I can’t think of a better July 4th message than this, originally posted July 1 on the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Brainstorm group blog.   Here’s to all the trustees, administrators & legislators that made this message possible.   

A couple of days ago, I posted a link to the Living Wage Calculator, and casually & rhetorically — but not accurately — said that you could use it to calculate eligibility for food stamps.

That’s because in order to actually keep writing, instead of simply howling my outrage, I have a flip tendency to handle rhetorically, ironically, and sarcastically the actual, bitter experience of faculty, students, and staff cheerfully exploited by half-million-dollar-a-year pigs at the trough and their cronies in the trustees’ skybox.

Food stamps are a federal program, administered by individual states. There are generally eligibility calculators made available by the relevant agencies in each state, such as this one in Oregon.

There are often special eligibility rules for students, such as in Massachusetts.

If you are eligible for food stamps in your state, you may also be eligible for emergency food assistance at a food bank and, if you are pregnant or have young children the WIC supplemental nutrition program.

Make sure you let your local newspapers know that you’re a campus employee and, if you have the time, mention what your top administrators earn and how much they spent on bricks & mortar, such as business centers and sports facilities in the past couple of decades.

Millions of Americans, many of them enrolled in or employed by higher education, are receiving food assistance, and with the rising cost of transporting oneself to multiple part-time jobs (yep, it costs more to be poor — just ask your administrator with a vehicle allowance), millions more are enrolling.

Millions of others are supplementing their loans with family assistance and credit card debt.

Nope, no problems here.

At least none that the god Market can’t fix.

Oh, and USC? (You know which one I mean by now.) I’ll catch you next week.

Apparently concerned by the administration’s efforts to transfer students into a program staffed by non-union faculty, the leadership of a creative independent union, the Adjunct Faculty Association at Nassau Community College, began an investigation into whether the arrangement violated federal law, using retired FBI agents working as private investigators.

The retired agents visted NCC trustees at home on Long Island last week, including the chair of the board, Mary Adams and the vice chair, John LeBoutillier. According to a Newsday account of the affair, both Adams and LeBoutillier, a loudmouth right-wing pundit and former Republican Congressman, claimed to have felt “intimidated.”

“I said it is very improper,” LeBoutillier huffed, according to the Newsday report. And LeBoutillier knows something about proper interrogation techniques. In addition to his highly qualified contributions to higher education as an NCC trustee, LeBoutillier’s main off-campus passion is the Skyhook II Project, “dedicated to recovering living American POWs in Southeast Asia.”

His expertise about the Vietnam war came the hard way–dodging the verbal slings and arrows of campus liberals and radicals who opposed the war while he was a Harvard Young Republican in the early 1970s. Styling himself “The Boot,” he brags about having made his political career as a low-rent imitator of William F. Buckley–authoring Harvard Hates America and an equally cheesy political novel.

By way of a postscript: Like adjunct faculty unionism, sending detectives to the homes of trustees is an idea whose time has come. Indeed, it’s long overdue.

I have a proposal, Chronicle of Higher Ed or Inside Higher Ed–better yet, AFT or NEA. (I’d say AAUP, but we don’t have the cash!)

Hire a young, disaffected Ph.D. candidate. Give her a video camera. Tell her to watch Stephen Colbert’s interviews with the members of the U.S. Congress.

Then have her interview college trustees–just let them be themselves.

We’ll be watching.

I have rather arbitrarily focused on books and online resources, and not made any attempt to select individual chapters or provide a list of relevant journal articles, which means, for instance, that I didn’t mention such indispensable essays as Andrew Ross’s definitive discussion of “The Mental Labor Problem” in Social Text, or the many essays appearing in minnesota review on the subject during the past two decades under Jeffrey Williams’ editorship. I also didn’t attempt to provide any of the incredibly helpful theorization of the general intellect by Italian autonomixt Marxists (the folks that brought you Empire, for instance.)

Nor did I delve into the literature of white-collar proletarianization that flows through C. Wright Mills and Harry Braverman to Aronowitz, whose first book has a brilliant chapter on the question.

