cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

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%.

I’ve split the brief abstract of the chapter into two parts that you can read below and in a companion post. NYU has made a pdf of the entire chapter available for free download: it’s written for general readership and is suitable for undergraduate reading. Ask your students about their working lives — you’ll be shocked at what they endure.

….. 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.

Read part 2