Having just spent several weeks in an emerging country working with people living in generations of almost unimaginable poverty (on my own dime, using my vacation time) I have little sympathy for multi-degreed people whining about exploitation within the academy. Get a grip people - there are really important issues in the world and the fact that you think job ads in academia are ridiculous is NOT one of them.
Shoefiend, you're comparing two different societies, and saying that the problems in one don't need to be rectified because the problems in the other outweigh them in some poverty scale you have created. But you're using a really narrow understanding of how poverty is lived.
Do we have unimaginable levels of wealth in our part of the world? No question, yes. Just the other day, I was reading something about how X amount of people in my province live below the poverty line, which was set, if I remember correctly, somewhere around 20K/year.
Twenty thousand dollars a year! I haven't lived on that much in over a decade! And yet, I don't feel poor. Of course, I'm a single person with no dependents. And I know that this is a temporary situation while I'm a student. I know that once I get a full-time job, my income will be two or three times that amount, and that my future income will allow me to build a retirement fund, and hopefully buy a house.
Because, see, our social institutions and cultural norms fit into a scenario where anything below 20K is poverty. It's not just about having the cash on hand to survive the day to day. Living in a society with such a high level of wealth means that families don't support their unmarried daughters indefinitely. It means that retirement is mandatory after a certain age (while, because of our tremendous wealth, our life expectancies continue to rise, giving rise to the need to save money to survive those ten, fifteen, twenty years without an income). It means that kids aren't expected to take on the entire financial burden for their retired parents, and don't plan for it in their own working budgets. It means that underage children cannot be asked to contribute to the household income. It means that rent in my city, for a crappy one bedroom apartment, runs anywhere from $700-$1000. It means that in order to have work, an applicant needs a telephone (and if you're applying for academic work, access to the internet). It means that in order to get welfare, you need an address (at $700/month?!) Because our standards of wealth are so high, these things aren't considered luxuries. A retirement plan is not a luxury. A $700/month address is not a luxury. Given the way our social institutions are based on this insanely high level of wealth, these are necessities.
In places where poverty is defined much differently, different social structures exist to attend (to some degree) to these kinds of needs. Of course, not knowing which society you're referring to, I can only make generalizations. But generally speaking, societies with lower standards of wealth and poverty tend not to individualize financial responsibility the same way we do.
You're right: the standard of living is comparatively much, much lower in most countries. And like you, I'm sickened by the thought of how much we have compared to the majority of the rest of the world. Our levels of consumption are outrageous. But that doesn't necessarily mean that there is no problem with poverty in western societies.
I'm glad that you pay your adjuncts $45/hour. Is that a living wage? I don't know. Depends, I suppose, on how many hours they are able to work. It sounds liveable to me, if we assume that the professor is only working those three contact hours a week, and can reasonably devote another 40 hours or so to another job. But most adjuncts are holding two, three, four courses - at $2000 a pop, they're still below the poverty line, but it's a liveable day to day wage for a single person, right? And they can always take another part time job to supplement, right? After all, four courses is only 12 contact hours a week. Still plenty of time to take a part time job somewhere else. Except that those four courses all require prep time. And grading time. And office hours. None of these are calculated into your $45/hour wage, are they?
Let's assume that each of those courses requires, say, eight hours of prep at the outset to get the syllabus set, books ordered, rough sketch of lecture and exam schedule. You're an adjunct, so you're hopping around from course to course, taking whatever you can get. Let's say that all of these courses require full prep. That's an unpaid labour total of 32 hours.
And let's say that each course requires about an hour or so prep time for each class session, and that each course meets twice a week. That's 8 more hours of unpaid labour per week.
And let's say that each course has on average one small assignment every two weeks that needs to be graded, and that it takes, say, two hours to grade and record the assignments for each class. That's another 4 hours of unpaid labour per week.
And say that each course has two exams - a midterm and a final. Setting these exams takes you anywhere from an hour to three hours per course, so let's average that out to two hours per course, so that's another 16 hours of unpaid labour.
Of course, you have to mark those exams, and since you're an adjunct, you don't get a TA. You do, however, get the overflowing intro courses with really high enrollment. Say your courses cap at 60 students. You've got four courses, so a total of 240 students. A few drop (a few always do), so let's round that down to 200 students. Now say that you can speed through an exam in roughly 15 minutes, so anywhere from 50-60 hours marking midterms, and another 50-60 hours marking finals. That's another 100-120 hours of unpaid labour. Let's average that out to 110 hours.