Finally, many of the figures I have included have produced substantial, additional, relevant work well worth adding to your own lists. This includes such figures as Sheila Slaughter, Gary Rhoades, Henry Giroux, Stanley Aronowitz, Eileen Schell, Jennifer Washburn, Joe Berry, Michael Berube, and Cary Nelson. I’ve certainly overlooked a few things inadvertently as well, and am happy to update this list periodically based on feedback!

For those seeking more, there are a number of online bibliographies on such topics as contingent forms of employment. My favorites are Owen Thomas’s detailed-but-selective resource list for the Ohio Contract Faculty Association, Wayne Ross’s comprehensive aggregation at the Workplace blog, and two recent review-essays by Jeffrey Williams and Vincent Leitch. Both include detailed taxonomies:

Vincent Leitch, “Work Theory.” Critical Inquiry Winter 2005: 286-301
Jeffrey Williams, “The Post-Welfare State University.” American Literary History (ALH) 2006 18: 190-216

Academic labor as a system

Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning.
Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation.
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life.
Henry Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education.
Randy Martin, ed., Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University.
Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt, Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education, and Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy. Also see: Cary Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, Nelson & Berube, Higher Education Under Fire.
Gary Rhoades, Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor.
Sheila Slaughter & Larry Leslie, Academic Capitalism
Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education.

Contingent Faculty

Faculty serving contingently are the overwhelming majority of all faculty today. Contingency is the norm of faculty life, and organizing this sector is the cutting edge of academic labor issues right now. The best sources are contemporary and available online.

In addition to the reporting at The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education, see Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, COCAL, and join the ADJ-L discussion list hosted by Vinnie Tirelli. All three of the major higher-education unions — AAUP, AFT, and NEA — produce indispensable scholarship and policy papers on contingent academic labor. The testimony of faculty serving contingently is available at a growing number of locations in the blogosphere. Some of those sites are listed in my blogroll, and other stories are captured in the videos at my youtube channel.

Joe Berry, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education
Joe Berry, Beverly Stewart and Helena Worthen, Access to Unemployment Benefits for Contingent Faculty: A manual for applicants and a strategy to gain full rights to benefits, published by Chicago COCAL (Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor), with financial assistance from AFT, AAUP, and NEA.
Michael Dubson, Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of College Adjunct Faculty –and the Price We All Pay.
Nelson, Cary, ed., Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis.
Eileen Schell, Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction
Eileen Schell and Patrica Lambert Stock, eds., Moving a Mountain: Transforming the Role of Contingent Faculty in Composition Studies and Higher Education.
Barbara Wolf, Degrees of Shame (film) email her at: barbara@barbarawolf.com

Graduate Employee Unions

The most important source for graduate-employee labor news is the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) email list and Web site, which links to most of the North American established unions and organizing campaigns.

Deborah M. Herman and Julie M. Schmid, Cogs in the Classroom Factory: The Changing Identity of Academic Labor (public institutions)
Monika Krause, Mary Nolan, Michael Palm, and Andrew Ross, The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace
Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson, eds., Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement (mostly private institutions).

Theory and Practice of Higher-Ed Administration

The single most important thing you can do to educate yourself about the intentions of higher-education administration is to read the discourse of higher-ed administrators themselves. Their self-description of their aims is far scarier than anything I can tell you about them.

The best one-volume source for administrator-think is the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) Reader, Organization and Governance in Higher Education, edited by Christopher M. Brown. The 5th edition (2000) is available used. The 6th edition from Pearson Custom Publishing is promised for this year (2008), but is not currently available.

The best one-volume discussion of the role of management theory in U.S. intellectual life is the indispensable Thomas Frank: One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. For a contrasting view, see Christopher Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980.

