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[mignon]

Is anyone even working on this?  God knows it's needed, at our school and elsewhere.

[larryc]

They suffer from false consciousness.

[kedves]

I would guess "too busy" and "fear of retaliation" before "false consciousness."  It would be interesting to know what distinguishes places with unions from those without.  I don't even know how many faculty of any status are unionized nationally.

At my place, the most recent push for unionization is from the TT and tenured people who are mostly concerned about administration's antipathy toward shared governance.   They debated should the non-TT people be allowed in the union and decided yes.  The problem is that within the entire group, most of the TT/T people are not interested in the union.  It's going nowhere.  If they said we couldn't join the club, we might have more chance to make it happen at the non-TT level.  On the other hand, I have attended meetings and probably wouldn't have done that if it were a non-TT-only organizing effort.  I would be more concerned that it looked like complaining or trouble-making.

[neutralname]

Of course they have unionized at some places, with good results.  One of our local community colleges is unionized, and I get the impression that some FT faculty resent that they gave up some benefits to the adjuncts. 

Our adjuncts unionized, but it hasn't really changed their situation much.  They have more ability to grieve cases where procedure was not followed, but they didn't change their situation much.  They don't seem to have enough organizational power: really it's just a few people with the energy, and most others don't do anything.  If they ever tried to strike, it is unlikely they would get much conformity among their own ranks.  And they would run the risk of being penalized after the strike -- maybe illegal, but hard to prove.  So many would be quite reluctant to take that risk.

[categorical]

They suffer from false consciousness.

How is that?

[charlesr]

Whya haven't full time faculty unionized?  Once you're tenured the threat of retaliation loses many teeth.

[rndmgrad]

There are adjunct unions at several schools.  I am aware of recognized unions at NYU, the New School, and George Washington, and very likely there are others. 

I'm working on a campaign to unionize graduate students.  Grad students and adjuncts face many of the same obstacles to unionization.  The seriousness of these difficulties vary from place to place, of course:

1.  A weak bargaining position.  There is a very large pool of qualified or semi-qualified replacements for adjuncts who make trouble.  When the supply of academic labor outstrips demand, workers face an uphill battle.
2.  A well-justified fear of retaliation.  Like other employers, universities are often willing to get rid of agitators.
3.  A very tenuous financial situation.  It takes a lot of money to win a unionization campaign, and lots of organizations can't muster the necessary financial resources.  Moreover, many adjuncts are poor and in debt, and they cannot afford to lose pay during a strike, to say nothing of losing their jobs.
4.  High turnover in the labor force.  Adjuncts move from school to school or place to place, or give up on academic work, or land a full-time job on or off the tenure track, or just aren't rehired.  It's very difficult to organize a workforce when the faces change every semester.
5.  Lack of solidarity.  Full-time faculty and staff at universities are not always sympathetic to adjuncts' efforts to improve their situation.
6.  Legal barriers.   
7.  Lack of a strong commitment to the work role.  In organizing a labor union, it helps if workers have a strong individual and group identity.  While professors take pride in teaching, my guess is that most adjuncts would prefer more secure work, and don't feel strongly committed to the idea of being an adjunct. 
8.  "False consciousness"/sympathy with the employer is probably more of a factor with graduate students, since many graduate students think of themselves as apprentices, or believe that they have to take their lumps, or that there is a big payoff coming for them at the end of the Ph.D., which may be true in many cases.  I would guess that adjuncts are less likely to see matters this way, but doubtless some do.

[seniorscholar]

Another reason: unionization depends on state labor law (for public schools) or on national labor law (for non-public). The steps involved, under the labor board in my state (where full time faculty -- whether tenured, TT, or non-tenured -- have been unionized for 35 years) require (first) that the board determine what members of the faculty (or other organization) have a "community of interest" by whatever standards the people on the board are at that moment decide upon. For reasons unknown to me, adjuncts at my public university are excluded by the labor board, though adjuncts at the CC less than a mile away are in the same union as full-time faculty. Second, signed cards asking to have an election to unionize or not must be obtained from more than 50% of the people eligible for membership. These cards must be certified by the labor board, which then supervises the election.

Most crucial problem, then, for adjuncts here (who have tried to unionize, with the help of the faculty and the AFT organizer, several times over the years) is that (1) discovering the names of all the eligible people -- adjuncts employed at the time and then (2) collecting cards and then (3) certifying the names to see if they are more than 50% of the eligible people can (because of the labor board's schedule) NEVER be accomplished within a single semester. Thus because the names of people working as adjuncts undergo significant change every semester, the necessary pool of eligible voters has never been certified.

