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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Mark Bauerlein

Extreme Work-Study 2

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

This is a continuation of Extreme Work-Study 1. 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.

The UPS partnership appears to have increased rather than decreased the economic distress of participants. According to the company’s own fact sheet, student workers giving up five nights’ sleep will typically be paid for just fifteen to twenty hours a week. Since the wage ranges from just $8.50 to $9.50, this can mean net pay below $100 a week, and averaging a little over $120. The rate of pay bears emphasizing: because the students must report five nights a week and are commonly let go after just three hours, their take-home pay for sleep deprivation and physically hazardous toil will generally be less than $25 per shift. In fact, most UPS part-timers earn little more than $6,000 in a year, and most have at least one other job.

UPS presents a triple threat to students’ prospects for academic persistence: sleep deprivation and family-unfriendly scheduling, low compensation resulting in secondary and tertiary part-time employment, and a high injury rate. UPS refuses to provide meaningful persistence figures for the more than fifty thousand students it has “aided” over the past decade. But of the ten thousand at the Louisville hub, it could account for little more than three hundred bachelor’s or associate’s degrees earned. The most generous interpretation of the few statistics made available suggests persistence to degree of about 12 percent.

According to one analyst, in 1964, all of the expenses associated with a public university education, including food, clothing and housing could be had by working a minimum wage job an average of 22 hours a week throughout the year. (This might mean working 15 hours a week while studying and 40 hours a week summers.) Today, the same expenses in a low wage job require 55 hours a week 52 weeks a year.

At a private university, those figures in 1964 were 36 minimum wage hours/week, relatively manageable for a married couple or a family of modest means, and still quite manageable for a single person working the lowest possible wage 20 hours a week during the school year and some overtime on the vacations. Today, it would cost 136 hours per week 52 weeks a year to “work your way through” a private university.

Now each year of private education amounts to the annual after-tax earnings of nearly four lowest-wage workers working overtime.

Employing misleading accounting that separates budgets for building, fixed capital expenses, sports programs and the like from “instructional unit” budgets, higher education administration often suggests that faculty wages are the cause of rising tuition, rather than irresponsible investment in technology, failed commercial ventures, lavish new buildings, corporate welfare, and so on. The plain fact is that many college administrations are on fixed-capital spending sprees with dollars squeezed from cheap faculty and student labor: over the past thirty years, the price of student and faculty labor has been driven downward massively at exactly the same time costs have soared.

For the eighty percent of students trying to work their way through, higher education and its promise of a future is increasingly a form of indenture, involving some combination of debt, overwork, and underinsurance. It means the pervasive shortchanging of health, family obligations, and ironically, the curtailment even of learning and self-culture. More and more students are reaching the limits of endurance with the work that they do while enrolled. One major consequence of this shift of the costs of education away from society to students, including especially the costs of education as direct training for the workforce, is a regime of indebtedness, producing what Randy Martin describes as docile financialized subjectivities by way of what Jeff Williams has dubbed “the pedagogy of debt.” The horizon of the work regime fully contains the possibilities of student ambition and activity, including the conception of the future.

Posted at 02:19:17 PM on June 4, 2008 | All postings by Marc Bousquet

Comments

  1. Marc,
    I think your analysis of the rising cost of higher education and the declining wages paid to manual labor workers has merit. But I don’t know why you choose to single out UPS or the Teamsters as the villains. The Teamsters, SEIU and other unions around the country are about the only entities trying to stop this trend, through tough negotiating for their own members and their efforts to stop the corporate investment protection deals that come through Washington at freight-train speed under the guise of free trade. Did you know that farmers in Mexico are far worse off since NAFTA than they were before? And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that American farmers are worse off, along with anyone in search of healthy, natural food. Did you know that Mexican truckers don’t want to be used in the US, but their bosses want the ability to force them to drive further from home to save money for corporations who don’t want to pay living wages and benefits to US workers. Research the NAFTA highway or the death rate of union workers in Columbia (the current “trade partner” we’re hoping to invite into the country). The picture is far broader than your assessment suggests. Were we not shipping our jobs overseas to enrich the financial classes on Wall Street, UPS would in fact be paying the wages you’d prefer.