Corporatization, Corporate Influence, Privatization, Militarization

Stanley Aronowitz, Against Schooling: For an Education that Matters.
Clyde Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928.
Henry Giroux, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex. Also see: Theory and Resistance in Education and Aronowitz & Giroux, Education Still Under Seige..
Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class.
David Noble, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education.
Kenneth Saltman, Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools. Also see The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education and (with David Gabbard), Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools
Upton Sinclair, The Goose-Step.
Jennifer Washburn, University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education.
Geoffry White and Flannery Hauck, eds., Campus, Inc.: Corporate Power in the Ivory Tower

Theory, Disciplinarity & Social Logic of the University

Michael Berube, The Employment of English.
Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors.
David Downing, The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace.
Richard Ohmann, Politics of Knowledge: The Commercialization of the University, the Professions, and Print Culture
Bill Readings, The University in Ruins.
Evan Watkins, Work Time: English Departments and the Circulation of Cultural Value.
Jeffrey Williams, ed., The Institution of Literature.

He just might get part-time teaching work at one of the several universities in the area, but there were no guarantees. He might well end up working at a grocery store, or a bar, or, if things went really badly, at a convenience store or fast food place. He shuddered, thinking of the injustice of one of the bright young minds in his field selling beer and cigarettes to the scum of the earth, or asking some imbecile if he wanted to super-size his order.

Raymond stared out the window of his office for a few minutes, morosely sipping his whiskey and imagining the very worst possible scenarios. When he turned back to his computer, he was surprised to find a job listing glowing on the screen with what seemed to be an unusual luminosity… read moreCourtesy of Sisyphus, by way of the redoubtable Craig Smith, of AFT’s FACE Talk.

In fact, by the calculation of the brilliant, indispensable Gary Rhoades (Managed Professionals and Academic Capitalism in the New Economy), nearly half of all faculty in the tenure stream bargain collectively–a rate more than 300% of typical U.S. workers. Graduate employees are close behind with, according to Gordon Lafer, a nearly 20% unionization rate. Both rates would be higher without the scandalous violation of international human rights represented by the laughable 5-4 Yeshiva decision and the Bush mob’s arrogant reversal of the NYU decision.

I’m reprinting the announcement below in its entirety from the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions mailing list.

The 17th Annual CGEU conference will be held at Yale University in New Haven, CT on July 31 - Aug 3, 2008.

Please contact Mary Reynolds, UNITE HERE/GESO, for more information: mary@yaleunions.org or 203-500-4698.

Higher education is one of the fastest growing sectors of the U.S. economy. Despite the economic downturn, many university endowments are hitting record highs (at Yale, for example, the endowment topped $22 billion in 2007). Public and private universities are competing in a race to open campuses abroad and build partnerships with foreignuniversities, particularly in the Middle East and China. In the United States, campuses are expanding to attract a record number of potential undergraduates.

The CGEU and the academic labor movement can provide a model for how to combat the increasing corporatization and casualization in the academy. Graduate teachers and researchers have an opportunity to use the expansion in higher education and our contract negotiations or demands for recognition to increase the number of good, union faculty jobs on our campuses. We must create and strengthen coalitions with other workers and unions on our campuses and across the academy, develop legislative and bargaining strategies to protect and expand organizing rights for more workers, and build consensus that union growth and power is the most important issue facing all academic workers.

Workshops could include:

Privatization at Public Universities

University of Michigan Victory: A Case Study

Building Power: Union density and lining up our contracts

Coalition Building: How to build alliances with other workers on campus, academic and non-academic?

The Changing Face of Higher Ed: Casualization, Race, Gender, and LGBTQ concerns

University Growth, Faculty Shrinkage: Endowments, Development and the Restructuring of Academic Work

The Global University and organizing global scholars

The Local University and organizing within our local communities

Legal and legislative strategies: Teaching and Research Assistants Collective Bargaining Rights Act, Employee Free Choice Act

Bargaining Strategies: How can unions help universities help themselves? How to use grad research to improve health care, create
innovative job strategies, etc.?

Building organizing committees: High Turnover, the memory problem, and the union difference

Not that most of you will care very much, but one of the best contenders for the thoroughbred Triple Crown will race this Saturday. The horse’s moniker, “Big Brown,” expresses the owner’s gratitude to shipping giant UPS for renewing a contract with his trucking company. For folks like him, for full-time Teamster drivers, and for the customers who want their online-ordered crap at their doors tomorrow, UPS represents a good deal. The company’s also received plenty of good ink for its “Earn and Learn” financial-aid packages for part-time student employees.

