A good number of part-time union activists in California have heard of what in being called the One-Tier, Unified, or One Faculty Model, but for those outside of California, FACCC, or the faculty association of California Community College has put together a great web page with resources by which to educate yourself and spread the word.

The gist of it all is this–the current two-tier model of part-time/contingent faculty versus full-time tenure-track faculty is increasingly problematic and for decades seen as a problem. Yet after nearly four decades since its declaration, there has been no significant movement towards the often vaunted goal of a 75/25 tenure/contingent faculty ratio. Further, even if the goal were reached, the inherent inequity of 25% percent of faculty lacking equity, security, and academic freedom would not be addressed. The real solution is the One-Tier Model:

FACCC Supports a One-Tier Faculty Model

This is a repost of a piece I did for “The Jumping Off Place” Substack, which I heartily endorse. It is the first in a series which discusses the larger social phenomenon of contingency from academia to the larger workforce:

As I sit here before my computer unemployed yet fully engaged in the act of doing unpaid yet expected work, I ponder upon an America made transient, isolated, and precarious in the name of efficiency, flexibility, and convenience.

As a “part-time” (I actually work 115+% of a full-time load at two combined institutions so that each school can pay me around 50% less than what my full-time colleagues make) community college instructor, I’m generally unemployed during the summer, but will spend 100’s of hours having to work on an online class shell for an upcoming Humanities (from 1400-present) class.

Because the overwhelming number of commercial Humanities textbooks approaching the time period fixate on the triumphal narrative expansion of Western European culture and its own internal issues, a proper teaching of the period effectively requires an instructor to not simply design what amounts to a textbook of their own, but a class shell of module outlines, assignments, video lectures, etc., the work of such a course no longer falls the traditional two-to-three week prep period and following class term.

For many part-time community college instructors, like an increasing number of the 36% of Americans who make up the US contingent labor workforce, working online is not an option, but an obligation.  After first accepting to teach Humanities online in the Spring of 2020 my reward for doing a hopefully adequate job was to be offered the opportunity to continually teach online, and to teach additional online courses requiring additional online preps.

To be fair, I do enjoy teaching and I don’t fault either my scheduler or Dean for the assignment, but to be clear, I work in an exploitive situation. 

As a worker whose employment is contingent on enrollment on a term-by-term basis, or who, without the protection true academic freedom of tenure, can find oneself without a job or even a career, the idea that one is “asked to” or “offered” work is a mischaracterization of what goes on in a contingent workers’ head, whether academic or not.  Asks and offers are really more the effective giving of economic ultimatums in the form of options: you can accept the assignment, or not be hired, or seen as difficult, and not be hired in the future, or simply excluded from being considered for a future option, and not be hired. Get the point?

The assertion that contingent workers enjoy choice only works if a worker has the option to truly look for work or withdraw from the labor market. In truth, contingent workers, paid less and lacking the status of a full-time job with some trappings of job security, rarely enjoy this luxury.  The convenience and flexibility of these jobs exists only for people who don’t really need to live off them. The convenience and flexibility of such jobs lies more with employers, who in fact benefit from a transient pool of workers who impermanence and precarity necessarily makes them harder to organize.

The trickling down of contingency manifests itself in other ways as well.  Increasing numbers of younger workers, more likely to enter into and remain in contingent working conditions, lack the capacity to build wealth, let alone consider the option of home ownership. Of course, they can choose to live with their parents, provided their parents are less precarious than themselves, or they can rent, an option made more tenuous by vast and largely faceless megarich and investor groups buying up properties, and renting out what they can’t sell off at inflated prices to people who will in turn never be ability to build their own equity.

There is another option, and that is to simply choose transience altogether by living in one’s car.  My own son, as a sort of personal test of discipline, did this for a few months, though to be clear, he was never homeless in any obligatory sense.  The same could not be said of those he encountered, often staying in the parking lots of defunct stores and restaurants. These folks generally did not fit the model of the unhoused as mentally ill and drug-addicted, or the itinerant types romanticized in Nomadland. Nearly all of them had jobs, many were college-educated, like one young engineer who bunked in a late model Tesla, thinking this was the way he would best accumulate savings to afford buying a home.

Young America is increasingly being told to pick itself up from the car seat and in a place where the ever more present threat of triple-digit heat from climate change can turn their cars into death traps.

More recently, as a contingent faculty union rep, I was approached for the first time this Fall by multiple unhoused part-time faculty simply looking for the creation of a safe parking space at the institution where they taught, thinking it might be of use to our much larger unhoused student population as well.  The administration balked, citing costs regarding liability, access to showers, etc.

And now I return to writing my class shell, unsettled but obligated to move forward, keeping ahead of car living.

