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

This week’s posts are all inspired by the Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value conference in Minneapolis April 11-13. In attendance will be plenty of Minnesota folks, like Paula Rabinowitz and Lisa Disch as well as a great lineup from GSOC-UAW (who have a new book out regarding the landmark strike of graduate employees at NYU), David Downing, Dick Ohmann, Jeff Williams, and many others.

Also in attendance will be Frank Donoghue from Ohio State, whose new book The Last Professors portrays the swift demise of the tenurable minority in the permatemped disciplines, arguing that with respect to silent acquiescence to casualization, “professors of the humanities have already gone too far to rescue themselves.”

This is a vigorous, approachable, and often angry book that seeks to hold the tenurable minority responsible for the steady flowering of multiple tiers of labor—the “new majority” serving contingently as well as graduate employees. To that end, he offers a trenchant critique of the communications of disciplinary associations and graduate program advisors that tend to paint the graduate-employee-as-disposable-worker as the victims of their own bad choices, bad preparation, or bad timing “on the market.” As a result, the relentless “job-market” propaganda and pseudo-knowledge produces a graduate-student subjectivity that willingly self-fashions as a commodity:

This take-charge, self-help approach is perfectly pitched to an audience of job-seekers who have survived graduate school and earned the Ph.D., and who cannot bring themselves to admit that the academic labor system is rigged against them. Instead, they deny it, or, more accurately, they don’t believe that the system will personally victimize them. If they fail, it is because they were “underprepared.” Ideally, they believe that their personal merit and thorough preparation will override the workings of the ‘market.’ … If you believe that success or failure is largely up to you, the job search itself becomes an intense personal drama about individual distinction and merit. (40)

Donoghue goes on to note that the intensified world of competition hardly ends with the job search but continues throughout the life cycle of the tenured minority, noting the sheer unsustainability of speed-up at this level (and, one might add, at wages often much lower than those of nurses, bartenders, and police officers).

The one caveat I’ll raise with Frank this weekend regards the general probem of using “vanishing” tropes. As many have observed, the “vanishing Indian” didn’t actually disappear, but moved to degraded circumstances with a limited purchase on the public sphere. We might say the same for the faculty.

Since future higher education won’t be “professorless,” but filled with faculty—research professors of retail marketing, distinguished chairs in business ethics, but $1000-per-course lecturers in Homer—there will remain opportunities for resistance, for political action, especially by way of activist unions of the faculty serving contingently, including those faculty who serve contingently as graduate employees.

This is the argument of The University Against Itself, the GSOC-NYU collection just released by Temple University Press: corporatization is neither inevitable nor impersonal. It is a matter of human, political, reality that we can make or unmake as we choose–if we choose.

Tomorrow I’ll write about the importance of Jeff Williams’ mantra to “Teach the University,” and perhaps the day after, I’ll say something about my presentation, Extreme Work-Study.

What this really means is that they’re in short supply at the crappy wages being offered, and the employers are begging the government to rig–I mean “socially structure”–the market in their favor. As Dan puts it, “The abundantly endowed Gates Foundation might attempt a useful experiment in talent supply. Advertise doubled pay for software engineers. A negligible response is not likely.”

In today’s post, Dan observes that we’re eating our young. (Okay, okay, he more politely quoted someone saying “We’re eating our seed corn.”)

Thousands of young Ph.D.‘s are stacked up in minimum-wage postdoc holding patterns for lack of full-fledged positions. For years it’s been predicted that droves of old-timers would be stepping down from academic posts, making room for a new generation. But the seniors of science continue to show wondrous durability, perhaps because the grant system is loaded in their favor.

This is one area where I’ve done a bit of work. Dan’s also employing what passes for “labor market” theory in writing about academic labor–when he talks about science “seniors” not clearing out, he’s suggesting that the system has a glitch and that sooner or later we’ll be able to employ those thousands of young PhDs.

The problem with this line of thinking (NOT Dan’s thinking) is that it assumes, inaccurately, that the academic labor market is a market in “jobs” when it is actually a market in contingent labor. When you look at it as if were what we call it–the “job market”–something we dearly wish it was–it looks mysteriously broken, and we don’t know how to fix it. Brilliant labor economists like William G. Bowen make ridiculously erroneous projections about it.

But when you look at it for what it is–a labor market in contingency–you see that it’s actually functioning brilliantly. Exploitative, dishonest as hell, cannibalizing of the young–but functioning just as it is designed to do, to produce ultra-cheap workers–first as students, then as postdocs or contingent faculty. Increasingly undergraduate workers are drawn into this contingent labor market. The tenure-stream employment in many sectors–certain sciences, many humanities–is increasingly epiphenomenal, providing a layer of legitimacy/public relations, some grant income, an upper-management candidate pool, and day-to-day supervision of contingent workers.