Coincidentally, the chapter of HTUW that usually gets the most attention from non-academic readers is the one questioning whether involvement with the company really has been a good deal for the tens of thousands of students it claims to have “aided” over the past decade.

Most startling for many readers are the details of the meretricious financial aid scheme at its Louisville Worldport hub. Recruited from Appalachia, urban Louisville and Cincinnati, and the profoundly depressed rural Kentucky counties where blood and animal excrement from giant hog butcheries and chicken plants befoul the waterways, students flock to the UPS program on the promise of “education benefits” that few persist to receive.

The worst job–performed by thousands of struggling students–is a physically demanding, high-stress job sorting heavy packages on a fast conveyor at the airport hub. Every student must work after midnight five nights a week–every Monday through Friday) but on a split shift, working just a few hours (until 3 or 4 am) at unprecendentedly low pay, taking home about $25 a shift. The Teamsters play a role in this scheme–they’ve bargained this low pay for the students and part-timers while preserving the generous pay and benefits of the full-time labor aristocrats represented by the drivers: driving for Big Brown is still one of the good blue-collar jobs. (This is similar to the strategy of many faculty unions, who bargain great deals for the minority tenurable caste while neglecting the contingent majority.)

Few of the students in this program were succesfully taking even one class a term when I spoke to its director. While UPS refuses to make meaningful persistence data available, the most generous interpretation of the numbers suggests a persistence to degree while involved in the program of around 12%.

…..
In its ruthless quest for super-cheap labor, the university has fastened on new ways of exploiting an old favorite: the student worker. We are all familiar with the figure of a student working a minimum-wage job as “financial aid.” On many campuses, student workers outnumber faculty, staff, and other workers combined.

Undergraduates work for their degree-granting institution as painters, maids, janitors, cooks, groundskeepers, truck loaders, daycare staff, teaching assistants, computer technicians, coaches, security guards, and administrative assistants, typically for wages at or near the national or local minimums. For a significant fraction of these students, on-campus jobs are just one element of their efforts to fund their degrees, which increasingly involve unsustainable debt loads and additional off-campus employment.

Nearly twenty million students are enrolled in postsecondary institutions. Eighty percent work to finance their educations, averaging 30 hours a week.

I first started thinking about this issue at the University of Louisville, where I first received tenure. I arrived in 1998, shortly after the university began a much-ballyhooed “partnership” with United Parcel Service (UPS), the city of Louisville, and other local colleges. The partnership’s sole function is to entice students to sign contracts committing them to provide cheap labor in exchange for education benefits. This arrangement alone has provided UPS with more than ten thousand ultra-low-cost student workers since 1997, the same year that the Teamsters launched a crippling strike against the carrier. Currently there are six thousand undergraduates working at the UPS Louisville hub, with plans to hire thousands more. About three thousand work a midnight shift that ends at UPS’s convenience—typically 3 or 4 a.m., later during peak shipping seasons.

Between 1997 and 2003, UPS hired undergraduates to staff more than half of its one hundred and thirty thousand part-time positions. Students are currently the majority of all part-timers, though only some receive education benefits. By restricting the education benefits of its “Earn and Learn” programs to students willing to work undesirable hours, UPS has over the past decade recruited approximately fifty thousand part-time workers to its least desirable shifts without raising pay. The largest benefits are reserved for students who think they can handle working after midnight every night of the school week.

The consequences of night work are well documented, and the available evidence suggests markedly negative effects for the Louisville students. Every instructor to whom I spoke reported excessive fatigue and absenteeism (due to both fatigue and an extraordinarily high injury rate). Students participating in the UPS program showed substantial failure to persist academically. In a desperate attempt to stem this tide, faculty scheduled UPS-only sections between 5 and 11 p.m. both on campus and at the hub. They even began a ritual of 3 a.m. advising, sending as many as a dozen faculty out to the airport before dawn in order to catch the exhausted students coming off the sort. Since nearly all of the faculty involved taught and served on committees five days a week, these efforts resulted in a bizarre twenty-four-hour cycle of work for themselves.