Understand that organizing an effective union is not a "lets get together and give a musical" situation. Our TAs managed to form a union and negotiate a contract, but it took nearly a decade, and the principal organizers, meanwhile, had exhausted their TA funding without finishing their degrees (though at least two of them now work for the AFT).

[educator1]

While professors take pride in teaching, my guess is that most adjuncts would prefer more secure work, and don't feel strongly committed to the idea of being an adjunct. 

I hate to think that this is the case, but hanging around these fora for a good while has taught me that you are probably correct in many places. FWIW, this is certainly not the case in my school. The adjunct group is stable and committed to teaching.

[neutralname]

I don't see much difference in teaching commitment between FT and adjunct faculty at my school.  It varies.  However, adjuncts mostly don't teach the same course several years running, and so they don't get to develop and perfect the courses in the way that FT faculty can.  Mostly they don't have offices so they can't do office hours except in the dining hall or the library.  And when students need letters of recommendation 3 years after taking a course with them, they can't be found because they have moved on.  So there can be differences in educational success even if the commitment is the same. 

[kedves]

While professors take pride in teaching, my guess is that most adjuncts would prefer more secure work, and don't feel strongly committed to the idea of being an adjunct.  

This sentence makes no sense.  While most professors take pride in teaching, most adjuncts would prefer more secure work?  How are those two things, pride in teaching and the wish for secure work, in opposition to each other?  Wouldn't having the latter, in fact, tend to encourage the former?  

If you intend to imply that most professors take pride in teaching but most adjuncts do not, then the equally logical implication of the sentence is that while most adjuncts would prefer more secure work, most professors would prefer less secure work.  

Why in the world would anyone be strongly committed to the idea of being an adjunct?   The commitment of most adjuncts is to the craft, not the institution--or to the underpaid and under-respected status of the job.  That doesn't make it a lesser commitment.  It's a relationship that is financially unsustainable for adjuncts and creates problems for universities and colleges who prefer to spend on technology, sports, and residence halls rather than on faculty salaries, but those are different issues.

It's interesting but hardly surprising that a question about contingent faculty and unionization has turned to a discussion about problems with adjuncts.  Contingent and adjunct are not interchangeable terms.  It's easier to understand why adjuncts haven't unionized than why other contingent faculty haven't.

[larryc]

They suffer from false consciousness.

How is that?

Many contingent faculty identify more with the TT professor they hope to be than with the exploited skilled laborer that they actually are. It is like poor people who oppose progressive taxation because they expect to be rich one day soon.

[midwestgrad]

They suffer from false consciousness.

How is that?

Many contingent faculty identify more with the TT professor they hope to be than with the exploited skilled laborer that they actually are. It is like poor people who oppose progressive taxation because they expect to be rich one day soon.

This reminds me of data I once read showing that Americans opposed John Kerry's proposal for a new tax on the top 1% of income earners because 40% of Americans believed they either already were or would be in the top 1%.

[king_ghidorah]

At my uni there has been a good deal of grumbling about unionization (and it would probably be the best thing for everyone in the whole inhumane system, TT profs [who are well below the national average in pay and perks] included). 

But we would be a study in why this doesn't happen: the adjuncts with or nearing terminal degrees are hoping to use their adjuncthood as a stepping stone to somewhere else, so are only tangentially involved in the politics of the institution; most of the others are either part-timers with masters who are raising families, retirees working on a small second income, or marginally qualified people who work elsewhere at the same time; and there is a small contingent of PhDs who either lost motivation after completing their terminal degrees or displayed a deplorable excess of personality on the job search and ended up here, in the middle of rural nowhere teaching 4 and 5 classes of introduction to whatever ever semester. 

[polly_mer]

Unions rely on continuous members who have mostly the same demands, the time and energy to devote to union activities, and view the benefit of collective bargaining as greater than the risk of making waves.  In addition, unions work best if they can plausibly speak for all the people who have a tiny, hard-to-obtain skill set in an area, both in terms of knowledge and geography.

None of those categories apply to contingent faculty in many places.  People have a variety of reasons for being contingent so the demands vary and the people who could benefit the most often lack the necessary time and energy to get a union in place.  In addition, the big kicker is that the union is unlikely to plausibly speak for large numbers of contingent faculty in some places. 

For example, in the right to work state that I just left, the contingent faculty for science and engineering were usually gainfully employed elsewhere with some of the best benefits in terms of health insurance and pension in the state.  Many of the humanities contingent faculty were married to these people.  Consequently, a large fraction of the people who would be needed to form a union had little motivation to do so.  Indeed, they often were anti-union because the union would likely impose limitations on working conditions that made the part-time, on-the-side adjunct positions less appealing.