As an added benefit, the minority who end up working in the tenure stream do so at lower wages because the price of the tenured is undercut by all the contingents. The “job market,” so-called, is therefore a rhetoric of the labor system and not a description of it. A true “labor market” analysis of academic labor would have to begin not with the superstructure of tenure-track jobs but with a rigorous analysis of the contingent base–the ways that the system produces and legitimates contingency. Including the legitimation provided by the institutional myth-making of presidents who urge “teaching for love” on other people while whacking away the cheese for themselves.

All this is discussed in detail in the free downloadable pdf of the introduction to How The University Works.

GEO is one of the most successful graduate employee unions in the country with a long tradition of militant response to administrator intransigence, staging walkouts or work stoppages in 1987, 1991, 1993, 1996, 1999 and 2002.

It takes a village to pay for the ultra-low wages that most contingent faculty are paid. The math is simple: since paying someone fifteen or eighteen grand a year for a full-time load is well below a living wage nearly everywhere in the country, especially when that person has massive student loan debt, someone is supplementing the wage so the teacher can live. It could be a spouse, parents, a retirement fund, or another employer. Sometimes it’s human services, in the form of welfare or food assistance. The money “saved” by cheap faculty labor is actually paid in to the system by taxpayers, other employers, and family members.

Meanwhile, the funds that would otherwise be spent on faculty are spent on the plague of locusts called administrators: as the most recent data have it: full-time administrators now outnumber full-time faculty. That’s right: you read it correctly. More next week on the most recent NCES data and managerial cannibalization of the campus next week. (Cut to Charlton Heston behind his desk in the dean’s office, spitting out his canapes, belatedly having his epiphany: “I’m eating people!”)

In California, the majority of faculty successfully sued to confirm their eligibility for unemployment compensation while they’re laid off from their employers. Joe Berry, chair of Chicago COCAL and the author of the essential book on self-organization for faculty serving contingently, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower, has produced an essential new tract to help faculty win their rights to unemployment compensation. Co-authored by Beverly Stewart and Helena Worthen, you can download it for free.

There are obstacles to faculty obtaining their rightful compensation. Because state policies vary, some will present more difficult hurdles than others. But Berry and his coauthors suggest that often the largest barrier is the emotional and intellectual barrier raised by faculty themselves, who find it very hard to accept the reality of their situation–that they are, literally, teaching for love, and being compensated far less than a Wal-mart employee or waitstaff at Denny’s.

The second largest barrier is Jane Provost, who will try to save the campus a few extra dimes (amounting to less than her own pay raise) by providing faculty with misinformation about benefits eligibility, and by outright lies, telling the unemployment office that contingent faculty can expect re-employment, while sending legally binding letters to the contrary to the faculty themselves.

Because unemployment insurance is funded by the employers themselves, and employers with a high rate of claims will be asked to pay more, employers have a financial incentive to reduce claims. Most higher education employers, the pamphlet explains, could avoid this exposure by reducing their excessive reliance on perma-temping and provide faculty with legally meaningful assurances of re-employment. Instead most choose “to continue to employ the majority of their teaching staff on a contingent no-reasonable-assurance basis but argue in unemployment insurance appeals hearings that the employee does in fact have reasonable assurance, and thereby often block receipt of benefits.”

I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again: Why do administrators get paid more? Not to be smarter, work harder, or exercise leadership. The extra cash buys hot water to scrub this kind of dirt from their hands.

Jointly funded by AAUP, AFT, and NEA, the pamphlet includes information on individual states.

It also makes it clear that filing for unemployment insurance is more than a matter of individual compensation.

It’s a political act: as more faculty file–especially filing in co-ordinated campaigns–pressure is placed on both the employer and the state to acknowledge the hidden system of subsidies enabling the ultra-low wages paid to the faculty majority.

But like most political acts, it comes with the risk of retaliation. While this sort of retaliation is illegal, U.S. labor law is the corollary of its position on torture, and there are few real penalties to be paid for terrorizing a workforce with the threat of non-reappointment. Did I mention the dirty hands of administrators?

Of the minority who do earn a degree after ten years, and perhaps four or five years of job-hunting, 40 percent of language PhDs will still not have tenure-track employment. That means no tenure-track job of any kind–not in North Dakota, not in a community college, not at a religous school where you have to sign a loyalty oath to the pastor.

And if you do get that job–in what could be your late 30s or even early 40s–what awaits most is a salary similar to a moderately experienced bartender or a 23-year-old police officer.

In many fields this means that perhaps 1/4 of the folks who started graduate school over the past decade might get a shot at lousy pay in the tenure track.