The UPS partnership appears to have increased rather than decreased the economic distress of participants. According to the company’s own fact sheet, student workers giving up five nights’ sleep will typically be paid for just fifteen to twenty hours a week. Since the wage ranges from just $8.50 to $9.50, this can mean net pay below $100 a week, and averaging a little over $120. The rate of pay bears emphasizing: because the students must report five nights a week and are commonly let go after just three hours, their take-home pay for sleep deprivation and physically hazardous toil will generally be less than $25 per shift. In fact, most UPS part-timers earn little more than $6,000 in a year, and most have at least one other job.

UPS presents a triple threat to students’ prospects for academic persistence: sleep deprivation and family-unfriendly scheduling, low compensation resulting in secondary and tertiary part-time employment, and a high injury rate. UPS refuses to provide meaningful persistence figures for the more than fifty thousand students it has “aided” over the past decade. But of the ten thousand at the Louisville hub, it could account for little more than three hundred bachelor’s or associate’s degrees earned. The most generous interpretation of the few statistics made available suggests persistence to degree of about 12 percent.

According to one analyst, in 1964, all of the expenses associated with a public university education, including food, clothing and housing could be had by working a minimum wage job an average of 22 hours a week throughout the year. (This might mean working 15 hours a week while studying and 40 hours a week summers.) Today, the same expenses in a low wage job require 55 hours a week 52 weeks a year.

At a private university, those figures in 1964 were 36 minimum wage hours/week, relatively manageable for a married couple or a family of modest means, and still quite manageable for a single person working the lowest possible wage 20 hours a week during the school year and some overtime on the vacations. Today, it would cost 136 hours per week 52 weeks a year to “work your way through” a private university.

Now each year of private education amounts to the annual after-tax earnings of nearly four lowest-wage workers working overtime.

Employing misleading accounting that separates budgets for building, fixed capital expenses, sports programs and the like from “instructional unit” budgets, higher education administration often suggests that faculty wages are the cause of rising tuition, rather than irresponsible investment in technology, failed commercial ventures, lavish new buildings, corporate welfare, and so on. The plain fact is that many college administrations are on fixed-capital spending sprees with dollars squeezed from cheap faculty and student labor: over the past thirty years, the price of student and faculty labor has been driven downward massively at exactly the same time costs have soared.

For the eighty percent of students trying to work their way through, higher education and its promise of a future is increasingly a form of indenture, involving some combination of debt, overwork, and underinsurance. It means the pervasive shortchanging of health, family obligations, and ironically, the curtailment even of learning and self-culture. More and more students are reaching the limits of endurance with the work that they do while enrolled. One major consequence of this shift of the costs of education away from society to students, including especially the costs of education as direct training for the workforce, is a regime of indebtedness, producing what Randy Martin describes as docile financialized subjectivities by way of what Jeff Williams has dubbed “the pedagogy of debt.” The horizon of the work regime fully contains the possibilities of student ambition and activity, including the conception of the future.

But shortly after she announced that she was the unopposed candidate for president of her local, and would therefore become the first part-timer to lead the unit, a dean with less than a year on the job terminated her.

Why? she asked.

“Because I can,” he replied.

This does lead one to wonder about the worth of the “Assurance of Employment” clause–it doesn’t seem to have modified the at-will relationship in this case. I’d like to hear more from Phil Ray Jack, or someone with close knowledge of the contract, about this one.

AAUP senior counsel Rachel Levinson has taken to sending occasional emails to AAUP members about the truly scary state of case law affecting traditional faculty rights. Her latest, on the retaliation against Irvine professor Juan Hong for speech in direct performance of his governance duties, is one of the most-forwarded emails of the past year, appearing on half-a-dozen lists and blogs that I regularly read. It’s a chilling ruling that crudely applies the Garcetti case (permitting retaliation, including demotion and discharge, against public employees for speech in relation to their duties).

Yeah, you read that correctly. He was retaliated against for speech in direct relation to his governance duties, and the court upheld it. If he had issued pro-Nazi sentiments, he would have been safe. But because he said permatemping is bad, they could drive him out with impunity. (He has since retired.)

