Nov 07 2015

The Cost of Casualized Labour

Category: Academic Freedom,Contract Faculty,News — Bob Hanke @ 11:39 pm

Casualization of Academic Labour has its Costs

(excerpted from the CAUT Bulletin, October 2015)

In the ongoing massification of post-secondary education, university and college administrators are increasingly turning to temporary or contract academic staff to teach and work in their institutions’ lecture halls, labs and libraries.

“More than 30 per cent of academic staff in Canadian post-secondary institutions are faced with short-term, insecure employment and struggle to find decent work,” notes Sylvain Schetagne, CAUT’s director of research and political action.

Living with uncertainty about when and what you might teach next creates financial, intellectual and emotional strain. Most contract academic staff live on four-month contracts and worry about finding a job for the next semester.

“The inability to plan is a major issue and a great cause of stress in the lives of contract academics,” said James Gerlach, who has taught on contract at Wilfrid Laurier University since 2006 and also serves as chair of CAUT’s contract academic staff committee. “You can teach six courses one year and two courses the next year. You can live on six courses, but not two.”

According to a 2015 United Way report, precarious workers face significant barriers to building stable and secure lives. Precarious workers face greater challenges finding childcare and addressing health and safety concerns in the workplace. They face more gender and racial discrimination and spend less time with their families and in their communities.

Unpaid work is also a widespread reality of the insecure academic job landscape. Office hours, advisement and recommendation letters, for example, are rarely spelled out in contracts, but these tasks can be part of job expectations, says Gerlach.

“Contract academic staff are paid for a fraction of the work they need to do,” he said.

To read the complete story, click here.

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Mar 30 2015

York U Strike in Context

Category: Contract Faculty,Discussion,Online Publication,Strike Discussion (2015) — Bob Hanke @ 11:48 pm

York strikers show the way — now let’s build a truly public university

Protracted labour dispute raises questions of post-secondary governance and funding

by Justin Podhur

(excerpted from Ricochet)

The strikes at York University, the University of Toronto, and elsewhere have opened a long overdue debate about student debt, precarious labour in the academy, rising tuition, and, to a lesser extent, university governance. The York University strike offers an opportunity to argue for the continuing relevance of universities as public institutions. The importance of the public in the public university is especially true for York, which, if it embraced its role as such, could tackle a new list of issues and lead the way for other educational institutions.

Precarity, debt, and defensive struggle

York’s contract faculty are the precarious academic labourers whose difficulties have been brought into some public light by the York strike and other labour actions in North America. The contract faculty settled earlier in March. The teaching assistants and graduate assistants had to battle on until the end of the month to win their objectives.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

 

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Feb 15 2015

This is Contract Faculty Time

Category: Academic Freedom,Contract Faculty — Bob Hanke @ 12:55 am

York Faculty in Support of Contract Faculty

Produced by videographer Alex Lisman, in conjunction with the CUPE 3903 communications committee, this new video features eight, tenured York University faculty members speaking about the obligation to engage the issue of contract faculty, the problem of precarious academic labour, the contribution that contract faculty make to teaching and research, and what the administration can do to exercise higher educational leadership and address this growing problem in the current round of collective bargaining.

To view this groundbreaking, revealing, educational video, click here.

Canadian higher education now faces an ominous situation. Increasingly, the university is being turned into a corporate business where education is viewed as a commodity. As a consequence, to quote John Ralston Saul, “democracy is weakening. Corporatism is strengthening. Certainly corporatism is creating a conformist society” (The Unconscious Civilization: 1995).

Corporate efficiency is the main force now driving York University where the administration holds all the power to implement policies with little regard to York’s avowed mission of academic pursuit, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge. York is chipping away at the collegial entity of the professoriate who endeavor to consciously shape the university in pursuit of its motto: Tentanda Via: the way must be tried.

One can easily see how York University’s commitment to its mission of  ‘social justice and collegial governance ‘ rings hollow, and the top-heavy administration is inclined to pursue short-sighted policies. An instance in point is its continual rejection of the contract faculty’s legitimate claims and insistent denial of their hopes of becoming full-time academics, despite their being fully qualified and fully utilized at a marginal cost. The contract faculty have been carrying nearly half of the total teaching load in the university, all for inequitable remuneration and inelegant terms of employment. It is obvious that the administration cannot hope to fill the classes offered in the university, unless it is prepared to water down the quality of teaching, or replace human creative minds with robotic computers, which will indeed ensure certainty of discipline and control.