This Sacramento Bee editorial, in speaking to what is the largest strike in US public university history underscores these points:

Universities across the country rely on low-wage, part-time, temporary workers, often construing student workers and postdocs as trainees or apprentices to justify low-quality employment. But the system these workers are supposedly being apprenticed into is broken. Despite their hard-won expertise, graduate students and postdocs look forward to a market made up mostly of adjunct faculty gigs that don’t provide health benefits or enough pay to cover their student loans.

American colleges and universities are failing their workers.

UC strike: Here’s what’s at stake in America’s largest ever higher education labor action

This past week, October 24-28 marks Campus Equity Week, a time of education and activism that draws attention to the working conditions of faculty working on temporary, low-paid contracts, who now constitute the majority of college instructors.

To the larger public, there has been a longstanding misunderstanding of academic labor, fueled by movie and media depictions of professors as mainly working at rich and exclusive colleges, enjoying an affluent or upper middle-class lifestyle, driving mid-range luxury cars, or summering in Europe in private villas. This rarefied lot exists only within realm of perhaps 5%-10% of full-time tenure-track faculty.

A much harsher truth is that 73% of American college faculty are not full-time tenure track employees, but adjunct/contingent faculty working on often term-by-term contracts for a fraction of the wages of their full-time tenure track colleagues, with limited to no benefits. Further, as their hiring is contingent upon enrollment, there is limited to no reasonable assurance they can or will be rehired after a term ends, even with stellar evaluations. Moreover, in many states, they are not eligible for unemployment benefits or social security.

What does the face of the adjunct/contingent majority look like? According to survey information provided by the American Federation of Teachers, it’s not a pretty one. Of over 1,000 Adjunct/contingent faculty surveyed nationwide, 22% percent stated they were facing food insecurity. 19% rely on some form of public assistance. More than a quarter earn less than 26,500 dollars a year, and over half nave put off healthcare treatment due to the cost.

And just who are these faculty? Most are women, and most are over the age of 50. 37% Have expressed they do not know how they will manage retirement.

While racially, most of these faculty are white, the numbers of BIPOC adjunct/contingent faculty are increasing, and it is likely within 20 years, by sheer attrition alone, that this underclass of faculty will be increasingly comprised of folks seeing academia as a path to equity only to be denied it.

As an adjunct rep at two different institutions, I routinely encounter homeless adjunct/contingent faculty. All but one was white and male, and even his story is marked by working class struggle. I have watched adjunct colleagues die prematurely, worn down by the job, who put off needed healthcare, and have suffered mentally and emotionally by the isolation, precarity, and poverty brought on by the work. Others have gone to Mexico for necessary and even emergency medical procedures they could not afford in the U.S.

Many and most of these faculty are teachers who taught for years, not out of desperation or a desire for wealth, but out of a true love in aiding students reach their dreams. Usually, it is the adjunct/contingent faculty who teach the underserved and marginalized students with the greatest needs—those students in greatest need of equity.

But these faculty, who often teach more classes than their full-time tenure track colleagues, and with fewer resources, are kept by precarious working conditions from their true potential.

The clear inequity between the working conditions between Full time-tenure track faculty and their adjunct-contingent counterparts has been long known, but little energy or action has been asserted at the Federal level to address it. Among policymakers at both the federal and state levels there has been a collective handwashing on dealing with the issue, with such policymakers claiming the cost truly creating academic labor equity is either too steep or incalculable.

In truth, is it neither. Public colleges, by law, are required to be transparent with their budgets, which are in turn reported to larger public entities themselves required to be transparent regarding government spending. This is information that is accessible, collectable, and can be analyzed.

The US Department of Education, under the direction of the Biden administration, could clearly undertake such a study regardless of the roiling partisanship in Congress. Further, they could publish it and reveal the inequity of a two-tier system, and in that inequity, the cost of addressing it. That cost could in turn be broken down at the individual state, local, and system level, and with it, a hard and solid target could be set.

And what would that target look like?

Imagine that when a student walks into a classroom they see a professor or instructor, not an adjunct/contingent, or tenure track faculty member.

We should simply make that what the student sees as truth—that each instructor, holding similar qualifications and benefits doing the same job, receive equal pay and benefits proportionate to their work. Additionally, all instructors, whether working full-time or not, should be not only allowed, but encouraged and even expected to be involved departmental and shared governance activities. Finally, in as much as it is possible, given the challenges of fluctuating enrollments, all instructors should have the right to equivalent job security protections, subject to evaluation similar to the tenure process accorded tenure-line faculty.

In effect, there would no longer be a two-tier and ever-exploitive system of academic labor.

Doing so would create a stable and secure academic labor force better equipped to empower students, particularly those in need of their own equity, to achieve it. It would also likely convince administrators to hire more full-time faculty outright to reduce the costs and challenges of employee turnover, and truly create the 75%+ full-time labor force often spoken of as some halcyon goal that could in fact be a reality.