I’ve reproduced Levinson’s remarks in full below, and you can read a pdf of the complete amicus brief that she prepared for Hong’s appeal. The AAUP pays for Levinson’s (highly-discounted) work, its extensive advocacy efforts, lobbying, scholarship, and policy statements, and the travel & meeting expenses of a fleet of faculty volunteer officers like myself–out of the dues of just 45,000 members. That number is 1/2 the number of dues-paying members in 1972, and the total annual budget is smaller than that of many disciplinary associations.

Forgive my bluntness, but, dude, you want this work to continue? Then click here and join. Like, right away. Faculty serving contingently and graduate employees pay highly discounted rates.

Faculty Speech and the First Amendment
by Rachel Levinson, AAUP Senior Counsel

Imagine that you are teaching at a public university that not only supports but encourages your participation in institutional governance. You speak up on several matters that you think undermine the faculty role or your students’ experience—and for your trouble, you are denied a raise, saddled with additional work, or even fired. Do the university’s actions violate the First Amendment?

The AAUP and the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression recently filed an amicus (“friend of the court”) brief in such a case. The brief, which was filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, supports the appeal of Dr. Juan Hong in his First Amendment lawsuit against the administration of the University of California, Irvine. The case could have significant implications for faculty members at all public colleges and universities—and, ironically, could have the strongest negative impact on faculty that are encouraged to participate in university governance.

Dr. Hong, a full professor at UCI, allegedly angered university administrators by opposing certain faculty hiring and promotion decisions and the university’s use of lecturers in place of professors. After Dr. Hong was denied a merit salary increase and given an increased workload, he filed suit, claiming that the university violated his First Amendment right to free speech.

A federal trial judge in California rejected Dr. Hong’s claim. The judge reviewed Garcetti v. Ceballos, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did not protect public employees from discharge for statements made “pursuant to their official duties” but declined to decide whether its ruling extended to “speech related to scholarship or teaching.” The judge in Dr. Hong’s case concluded that Dr. Hong’s participation in faculty governance was “pursuant to his official duties,” and that the university’s retaliation therefore did not violate the First Amendment. The court failed to acknowledge, however, that the Garcetti decision explicitly set aside the question of protection for academic speech, and held that “UCI is entitled to unfettered discretion when it restricts statements an employee makes on the job and according to his professional responsibilities.”
The AAUP’s amicus brief focuses on the unique status granted to academic speech, and its relation to shared governance. The brief notes that faculty speech has been accorded special First Amendment protection by the Supreme Court since Sweezy v. State of New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234 (1957). The hallmark of such cases, the brief notes, is the recognition that academic freedom merits distinctive First Amendment protection against repressive action from within or outside the campus community.
The AAUP brief argues that participation in faculty governance is part and parcel of professors’ First Amendment-protected right of academic freedom to speak without fear of retaliation. The brief also observes that the court failed to distinguish between faculty rights and responsibilities, and argues that the court’s decision will empower universities with strong policies in favor of shared governance to discipline faculty members who annoy administrators through their involvement in university governance.

Luke, I am your father.

Junior faculty report being advised to file grades in violation of Quebec law, and “not to say anything, because it could affect your tenure case.” There are numerous reports of graduate students denied full payment of pre-strike hourly earnings, including both teaching wages and research stipends from grant funds completely unrelated to teaching activities.

Last week, the administration overplayed its hand in an amateurish attempt to bypass union leadership and the bargaining process itself by electronically self-publishing what it called a “global offer” to teaching assistants. Students were fired up by the arrogant paternalism of the move–essentially saying to union members, “the heck with bargaining and your leadership, just sign here, kids.” But they also understood the offer as a sleazy effort to get them to agree that other university employees could do their work, essentially giving up core labor protections in the Quebec code. The “offer” was rejected overwhelmingly, by 86% of voting members.

Frustrated by the thumping rejection, McGill returned to the table but adopted an unprofessional and hectoring tone, accusing the grad students of attacking the role of the professoriate and academic freedom, and, most egregiously, telling the union’s bargaining team to”grow up and take responsibility,” resulting in the students’ walking out of the session and this response by Richard Hink, AGSEM president.