If present trends continue, that percentage should drop considerably for folks entering grad school this year, to 1/5 or even 1/6.

Of course since the vast majority of qualified persons who might have thought about grad school but couldn’t afford the luxury never even applied, talent–especially working class and middle-class talent–is rushing away like water over the falls. And if family wealth determines who can afford the professorial life as a sort of jolly volunteerism, the wealth gap means that folks from racial and ethnic minorities are less likely to see themselves as able to afford this particular form of philanthropy.

As always, see more video at the youtube channel.

“Shuttle Bus: A free shuttle bus will run between Professional Courtesy and Thinly Veiled Contempt. Buses will also stop at Ambition, Exhaustion, and Horniness.”

“Social Skills Research Council Workshop: Cancelled due to lack of qualified participants.”

“Exhibits. Over 130 firms will exhibit books and materials of interest to teachers of language and literature who wish to stoke the professional jealousy of their professional colleagues.”

“Smirking. The MLA allows smirking in restaurants and bars in a designated smirking area. Please be aware of your smirking when you exit the convention center for greater Chicago.”

Thanks to Inside Higher Ed for reporting this story. See the whole program at mlade.org

Video with Andy and many other contingent faculty will come shortly after the New Year. The most common refrain: earning under $20,000–being terrorized out of anything remotely resembling academic freedom–raising children without health insurance–facing retirement without a pension. How can you afford to do this? I asked a dozen folks today and yesterday. “My spouse supports me,” or “my family supports me,” or, “I’ve had to declare bankruptcy after adding 25,000 in credit card debt to my student loans.”

The most startling line of the day: one contingent faculty member who sat in a room where 6 of her colleagues had failed to show up to claim their $1350 a course assignments, to which the outraged writing program director responded, “It’s really wrong of you people not to show up for these jobs. When you walk out, I have to go slavetrading all over town to replace you.”

Also in the future–an interview with MLA chief of staff Rosemary Feal, in which she points out that nearly 60% of folks who earn a Ph.D. after perhaps a dozen years of study end up with some kind of tenure track job after three or four years of searching. Woo-hoo: now there’s something to celebrate: that means new folks have about a 50-50 chance to get paid just as much as a bartender after fifteen years of preparation! Just with sixty grand in debt. Oh, and what about all the folks who smartened up and dropped out? Who postponed childrearing or endured divorce because a spouse couldn’t relocate with them? Feal herself served contingently, and is sincerely concerned about the plight of others working for 15 grand a year while their turn may (or may not) come around. But we need more than hope and sympathy from our disciplinary associations.

She told me that she mentions contingency every time she’s on the hill lobbying for funding for the humanities. “But it’s a nonstarter with them,” she said, because funding is at the state level. So, I asked, when are MLA and AHA and APA going to get off the hill and go to Albany and Sacramento and start making a stink? (crickets chirping.)

Contingency is the norm in academic work. Contingency often means eligibility for food stamps. That story needs to be the lead, not the postscript at the next MLA convention.

Here’s part 2 of the Berube interview, in which he graciously agrees with my various leading questions about the Modern Language Association. Since this is the holiday season, I’ll save the full MLA-gate expose for another time. In the meanwhile, you can read a more temperate recent post of mine at Inside Higher Ed. And if you too will be at MLA, you can catch me at forum #280 (”Higher Education and the Service Economy”) and at the minnesota review cash bar… And if you are one of the 10,000 or so who will be interviewing for a job, and want advice, check out “Who wants to be a tenure-track professor?” by our old friend and Workplace comrade, the Constructivist.

Quicktime version (.mov)
Windows version (mpeg-1) (best quality)

We’re all working all the time, just not at “jobs”

It’s actually really heartening to see MLA staff leadership say things like “we have a job system where there are simply not enough full-time positions.” This is a big step forward from the analysis of the 80s and 90s in which staff members read tea leaves to see whether tenure-stream positions might magically increase.

Since we now know that the tenure stream won’t increase by prayer or magic, and that the wholesale conversion of our work to “student funding” and permatemp assignments was a planned, intentional assault on tenure by management: the only question is what will the disciplinary associations do to struggle against management’s continuing plans?

MLA can do a lot to defend tenure. It’s got a budget and resources far larger than AAUP. It has a respected national profile. Without engaging in censure, it can spend lots more on aggressive public relations, lobbying, the creation of model legislation, and the publication of best practices/worst practices articles in a variety of fora. It is not, as Phyllis Franklin once told me “AAUP’s job” to do these things. It’s everyone’s job, especially the disciplinary associations.

We’re all working all the time. There’s plenty of “need” for us to work. MLA can and must do more to ensure that all that work comes in the form of tenure-track jobs. It’s time for MLA to make a public-relations assault on the sexist, racist, exploitative job system.