMass administration had
arbitrarily defined part-time faculty members who teach 2 courses per term
(2/3 of a full-time faculty member's teaching load) as .4 time in order to
avoid having to provide them benefits. This definition is especially
ludicrous in that many part-timers also serve on committees, advise
students, and engage in research or other forms of creative work. The
Part-Time Faculty Committee decided to challenge this arbitrary definition
and demand half-time status for those teaching 2 courses per term, roughly
2/3rds of the unionized part-time faculty. Full benefits would follow as a
matter of law.
15. The first obstacle the Committee faced to implementing its strategy
was the opposition of the FSU's acting president, who was worried that
part-timers' achievement of half-time status would somehow undermine the
full-time faculty. In order to circumvent that opposition, a full-time
faculty supporter drafted a petition directed to the entire full-time
faculty that was highly critical of the administration for understating the
work load of part-time faculty members so as to avoid providing benefits.
In each department a faculty member was responsible for talking with
colleagues about the issues involved and obtaining their signatures. The
petition, which was reprinted in the school newspaper, was signed by 175
full-time members of the faculty. Although aimed at the administration, the
petition also served to demonstrate to the union leadership that the
part-time agenda was widely supported by union members. Though the acting
president lobbied against the initiative, he was isolated by the widespread
support it elicited.
16. Shortly after the petition results were made public, the Part-Time
Faculty Committee held a joint meeting with the FSU Executive Committee and
presented its agenda in a forceful but disciplined fashion. As a result,
the members of the Executive Committee voted not only to support the
part-timers' agenda, but to make it the priority issue at the negotiating
table.
17. This was a crucial moment in the organizing campaign, but it had to
be reenforced by broadening and deepening the support of the whole
University community. The point was not only to pressure the
administration, but to keep the union's feet to the fire by making it
impossible for negotiators to abandon part-timers as the bargaining process
wore on. The Committee worked very hard to make sure the campus was
inundated with flyers, posters, buttons, and articles and sympathetic
editorials in the student newspaper. It also organized two additional
general meetings of the part-time faculty which enabled a large number of
part-timers to make crucial decisions about the direction of the campaign.
By tabling over the course of 3 days, adjunct activists collected 2000
signatures on a petition in support of their demands, mostly from students.
And finally, in April of 1998, the campaign reached its peak with a mass
picket. On a beautiful spring day, 200 people gathered in front of the
Quinn Administration Building and walked the line in support of health and
pension benefits for the part-time faculty. In addition to part-timers, the
picket included full-time faculty, staff, students, and most members of the
FSU Executive Committee, including the acting president (now vice
president) who had opposed the petition to the full-time faculty. It was
the largest labor action to occur on campus in 20 years.
18. Shortly before contract negotiations were concluded in June, the
Part-Time Faculty Committee came under pressure from the union negotiating
team. The administration had already agreed to award half-time status and
full benefits to all adjunct faculty members who taught 2 courses per term.
But it wanted to maintain the fiction that 2 courses did not in themselves
constitute half-time work, undoubtedly to protect itself from lawsuits over
back benefits. So it insisted that part-timers would have to take on formal
service work to qualify for half-time status, yet it wanted them to engage
in such work without additional remuneration. With the exception of the one
adjunct representative on the negotiating team, the union negotiators made
it clear that they felt the deal was the best that could be achieved. The
Committee, however, decided to resist this pressure. Members discussed the
possibility of picketing the next negotiating session. But, since the
Committee had already developed considerable credibility and strength, it
decided to light the candle with a match rather than a blowtorch. It
drafted a letter to the negotiators asserting that the arrangement was
unacceptable in the absence of additional compensation. When the letter was
delivered by certified mail, the chief negotiator and several others blew
their tops, but were nonetheless caught in a bind. In the next bargaining
session, the union held fast, and the administration gave in to the
part-timers' demands on this issue.
19. The result was a three-year contract that included the following
provisions: 1) Half-time, salaried status and full medical, dental, and
pension benefits for all part-timers teaching 2 courses per semester
(currently more than 2/3rds of union part-timers). 2) A 21% increase in
base pay to $4000 per course. 3) Additional "appropriate professional
responsibilities" compensated by a cumulative $200 bump in each
semester of the new contract. 4) An additional 16% wage increase over the
life of the contract.