    The fact is, UPS is head and shoulders above their competitors. Compare the situation at UPS to Fed-Ex. Fed-Ex has virtually no part-timers. They simply call most of their workers “contractors.” As someone familiar with higher ed, I’m sure you understand what that means. If a teacher is needed to teach a class, they are rehired at bargain basement rates with no benefits, protections or job security. Piss off the boss or simply have a new dept chair come in who wants “new blood,” and you’re out on the street. Same with Fed Ex. Sorry, no packages today, No work. No money. And, of course, no benefits, unemployment, etc. They’ve successfully carved out a shelter from efforts to organize their workforce by bribing congress. So you have no need to criticize them because they do nothing for part-timers (either students or otherwise).

    As you probably guessed, I worked at UPS through the holidays to pay for school (though in Massachusetts not Louisville). The shifts were everything you describe. In the dead of winter we would strip off our shirts because of the incredible flow of packages. We had the worst wages and worst shifts. Though it was never dangerous, we were sweating for the entire shift. Would I have liked better conditions or pay? Sure, but the bottom line was they offered the best paying job for someone who had to work their butt off to get an education. I suspect they still are. I also would have preferred to have spent vacations in Florida, Mexico or Switzerland with the many privileged colleagues I attended school with. But that wasn’t in the cards, either.

    UPS, like every other employer, is simply a product of the marketplace. If we as a country don’t decide to improve the market for laborers, UPS will never be able to pay higher wages. The Teamsters would be glad to see higher wages for part-timers, because it would mean their own members’ wages would be on the increase, too. I would suggest your beef, as you rightly point out, is with universities that make poor spending decisions and our government leaders (of both parties) who see no merit to the work done by laborers. We talk a good line in this country about honoring working class men and women, but when policy is made the leaders of both parties only seem to be able to hear Wall Street. Our financial classes live like kings, while the working man and woman are subjected to ever-greater insecurity. When it comes to fighting that, your only allies are the unions.

    Do you recall, as I do, the congressman who several years ago proposed limiting a college’s eligibility for federally-guaranteed student aid to those schools who kept tuition increases to the inflation rate? I can assure you that the ploy raised millions of dollars in campaign donations for anyone and everyone who could help to kill it. And that was a bill that was nothing more than a scare tactic. The system you’re trying to change is as corrupt as they come. In this situation, the Teamsters are the choirboys.

    — Martin · Jun 4, 04:58 PM · #

  2. While Martin’s response was thoughtful and well articulated, I just wanted to add mine.

    I am a 27 year old graduate student trying to survive in Hawaii’s economy. Reading this article really got me thinking. I realized my entire college career was spent taking student loan after student loan after student loan ON TOP OF the jobs I had. While obtaining my BA, I worked an on-campus job until midnight a couple of nights a week, and sometimes as late as 2:30am. Then I would have to come back at 9:00am. I am glad I had the energy to do that on top of my studies and (as Mr. Bousquet calls it) embarking on “self culture”.

    Anyways, I am glad to have seen this article today and I will definately pass it on to my younger family members before they embark on their studies in college. It really gives some food for thought…

    — Autumn · Jun 4, 05:43 PM · #

  3. Hi, Martin. If you look at the book, subtitled “Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation,” you’ll see that the case study of UPS and, yes, the Teamsters is embedded in exactly the thoroughgoing systematic analysis you describe.

    That said, you should be pretty proud of yourself for getting a degree in that program—‘cause it looks like the majority don’t come close. (And if they had persistence rates to brag about, they sure would.)

    The numbers they do share suggest persistence rates of 12%—about 120 degrees/year with an average of 1,000 students entering/year.

    When I talked to the them, they could only account for 300 degrees out of 10,000 students they bragged about “aiding.” By now they might have 500 degrees, out of 12,000 “aid recipients.”

    Another stat, re the “choirboy” Teamsters (!?!) and the part-time wage: in 1982, part-timers earned 8.50 Reagan dollars, or about 17 current Bush dollars an hour. At that rate, with longer shifts and less speed-up, part-timers were paying their way through college. (As some of the veterans of that era testified.)

    Today, 25 freaking years later, the choirboys have bargained plenty of increases for drivers—but the wage for part-timers (now mostly student aid recipients) is the same 8.50.

    For folks who don’t get why most students don’t last a year at this “financial aid opportunity,” you can read the MANY stories in the free downloadable chapter.

    Or you can try this experiment, for a week. At 11 pm, drive to the airport, park, take a shuttle bus, and go through security. At midnight, clock in for hard manual labor. (You might dig in your garden or sweep the sidewalk around your block.) Do that with a buddy shouting at you when you make an error for 3 hours.

    Pay yourself $25, go to sleep, get up at 8 for classes, then go to a second job.

    Repeat, five times in a row. Work a third part-time job on the weekend.