Most of all what it would create is a sense of solidarity in a higher mission for higher ed, not one grounded in division and parsimony and, but inclusion and prosperity. It is not beyond imagining.

Now we must create the collective will to make it happen.

Geoff Johnson

AFT-ACC president

End this Higher Ed Irony. Equal pay for equal work. #CampusEquityWeek

Credit to @adjunctlaborer on Instagram

Please take a moment October 24-28 to post on your social media (Twitter / Instagram / Facebook) for Campus Equity Week.

This is a quick and simple campaign. It takes 5-10 minutes.

Do it between grading papers, or between classes (but sure to pull over on the side of the road so you don’t get in a crash)

Instructions:

Step 1: Take or use a picture which speaks to your situation as an adjunct/contingent faculty member

Step 2: Add a one to two sentence message Post your photo along with a message (samples below), making sure to use the hashtag #CampusEquityWeek

Step 3: Encourage your fellow faculty to post as well!

Some Examples:

An an adjunct, may district gives me 75$ a semester for healthcare, so I guess I’m covered. #CampusEquityWeek #FacultyHealtcareNow

Adjuncts deserve desks, not dashboards. #CampusEquityWeek

In an AFT survey, 37% of adjunct/contingent faculty, many who do not have social security benefits, stated the had no idea how they would manage retirement. #CampusEquityWeek

In its 2022 Survey of Adjunct Faculty, AFT found 22% of adjunct/contingent experienced problems with food insecurity. These same faculty are often prohibited from going to food pantries at their own colleges. #CampusEquityWeek

Here is a link to a report from the CFT about an AFT resolution, in large part procured because of the efforts of the intrepid Geoff Johnson, president of the AFT/ACC, as well as the efforts of other members of the Caucus’ executive committee, to request that the DOE conduct a study of inequity among higher education faculty. Geoff has worked tirelessly and has led to much increased visibility of the adjunct crisis that has disempowered and disenfranchised faculty for decades now. Some few steps in the right direction.

Presently before the California Senate Appropriations committee is AB 1856, a bill which would, if passed, enable part-time faculty to negotiate with their districts to teach up to 85% of a full-time equivalent load.  Presently, the per district teaching cap is 67%. In that part-time faculty are already paid a fraction of what their full-time colleagues make for the same teaching load, many have to teach in two or more districts, often traveling over hundreds of miles each week, the merits of the bill are clear. It would . . .

• Reduce part-time faculty travel time to various assignments

• Additionally allow these faculty to better connect with their respective institutions and students

• Reduce California’s carbon footprint

Sadly, this bill is presently being challenged in appropriations by the California Community College Chancellor’s Office using the following rationale:

• This bill could result in $200 million to $403.5 million in ongoing Proposition 98 General Fund costs each year for community college districts to offer health insurance benefits to part-time faculty, depending on the exact number of faculty who qualify. This estimate assumes that the bill would trigger Affordable Care Act (ACA) requirements due to the additional unit load and potential increase in office hours and other workload requirements. This estimate also assumes an annual employer contribution of $11,000 for 18,384 to 36,768 part-time faculty employed by community college districts throughout the state.

• This bill could also result in one-time Proposition 98 General Fund costs of between $360,000 and $720,000 for community college districts to update or create collective bargaining agreements with part-time faculty. This estimate assumes a cost of about $5,000 to $10,000 for each of the state’s 72 districts.

The assertions made by the Chancellor’s office are not simply wrong, but specious.

First, it is unlikely that there are in fact 36,768 adjuncts in the CCC.  Many adjuncts are double or even triple-reported in that districts report part-time hires individually rather than collectively, and the CCCCO is fully aware of this.

Second, the current number of part-time faculty at any given district who teach at 67% of an FTE (Full-time Equivalent Load) are in the minority, and with shrinking enrollment, the number of sections and adjunct faculty are decreasing. The number of faculty who would be able to teach at an 85% load, even if AB1856 is enacted, would not even come close to reaching the 18,384 number suggested by the CCCCO, and again, the CCCCO knows this.

Third, many part-time faculty even, when offered coverage by their respective districts, choose not to take it because they 1) are covered by another employer or through their spouses, 2) are retirees who receive coverage through Medicare, 3) seek coverage through Covered California because even when they qualify for benefits, they find Covered California a cheaper option to cover their dependents. Former CCC Chancellor, Eloy Oakley, who was in fact the Chancellor of the Long Beach City College System, certainly was aware of this, and it stands to reason that the present interim Chancellor, Daisy Gonzalez, is as well.

Fourth, passage of AB1856 would not guarantee any part-time faculty member in any district the right to teach an 85%, unless it were locally negotiated.  Some districts may in fact choose to forgo raising the cap. This is directly in the bill language.