This past Thursday and Friday, the administration continued its hijinx at the bargaining table, making a verbal agreement with grad employees to a version of the workload form consistent with Quebec law, then repudiating the agreement the next day. “This deal occurred at the table with a provincial conciliator present — everyone in the room agreed. This morning, we returned to the table and the Administration informed us that they were retracting the deal,” an AGSEM official informed me “This is a stab in the back and we’re looking into legal action for bad-faith bargaining. Our position is that the text was accepted and remains part of the workload form.”

“They’re stalling,” my faculty source told me. “The administration doesn’t appear willing to bargain in good faith. It’s not just about the TAs. Their negotiations with the clerical workers’ union (MUNACA) have also been dragging on. The administration appears more interested in control than in saving money.This is the politics of neoliberalism.”

Grad student activists appear to share this view. “McGill appears to be trying to make an example out of the TA union because the administration is currently in negotiations with clerical, technical, library assistants, nurses and others. If MUNACA goes on strike, the University shuts down,” he said. He thinks the university’s hardball tactics are backfiring. “If anything, the support from MUNACA members on the TAs’ picket line indicates that our refusal to give in to pressure tactics has only inspired their membership to fight.” The same source offered several examples of McGill’s corporatization, including centralization of food services and the shutdown of student-run businesses and the takeover of spaces traditionally controlled by faculty and students:

The attempt to bust the TA union is only one part of a general plan to not only obliterate student autonomy, their organisations, and places of discussion, publication, dissemination, and thus, dissent, but to make circumstances very difficult in which students, faculty and staff could freely meet each other and discuss issues pertaining to their workplace and the increasingly stifling campus climate.

While faculty feeling about unionism is mixed, some have been questioning the role of their own faculty association, the MAUT, described by many as a classic company union. As one commenter in an earlier blog post on the strike noted:

As a junior McGill professor, I can say that it is par for the course for our faculty association to be another arm of the administration. In fact, most of the administration is part of the faculty association. Who is going to show up at a MAUT meeting and ask the faculty to cross the administration when their dean is sitting beside them? The main role of MAUT seems to be to keep the salaries rising nicely and to monitor the pension fund. Real concerns, like workloads for junior faculty, access to daycare, conflicts with management, etc., are not things that interest MAUT. The result is that the faculty are financially probably better off than many places with unions, but we have no bargaining power on other issues.

The Montreal Gazette reported one faculty member who took an even dimmer view of MAUT’s response: “I guess the MAUT folks don’t want to rile the administration [while negotiating their own salaries], but for one group of teachers to ignore the efforts of another group to improve their working conditions is shameful, at least.”

Many of the faculty support the union, and some individual profs wear AGSEM buttons, walk the picket line, distribute strike literature and are trying to find ways to help students to replace the lost income.

In the tentative agreement reached between the administration and UPTF-AFT, the faculty forced the administration to accept job security after 6 consecutive semesters (to one-year renewable contracts with seniority protections) and, after 6 more terms, 2-year renewable contracts with seniority protections. Salaries were raised to a minimum of $700/credit hour (from a current low of $582), with a floor of $1000/credit hour in the most secure tier. Above these minimums are fifteen salary levels to avoid wage compression.

They did not press on health insurance and the percentage raises in this four-year first contract are modest (2% + $75/credit hour in the first year, then 2.5% year for the succeeding years).

But the union delivered on its controversial (to some) core strategy of zeroing in on job security, reflecting the reality that most faculty serving part-time are in this to make their living (despite most administrative propaganda to the contrary). There is specific language in the agreement guaranteeing continuing employment after six terms: so long as “faculty are available to perform the duties that they have previously regularly performed, and there is no reduction of available work…they will be reappointed at that same level of employment as in the previous academic years” except in the case of demonstrable poor performance or a substantial loss in the availability of work.

The UPTF-AFT contract continues a trend toward bargaining contingency out of existence established in the Cal State and New School/NYU (UAW) campaigns. Next post, I hope to follow up on events at McGill.