    Then tell me this is a great deal. (If you can handle this for a month, then give yourself a work-related injury and go to work on “light duty” anyway.)

    UPS didn’t invent the exploitation of student labor, and the Teamsters didn’t invent bargaining for a first tier of full-timers at the expense of part-timers. But they both have showed a talent for it.

    — Marc Bousquet · Jun 4, 09:09 PM · #

  4. I was a student at U of L when the UPS partnership began, and I remember vividly fellow students who would fall asleep in the middle of class after working all night at UPS, then drop out midway through the semester. One woman was in several of my honors class. Right after high school, she had given up a merit scholarship to UofL because of an unplanned pregnancy. As a single mother with a 5-year-old son, she re-entered college, and worked nights at UPS to make ends meet. She was extremely intelligent (an honors student), but repeatedly fell asleep in class and received very poor grades. Now that I’m a parent myself, I can’t even imagine what her home life with her son was like with so little sleep.

    During my senior year, I took a gen-ed night class with several students who came to UofL specifically for the UPS deal. They were underprepared to begin with, and fell further behind as the year went on. I don’t know the motives of UPS or UofL, but it was marketed to students as an incredible benefit to them, without any discussion at all of the sacrifices they would have to make.

    I was uncomfortable then, and am still uncomfortable, with a university using its resources to recruit low-wage workers for a Fortune 500 company under the pretense of education.

    — Mike · Jun 5, 06:59 AM · #

  5. What gets me about all this is that UPS probably entered into this faustian bargain with good intentions. And we know what road is paved with good intentions.

    One of the really striking phenomena of the late twentieth century, say from 1980 on, with the election of Ronald Reagan, is the “discovery” by the powers that be of amazing innovative ways to increase efficiency, etc. These seem invariably to turn out to be nothing new, once the window dressing is set aside, but rather a return to pre-labor movement conditions. In this specific case, I find it hard to believe that the person who had the bright idea in the first place ever imagined such a dickensian outcome.

    The geniuses who are (still) advocating outsourcing and all that nineties nonsense may eventually wake up to the reality that no one can afford the goods and services their companies produce, because their own policies have deprived them of the wherewithal to purchase. Management that views labor as a problem is as insane as labor that views management as a problem.

    — Dan · Jun 6, 10:57 AM · #

  6. The moral of this story is not just “oh, woe is the student” but “oh, woe is the UPS worker”. So much of what happens in the work world is grueling, back-breaking labor for low wages and lower health benefits – followed by an often-forced retirement into illness and poverty.

    It would not be a bad thing for collegians to have the opportunity to work to afford their education, but it would be best if the work could be of more than simple asymmetrical monetary benefit to the employer and the student. Where, oh where, are the faculty in all of these “deals”?

    A valuablel “work-study” arrangement with corporations could be an opportunity to enrich and educate both the employer and the student, but instead it is simply a harsh introduction to the realities of so much of the American workplace: raw exploitation.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jun 6, 02:25 PM · #

  7. Thanks for all the effort that makes transparent the continued relevance of worker exploitation. The rather obvious fact, again, is that there are those who continue to profit from others’ “sacrifice,” not only the corporations like UPS, but the financial institutions that relish the debt load of the young. This is a deeply political question and one wonders if it could ever become a campaign issue.

    Some years ago I read a piece by Professor Engell, a comp lit professor, ‘The Eroding Conditions of Literary Study.” It described how students’ lives have become so hurried and hectic in ways Thoreau would have found horrific, that they do not have the time to devote to the demands of the kind of reading typical in the humanities. He noted that perhaps other disciplines could accommodate this McLearning style, but that the humanities are distinguished by the demands of time required for reading, reflection, and non-Oprahfied conversations.. And in his piece Professor Engell was talking about Harvard Students. Though I doubt many were heading off in their spare time to UPS, the point still remains: too many of our young people are being denied opportunities for a truly liberal and liberating education. Someone needs to write another piece on the eroding conditions of higher education, generally. It grieves me that the young are having their youth stolen, and that we live in a world where leisure time is at a premium for people in general. Again, as always, we need to ask who benefits from all this.

    — George K · Jun 6, 04:03 PM · #

  8. One might also add that the invention by American higher education of the “full 3-credits in just 3-weeks” summer course of instruction is an amazingly clever way to increase student debt while decreasing student learning, as well.

    The fact that any institution of higher education in America would argue that such courses are in any way whatsoever “equivalent” to the standard semester of paced learning is testimony to the self-serving greed of administrations.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jun 6, 04:26 PM · #

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