From the issue dated February 21, 2003
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United We Stand?Part-time professors are forming unions, but many wonder if teaming up with full-timers would be betterBy SCOTT SMALLWOOD To the students, they're all just professors. The title -- adjunct, associate, assistant -- has little meaning when the professor is giving a test or grading a paper. But outside the classroom, there's a hierarchy cast in stone. Part-time and full-time faculty members live in separate worlds. They have different priorities and different dreams. In one corner are the part-time professors, who teach an ever-larger percentage of classes (more than half on some campuses). They're sure that the colleges are riding on the backs of their cheap labor. In the other corner are the full-timers, who believe that they remain the core of the faculty, whatever the percentages. They're the ones teaching the advanced courses, conducting the research, and participating in all those committees that keep colleges running. As part-timers flock to unions, these differences are rearing their heads within the labor movement. Part-timers are considering the best way to negotiate with their administrators. Should they join forces with the full-timers, gaining strength in numbers? Or should they strike out on their own, protecting a voice that might get drowned out in a larger union? The answer differs across the country. At Nassau Community College, on Long Island, N.Y., the two groups -- about 1,300 adjuncts and 500 full-time professors -- have had a sometimes acrimonious relationship. The annual salaries of full professors there average more than $84,000, according to data from the American Association of University Professors. Part-timers have different ranks, depending on their experience; instructors make about $2,700 per course, while part-time professors make $4,300 for a three-credit course. After being in the same union with full-timers in the 1970s, the adjuncts broke away nearly 20 years ago. Robert Gaudino, a part-time history professor at Nassau since 1965, remembers once asking a full-time colleague why the two camps always seemed to be at each other's throats. "He said, 'This is our college, not yours. You're like interlopers. You're the academic grape pickers,'" As a result, Mr. Gaudino is certain that part-timers are better off on their own. "Full-timers are not interested in the well-being of adjuncts," he says. "It's just not on their radar." Strength in Numbers Historically, adjuncts have been included in faculty unions at some public institutions. Adjuncts at a few private colleges, including Emerson College, in Boston, and New York University, have recently unionized -- a move that their full-time colleagues probably can't duplicate because of federal law. And organizing drives are under way in California, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, and Ohio. The part-timers have galvanized around the obvious issues: pay and benefits. More than 70 percent make less than $3,000 per course, according to a 1999 study by a coalition of academic associations. About two-thirds of the departments in the study offer adjuncts no benefits -- no health insurance, no retirement plan. Adjuncts are also pushing for more job security, some kind of hiring preference for experienced professors, and stronger grievance procedures. Many adjunct activists -- maybe just the more optimistic ones -- believe that professors should stick together, creating one faculty union. "Having everybody under one roof is just incredibly important to your bargaining power," says Tom Mooney, an organizer with the American Federation of Teachers in Ohio. "Otherwise, management can simply play you off one another." What's more, says Chris Storer, a part-time professor of philosophy at De Anza College, in Cupertino, Calif., being together at the bargaining table can unify faculty members against administrative efforts to alter the traditional role of professors. "The goal of the part-time faculty is to get rid of the two-tier system, to professionalize the use of all faculty," says Mr. Storer, who is a legislative analyst for the California Part-Time Faculty Association. Bargaining alongside full-timers generally gets better results for adjuncts, says Joe Berry, a part-time history professor at several Chicago institutions and chairman of the Chicago Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor. Many of what he sees as the best contracts for adjuncts -- deals that provide better pay and some measure of job security or seniority -- are the result of combined unions, he says, pointing to those at the California State University System and the City University of New York as examples. Even the optimists among adjuncts, however, acknowledge that togetherness isn't always the answer. "Where you have an isolated and aging full-time faculty that isn't aware of the issues and really misunderstands what's happening, then it becomes almost impossible to work with them," says Mr. Storer. "It's like a kind of blindness that could be compared to white racists in the South in the 1950s." Michael Ward, a part-time history professor at College of the Canyons, in Santa Clarita, Calif., believes that part-timers get little respect. "We generally get along," he says of the full- and part-time professors, "but there's an older core that thumb their noses at us." The dispute has become ugly. For Mr. Ward, it's especially galling because he spends half of his time 50 miles away, at another two-year institution -- Ventura College -- where the treatment of adjuncts is much better. At Ventura, he's rewarded for longevity and gets about $55 an hour -- compared with $43 at College of the Canyons. But the differences go beyond money. At Ventura, adjuncts can control their own courses, participate in curriculum revisions, and vote in departmental meetings. At College of the Canyons, many adjuncts can't choose their own books, and taking part in curriculum discussions is unheard of, he says. This elitism extends even to the petty, Mr. Ward says. At College of the Canyons, part-timers are given turquoise parking permits. Full-timers get light blue. More important, the unions, too, are very different. At Ventura, one union represents all faculty members -- a "wall-to-wall" unit, the union organizers call it -- and Mr. Ward, a part-timer, serves on the executive council. But at College of the Canyons, when adjuncts have asked if they could join the full-time union, they have been rebuffed. After Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat, provided new money to increase part-timers' pay in 2001, and the American Federation of Teachers began organizing part-timers on the campus, the full-timers' union, an affiliate of the National Education Association, got the