The university pursuing the ‘Matthew Effect’ (Robert K. Merton:1968) seems to thrive on accumulating advantages from the contract faculty’s precarity! Is it not YorkU’s time to redress the inequities the contract faculty have bravely suffered so long, and is it not ethical to fairly integrate them into academe?

— Indhu Rajagopal, PhD
Professor, Department of Social Science, York University
Author of Hidden Academics: Contract Faculty in Canadian             Universities (University of Toronto Press, 2002)

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Jan 04 2015

The Workings of Precarity

Category: Contract Faculty — Bob Hanke @ 12:35 pm

Precarious employment is becoming a way of life & academia is no exception

Tenuous employment is now widespread, warns panel invited to attend council.

(excerpted from the CAUT Bulletin, December 2014)

Academic union leaders say the number of academic staff in contract or casual positions is on the rise, a common thread that ran throughout a panel discussion sponsored by CAUT during its council meeting last month.

The event featured Theresa Montaño, a professor at California State University, Northridge, and president of the National Education Association’s National Council for Higher Education; Jeannie Rea, president of the Australia-based National Tertiary Education Union; and Sylvain Marois, vice-president of the Fédération nationale des enseignantes et des enseignants du Québec.

Montaño warned that the role of faculty in the U.S. has changed dramatically as higher education is being transformed into a private right rather than a public good.

“The result has been an increasing reliance on online courses and contingent faculty,” she said.

“High levels of precarious work are undermining the academic profession in Australia,” agreed Rea. Since 2005, casual or fixed-term contracts account for three out of four positions filled at Australian universities.

Marois stressed the need to work in concert with other unions, students, civil society and organizations, to counter the ideologically-motivated attacks on the public sector. “It is important to target precarious work, but not precarious workers,” he said.

Rea said her union’s efforts have focused on mobilizing the membership to support campaigns against casualization and fixed-term contracts.

Recent successes have been realized in the form of limits on fixed-term contract categories, conversions to ‘ongoing’ positions, and creation of new early career teaching positions.

The NEA uses research, advo­cacy and organizing to further the interests of contingent faculty, such as its “Degrees Not Debt” campaign that seeks to extend student loan forgiveness programs to public sector workers, including contract faculty at universities and colleges.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

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Oct 23 2014

The Precarious Professoriate

Category: Books and Articles,Contract Faculty — Bob Hanke @ 11:42 am

Ivory Tower or Temp Agency?

By Herbert Pimlott

(excerpted from Academic Matters, October 20, 2014)

“I never thought teaching at a university would become a dead-end job.”

Jason Sager, an innovative professor whose courses are very popular with students, made this comment when he told me of his difficult decision to leave academia, after teaching for seven years at Wilfrid Laurier University (where he earned his PhD in 2007).

Dr. Sager, like thousands of highly educated—and experienced—faculty members, working at universities across the country, are learning that our profession is indeed becoming a dead-end job—an unfortunate new twist on the PhD’s description as a terminal degree.

The growing number of precarious academic workers teaching an ever-larger number of undergraduate students is a threat. It is a threat to our profession, with serious implications for our working conditions, our compensation, and the future of collegial governance. It is also a threat to the existence of higher education and the public university as we know it. Indeed, it is also part of the tale of Canada’s shrinking middle class.

A common adjective for contract faculty is part-time. At one time, such an adjective was accurate because universities employed part-time professors—or, instructors with other careers outside of the university—to share their real-world expertise with students. However, the long trajectory of public funding cuts and massive increases in student enrolment has meant a surge in part-time faculty positions, filled with academics who have no other source of income. These part-time jobs for full-time scholars are the increasingly likely future for many graduates of PhD programs.

Most people, including permanent professors, don’t realize that the number of full-time faculty hires have not kept pace with growing student enrolments. They also might not realize how the expectations for tenure-track jobs have changed, becoming more stringent in response to dwindling positions and an increasing number of young PhDs.

I want to address what the growth in contract faculty means for faculty associations in Ontario. To do so, it is necessary to sketch out the rise of precarious academic employment, and the consequences of the growing use of contract faculty for the public university. Then we can examine the implications of precarious academic work for higher education, the tenure-track professoriate, and faculty associations. This issue is not only about the livelihoods of our colleagues in contract positions, but also the future of the public university.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

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