Fifth, the notion that it would create any added negotiation costs is also false in that districts, with but rare exception by way of a mutual agreement by faculty and admin, already annually negotiate on health and welfare.  These districts are already engaged in bargaining–where’s the added cost?

Sixth, and most significantly, AB 1856 purposefully refers to an 80-85% FTE per district teaching cap in order to fall below the 86% FTE teaching threshold which would trigger the ACA regulations requiring the districts to provide insurance benefits.

Beyond this, it is also worth mentioning, as the CA Senate Appropriations Committee itself noted, the CA budget is calling for 200 million dollars in ongoing funding for PT healthcare, which would approximately match the cost of 18,384 new adjuncts suddenly being covered to the tune of $11,000/part-time faculty member. Ironically, in hearings on the PT healthcare proposal, the CA legislative budget office questioned whether this much money was in fact needed to cover PT faculty health benefits.

The disingenuous arguments made by the CCCCO regarding AB 1856’s impact on the leads one to wonder if the larger agenda of the CCCCO is simply to keep part time faculty working under precarious conditions because it makes it harder for them to negotiate for better pay and working conditions, which quite frankly, is a slap in the face to the notion of equity the CCCCO purports to promote.

It’s not simply that many of these faculty struggle with basic equity issues themselves due to the low pay and poor working conditions, but their children are also California Community College students. Are they not deserving of equity too?

Thanks to all those who have contributed to the development of this resolution submitted to the AFT National Convention. It represents a significant moment in the fight to end adjunctification. Spread the word.

National Resolution Calling for DOE Study of Adjunct/Contingent Pay and Benefit Inequity

Submitted by CFT Part-Time Faculty Committee

Whereas, adjunct/contingent faculty comprise 73% of all higher education (ed) faculty (AAUP), which is the majority of US Higher Education (Ed) faculty, and a critical and essential force for learning; and,

Whereas, adjunct/contingent faculty possess the same teaching credentials and teach alongside tenure-track faculty without the benefits tenure-track faculty are given, including: job security, paid livable wages, access to employer healthcare, and a robust retirement plan; and,

Whereas, 41% of adjunct/contingent faculty reported they struggle with job security (1), not knowing whether they have a teaching position only days before the start of a new given term; and,

Whereas, 25% of these faculty rely on some form of public assistance and 40% struggle to meet monthly household needs (2) and,

Whereas, over two-thirds of adjunct/contingent faculty make less than $50,000 per year, and one-third making less than $25,000 per year, which is below the poverty level for a family of four; and,

Whereas, less than one-half of adjunct/contingent faculty have access to employer provided healthcare during a time of a global-nationwide pandemic; and,

Whereas, most adjunct/contingent faculty are over the age of 50 and 37% do not know how they will manage during retirement (3); and, 

Whereas, such widespread academic inequity must be called out; and measures taken to address it, and finally,

Whereas, once called out, the appropriate measures to address this inequity, to the true fullest extent possible must be engaged,

Be it resolved that CFT forward this resolution calling on AFT to directly request of the US Department of Education to fully investigate, by use of a national study, the plight of adjunct/contingent faculty and the severe inequities of pay and overall benefits they endure as the majority workforce as US Higher Ed faculty and publish the results of said study.

(1) 2019 AFT report “An Army of Temps”

(2) Ibid

(3) Ibid

Good Adjuncts,

This is Geoff Johnson, AFT-ACC President, Adjunct Rep for AFT 1931 (San Diego-Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District), and SCEA (Southwestern College Education Association), encouraging you to check out the HELU Winter Summit, from Feb 23rd-27th.

HELU is a cross union cross labor sector coalition of Higher Ed faculty, including adjunct/contingent faculty, classified staff and paraprofessionals, and graduate student workers fighting to reclaim Higher Ed from disinvestment, and adjunct/contingent, staff, and graduate student worker exploitation.

AFT-ACC and AFT 1931 is are official endorsees of HELU’s Vision Platform

The goal of the HELU Summit, in a bit of a follow up to its Summer 2021 Summit, is to bring greater awareness of HELU, and of the issues and goals around its efforts, and to begin making plans towards the realization of the goals listed in the vision platform.

HELU Winter Summit Agenda

The summit will also feature a slate of noted progressive and labor activists such as Noami Klein and Jane McAlevey.

Winter Summit Featured Speakers

It would be great to see as many Adjunct/Contingent folks at the summit as possible in that this is a great opportunity for adjunct/contingent activists to become connected to a larger national Higher Ed labor scene and build greater solidarity.

I know right now that a lot of us are busy, but registration is free, and you don’t have to hit all the sessions, though HELU will accept donations

Here’s a registration link:

HELU Winter Summit Registration

See you there.

In solidarity,

Geoff Johnson

AFT-ACC President