20. All in all, a resounding victory.
Municipal Organizing
21. The UMass victory shows the importance of organizing on a
campus-by-campus basis. That is where adjunct faculty power ultimately has
to be generated and asserted. But the campus-by-campus approach also has
some important limitations. Though groups of adjuncts can always get
together and agitate on behalf of their interests on a single campus, it
can take years to achieve collective bargaining rights under state and
national labor relations law. If a substantial part of the adjunct
population on the campus concerned is transient, spending only a semester
or two on the job, the original union organizing committee may disintegrate
long before it's able to achieve bargaining unit status. But even forming a
bargaining unit and winning a good contract on a single campus addresses
only one part of the problem faced by underpaid and otherwise exploited
adjunct faculty. Most adjuncts teach at more than one institution in order
to make ends meet. Many essentially live out of their cars, earning the
nickname "freeway flyers." They have been compared to the
vagrant, train-hopping laborers of the early twentieth century, as well as
the migrant farm workers of more recent times. The only way that mobile
workers can defend their interests is by organizing on a scale that encompasses
a number of workplaces. In light of the concentration of colleges and
universities in the Greater Boston area, this recognition implies adjunct
faculty organizing on a municipal scale.
22. Some of the UMass Boston activists began to talk about the
possibility of municipal organizing early on in their campaign, but the
demands of the immediate struggle left little time for following up on the
idea. After the victory, however, they contacted the American Association
of University Professors (AAUP), having become aware of a similar train of
thought in that national organization of faculty members.
23. More than one adjunct has expressed surprise at the AAUP's interest
in the adjunct issue. After all, the group has a rather respectable, even
stodgy reputation as a professional association principally devoted to
protecting academic standards and collegiality. Still, in 1972 the national
organization decided to allow chapters to engage in collective bargaining
if they were so inclined, and several became functioning union locals,
especially on private campuses. In the spring of 1979, an AAUP chapter
conducted a surprisingly militant and successful strike at Boston
University. By entering into an alliance with the secretarial and
librarians unions, the chapter was able to defeat John Silber, the
notoriously abusive BU president. But what Silber lost in the streets he
regained in the courts. He was one of the complainants in the 1980 Yeshiva
Decision in which the US Supreme Court ruled that faculty members at
private colleges and universities are not eligible to enjoy the protections
of the National Labor Relations Act because they exercise managerial
authority. In the aftermath of Yeshiva, the BU union was decertified, as
were AAUP unions on other campuses. Nineteen years later AAUP membership
has dwindled to 45,000. The organization has begun to focus on adjunct
faculty organizing as a way of building its membership base. By no
conceivable stretch of the imagination do adjuncts wield managerial
authority, and so they are not covered by Yeshiva.
24. This emphasis on adjunct organizing is welcome in itself since it
has no counterpart in the other two major faculty unions, the NEA and the
AFT. But the AAUP has gone even further by hiring an organizer to develop a
model of adjunct municipal organization. After his meeting with the UMass
activists, the national leadership of the AAUP decided to implement the
model as a pilot project in Boston.
25. The idea is to pull together a city-wide group of adjunct faculty activists
that can begin to shape the character of adjunct work in the city as a
whole. It would start by defining a basic standard for wages and working
conditions in the Greater Boston Area. The group would then target campuses
that fail to meet the standard in campaigns involving adjunct activists
throughout the region. The campaigns would strike alliances with students,
staff, and full-time faculty, appeal to churches, community organizations,
and unions for support, engage in postering, leafleting, informational
picketing and so on, all by way of pressuring the administrations concerned
to meet the basic standard. Eventually it might be possible to create a
hiring hall that would supply qualified adjuncts to institutions meeting
the standard, withdraw labor from those that do not, establish a portable
benefits package, and otherwise enable adjuncts to improve their lot
throughout the city and its environs. Though administrators are sure to
raise the boogeyman of "outside interference," activists have an easy
reply: You can't create and take advantage of a contingent workforce and
then try to prevent it from organizing wherever it likes.
