PITTSBURGH–(ENEWSPF)–August 20, 2012. The Adjuncts Association of the United Steelworkers along with the Battle of Homestead Foundation will host a community meeting on the increase of academic contingency, the exploitation of that workforce, and the ongoing union campaign in Duquesne University’s McAnulty College. The meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, Aug. 22 from 6-8 p.m. in the Squirrel Hill branch of the Carnegie Library. (The event is neither sponsored nor endorsed by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.)
Dr. Charles McCollester, Retired Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and an active member of the Battle of Homestead Foundation, says, “The adjuncts are the most oppressed intellectual workers in the country. They’re loaded with student debt, having paid handsomely for their education, and then universities turn around and pay them at rates lower than fast food workers.”
Adjunct professors often rely on several jobs to make ends meet. Teaching on multiple campuses, many are forced to take on twice the course-loads of their full-time counterparts. Teaching at Duquesne and CCAC, Adjunct and parent of a two-year-old daughter, Clint Benjamin will teach seven classes this Fall.
“While I am grateful to be in the position to teach and I love teaching, my course load is excessive and probably does a disservice to the students that I endeavor to instruct and care about.” Benjamin adds, “The reality is that I need to teach a course load like that in order to actually independently sustain myself.”
Part-time instructors need a living wage and fair contracts in order to provide the quality education students deserve, and to attract and retain a talented and qualified adjunct faculty.
Unlike the graduate student employees, or even the students they teach, Duquesne’s adjuncts are denied access to health care by the university. “For Duquesne not to provide health benefits is outrageous,” McCollester says, “particularly because it’s a Catholic institution, which should be strong on the rights of workers to organize.”
Regardless of years of service, most liberal arts adjuncts at Duquesne remain at a base wage of $2,556 per class. Many working at this rate have taught at the university for more than 20 years. Meanwhile, each student at Duquesne pays approximately $3,000 a course, and classes with fewer than 10 enrolled students are likely to be canceled, providing the university with an estimated $27,500 minimum profit for a class taught by an adjunct instructor.
Perhaps worst of all, adjunct faculty members have no job security. If their contracts are renewed, they’re notified weeks or even days before each semester. They’re given no ability to plan for the future, and their employment at Duquesne can be severed without reason regardless of their performance or seniority.
The Adjuncts Association of the USW seeks to address this level of worker exploitation by organizing for fair wages and dignity for contingent faculty members throughout the Pittsburgh Area. The union welcomes non-tenure-track faculty members from all colleges and universities to contact us.
The USW represents about 850,000 working men and women in the United States and Canada in a wide variety of industries, ranging from glass, paper, steel, and other manufacturing environments, to the public sector, education, clerical, service workers and health care industries.
Source: usw.org