You also have the students in those courses write term papers, because you're in the humanities or social sciences and it's necessary that they demonstrate the ability to do research, to think critically, to write a paper. Now say that two of the courses are first-year, so the paper's pretty short - say 7 pages. But of course, these are first year students, so they need some guidance. The prep and teaching and scaffolded assignments that accompany this term paper (not to mention the extra office hours for students who are freaking out) amount to say, 15 extra hours for each class).
The students in the other two classes need less hand holding, so that lessens the work load somewhat. But their papers are longer - say 12-15 pages.
Then you need to mark all those papers. That's another 120-140 hours of unpaid labour.
And of course, throughout the term, you are required to hold office hours: at least an hour per course is the university's rule. But the department is pretty slack about that, so you figure you can combine office hours, and only offer them twice a week. That's another 2 hours of unpaid labour per week. But hey, maybe you can do your lecture prep during those two office hours - just schedule them before your class. Except that you don't actually have an office. Your office is a shared room with all the other adjuncts on that floor - say there are twenty of them. And two computers. That only work half the time. Without internet access. And say that at any given moment, six of those other adjuncts are also meeting students, or holding a make up exam. There goes your prep time.
And speaking of computers, most non-academic jobs will supply the grunt workers with the materials needed to do the job. Those women carrying cement on their heads didn't supply their own cement did they? But adjunct faculty are expected to have their own computers and access to the internet. They also have restrictions on photocopying and use of other departmental resources necessary to teach according to the standards of the institution. If your 10 year old computer crashes or you use up your photocopying privileges by midterm, you're SOL. If you can't afford home internet, then you have to do all your Blackboard work (a standard at this university) in the student computer lab, which means more time at work, away from home. Let's hope you aren't paying for childcare! But these are unexpected expenses, so let's not count them in our grand total.
Now let's add that all up! Assuming that the semester is roughly 3 months long, that's a whopping 386 hours of unpaid labour per semester, or about 32 hours/week on top of the 12 contact hours for four courses. 44 hours of work per week, for four courses, at 2-3 K/course. That's 8-9 thousand dollars a semester. Before taxes.
You might say that these people are choosing to put this much time into their courses. It's not like they absolutely have to have assignments every couple of weeks, or assign a term paper. They're choosing to overwork themselves. But these people know that if they're ever going to get out of the adjunct ghetto, they've got to have good teaching evaluations and letters of recommendation from their current employers. They can't afford to slack off, or they'll be stuck adjuncting forever.
And let's not forget the need to continue doing research if they're going to stay competitive. Being adjuncts, this isn't part of their job description. But it's necessary nevertheless.
Now, where are people supposed to find the time to take on a second part time job, working 44 hours a week? I bet those construction workers you saw worked more than 44 hours a week, though. Maybe we're just being precious. After all, leisure time is a privilege, right? Well, consider that not all of those courses are scheduled one after the other. They're spread out all over the map. You've got maybe two or three hours between courses on Tuesday and Thursday. And your MWF course (including office hours) has you on campus from 12-2PM. If you're lucky, all four of your courses are on the same campus, but let's not forget that a lot of adjuncts cobble together courses at different institutions, so travel time has to be taken into account here, too.
Still, you might be able to supplement your income with another part time job. A lot of places hire people in the evenings. But what if you've got kids? Who's looking after them? They're back from school at 3PM, but you're rushing from your last class of the day to wait tables during the dinner rush until 8PM. Child care is really expensive. And unlike in that unnamed country where Mom and Dad work 60 hour weeks carting cement around on their heads, and people don't move far away from family, you've only been able to pick up courses in the city where you did your own graduate studies - 1500 miles from home. The grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins aren't around to watch the little tykes in the evenings. And since we live in such a wealthy country, and child labour is so stringently enforced, you can't have your eldest child take care of the toddler for a few hours without Child Protection Services taking your kids away. So childcare it is.
But as someone who has worked 19 years as an adjunct, sometimes holding down as many as three other part time jobs, this is old news to you, right?
What I'm getting at is that it's a whole other world, Shoefiend. I get it: you were appalled at the level of poverty in this other country. Yes, it's horrible. But that doesn't make our own problems with poverty magically disappear.
But we weren't talking about exploitative adjunct labour. You brought that up to justify your pissy attitude toward people who, according to you, have no right to complain about anything when we live in a world with Starbucks and Walmart and immeasurable choice. (Incidentally, for someone so finely attuned to the horrors of poverty in the Third World, you don't seem to have a very good understanding of how these kinds of things contribute to unequal global distributions of wealth).
We were talking about crazy job ads that want the world, when you jumped in with your sanctimonious rantings about whiners and moaners who refuse to carry cement on their heads.