26. In a way, this project harks back to the organizing drives the
Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) conducted in the first couple of
decades of this century among "hoboes," "harvest
stiffs," and other contingent and temporary workers of the period. The
wobblies crafted a mobile organizing strategy for a footloose workforce,
agitating in temporary encampments, riding the rails, concentrating its
forces on short notice wherever it made sense to wage a battle. But this is
not merely a historical connection. The wobblies are alive and kicking in
the US, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, and they have a general membership
branch in Boston that has become active in the adjunct faculty struggle.
27. The branch organized a meeting in Cambridge a few months ago at
which two speakers from the UMass Boston Part-Time Faculty Committee
discussed the tactics involved in their victory with a group of 25 people.
Two adjunct faculty members from Suffolk University present at the meeting
caucused after the discussion with a wobbly who happens to be a Suffolk
full-time professor. The three were subsequently joined by a UMass Boston activist
who also teaches part time at Suffolk. The four initiated a drive to create
an AAUP chapter that would enable Suffolk adjuncts to pressure their
administration for concessions. An initial meeting at the University drew
30 participants and resulted in a superb and sympathetic front page article
in the student newspaper.
28. An IWW-AAUP alliance. Who knows what other marvels Boston adjunct
organizing has in store?
The Third National Congress of COCAL
29. Municipal organizing in Boston is also linked with a larger,
national effort. Five Suffolk activists now meet regularly with a similar
number from UMass Boston, the AAUP organizer mentioned above, another
wobbly activist, and more occasionally with adjunct faculty members and
graduate TAs from other area campuses in a planning group for the Third
National Congress of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL).
30. COCAL, which includes adjunct, temporary, and nontenure track
faculty, as well as graduate student teaching assistants and research
assistants, was formed at the concluding session of a Second National
Congress of these groups held in New York City at the CUNY Graduate Center
last April. The Second National Congress was attended by more than 100
contingent faculty activists, and followed by about a year-and-a-half the
First National Congress which was held in Washington DC.
31. The Second Congress was organized for the most part by CUNY Adjuncts
Unite, a group of talented activists that has been in a long-running
conflict with its AFT union, a local that has systematically marginalized
CUNY's adjunct faculty even though it comprises a majority of bargaining
unit members. At the conclusion of what most participants found an
inspiring event, the Congress organizers asked two members of the UMass
Boston Part-Time Faculty Committee who were in attendance to take
responsibility for organizing a Third National Congress the following
spring in Boston.
32. The Third Congress promises to be an important event. A Friday
evening plenary meeting and social gathering will take place at Suffolk
University on Friday, April 16. The all-day Saturday session will occur at
UMass Boston beginning with a morning plenary panel bringing together
contingent faculty activists from California, Georgia, Michigan, Montreal,
New York, and Boston to report on and discuss the struggles occurring in
their regions. The panel discussion will be followed by workshops before
lunch on municipal and regional campaigns, making alliances with full-time
faculty, and how to organize a graduate employee union. After lunch, there
will be workshops on legislative strategies, getting undergraduates
involved, and corporatization of higher ed. Following the workshops,
representatives of the AAUP, NEA, AFT, UAW, Hotel and Restaurant Workers,
IWW, and United Electrical Workers (all with a presence on campuses) will
participate in a Labor Roundtable on strategies for organizing contingent
faculty. A short plenary session will conclude the Congress, though COCAL's
steering committee will met on Sunday to plan the organization's activities
for the following year. (More details are on the COCAL website: http://www.omega.umb.edu/~cocal/).
33. It's easy to see from the preceding account that synergy is
developing between campus-based organizing, the municipal project, and the
attempt to establish a national organization. To some extent, each of the
efforts is independent of the others, and yet a number of activists are now
working on all three projects in common. Ideas are circulating from one
venue to another, new people are becoming active, and successes are
inspiring further work. All involved have the feeling that something
exciting is happening. Hopefully with good reason. They may be in the process
of helping to create a powerful social movement.
Gary Zabel and Harry Brill, University of
Massachusetts, Boston
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Gary Zabel and Harry Brill
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