administration to agree to change the definition of who its members were, essentially enlisting 380 part-timers into the union without their consent. The AFT fought that move, and in January the state's public-employee labor board ruled that the college should not have included the part-timers unilaterally. The adjuncts now are gathering support for their own union and hope to have an election soon. Mr. Ward says he'd sign on with the full-timers' union if it were really willing to have him, but at College of the Canyons, "we need our separate unit. They didn't represent us." A spokeswoman for the NEA says she doesn't know about the College of the Canyons case. Local representatives of the full-timers' union did not return telephone and e-mail messages. On some other campuses, part-timers haven't felt any animosity toward full-timers, but they've chosen to create a separate union anyway. Full-time professors at the University of Cincinnati are represented by the American Association of University Professors, but adjuncts there decided to organize a separate union, affiliated with the AFT. State law doesn't require the university to recognize the new adjunct union, which is still in its infancy. "Would it be great to be in one big union?" asks Howard Konicov, a part-time mathematics professor. "There are benefits to that, but I don't think it's a panacea. Each group has to have its separate identity." Working From Within A separate union isn't always the answer, even when adjuncts don't feel appreciated. A decade ago, the Professional Staff Congress represented both full- and part-timers at the City University of New York, but many of part-timers might not have known about it. "It wasn't working at all," says Marcia Newfield, who teaches English part-time at Manhattan Community College. "The union's effort was to make believe that we didn't exist. It was hard to get cards to even sign up if you were an adjunct." Back then, although the union officially represented the part-timers, only about 10 percent of the more than 7,000 adjuncts were union members. And although part-timers teach the majority of courses in the system, only one of them sat on the union's executive council. "For a long time, I wouldn't say it was a bad thing," says Eric Marshall, the union's former vice president for part-time personnel. "But it didn't do the adjuncts any great good." Through the 1990s, the adjuncts organized among themselves, creating CUNY Adjuncts Unite to lobby for more respect both inside and outside the union. At one point they even threatened to seek a vote decertifying the Professional Staff Congress. Instead, the adjunct group helped elect a new leadership in 2000 that has taken up the part-timers' cause more forcefully. And that paid off in the strongest-ever contract for part-timers at CUNY, says Mr. Marshall. Among other things, the new deal provides paid office hours for part-timers who teach at least six credit hours at one college; they get paid for a seventh hour. Initially, the administration wasn't open to the idea, Mr. Marshall says. But at the end of the negotiations, when all other matters had been resolved, he recalls, the union president said to the CUNY officials, "If you don't do this, we don't have a deal." Because everyone wanted a deal, the adjuncts got a little bit more. "It was because we were in a union with the full-timers," says Mr. Marshall. "It let us use that lever, and that wouldn't have happened if adjuncts bargained separately." Ultimately, union leaders argue, faculty members of every variety have to focus on the common interests that connect full- and part-timers. "The burgeoning part-time phenomenon is the core of the degradation of academic work," says Gary Zabel, who teaches philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and is a labor activist for part-time professors in the area. "It's meant a loss of power for tenured faculty whether they realize it or not. If the faculty as a whole is less powerful, then they are less powerful as well." But many of them don't see it that way. "Senior tenured faculty have an interest in maintaining the status difference," Mr. Zabel says. "Anything that brings part-timers forward in status is regarded as a threat to them." At CUNY, Mr. Marshall says, a sentiment endures among full-time faculty members that "there is a fixed sum of money available, and that anything they get comes out of my pocket." Both camps complain that they are the ones doing the most work, he says. Full-timers have also expressed concerns that negotiating for part-time faculty members, or getting other benefits for them, "will strengthen the legitimacy of a hiring trend they bitterly oppose," according to a 1998 report by the American Federation of Teachers. But the union argues that the growth in part-time faculty is based on the financial advantage to using them. Improving the pay and working conditions for adjuncts "may turn out to be the only way to cure the addiction of administrators to this form of cheap labor," the report said. Activists for the part-timers agree that whether they form their own union or are in wall-to-wall unions, they must have their own voice and lobby for their own issues. "Any group that has been historically omitted and is in a lesser economic or political position cannot depend on others to represent its interests fully, even others of the best will," says Mr. Berry, who teaches part-time at Roosevelt College and other Chicago-area institutions. "Even the best full-time, tenure-track faculty don't live the daily life of contingent faculty and can't properly represent them." At UMass-Boston, the part-timers had been represented since the early 1970s by the Faculty Staff Union, which included full-time faculty members as well. But until about six years ago, that representation was "perfunctory," says Mr. Zabel. Adjuncts there organized an independent caucus to push for health benefits. They won that fight, and now 5 of the union's 12 board members are part-timers. "It was an internal revolution that worked," Mr. Zabel says. "Adjuncts always have to act independently, whether it's in independent caucuses or independent unions." Maybe adjuncts struggling with a lack of respect and frustrated by the way they're treated can take solace in the situation at Nassau Community College. There, the cold war between the full-timers' and part-timers' unions has thawed some, in part because of new union leadership. "It's not that we're in bed with each other or skipping through the tulips, but we're not yelling at each other anymore," says Mr. Gaudino, vice president of the Adjunct Faculty Association. "Last Christmas, they sent us a card." http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 49, Issue 24, Page A10
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education