Last month I had the privilege of participating in the seventh Coalition of Contingent Academic Labour conference in Vancouver. Held every two years, it provides a rare tri-national forum to discuss issues of casualization and the challenges facing contract academic staff. The 200 delegates came from Canada, the United States and Mexico.
The bottom line emerging from discussions is that there are underlying similarities, although the specifics may vary from one country to the other. Our Mexican colleagues are more concerned with gaining a living wage in the context of globalization. In the U.S., entire regions are unorganized, and where contingent faculty are unionized, membership is split between the American Association of University Professors, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.
As Chicago organizer and adjunct Joe Berry said, “A national organizing strategy has not yet emerged in the U.S.” More than 500,000 contingent academics, he said, are still not represented. Hostile labour laws and court decisions in the U.S. present formidable challenges to organizing and collective bargaining. And tenured faculty are now only a minority among the faculty at American universities.
Of the three countries, Canada stands out as having the best situation as far as our contractual colleagues are concerned, although much still needs to be done. On the organizing front, CAUT hired an organizing officer in 2000 and a year later created a contract academic staff committee composed of contingent faculty from across Canada to advise CAUT’s executive on issues pertaining to casualization.
In the last six years, CAUT has helped organize virtually all the unorganized contract academic staff into their universities’ faculty associations, either in the same bargaining unit or in a separate one. Only a few groups are not yet organized, and some of these are currently in the process of certifying. In Canada, the majority of contract academic staff is organized within CAUT-affiliated faculty associations. The rest are represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees, la Fédération nationale des enseignantes et des enseignants du Québec (CSN), or by independent local unions.
On the collective bargaining front, our record is not bad, although much remains to be done. A general look at recent contract negotiations reveals contingent academics were able to negotiate better wages (including additional pay for large classes), access to office space and e-mail accounts, teaching and working assistance, pooled research funds, academic freedom and intellectual property provisions, child care reimbursements, and professional development expense reimbursements and other benefits.
All these gains have improved working conditions of contingent academics, but they are still incremental. Our aim now should not simply be making upward adjustments to the current working conditions of contingent academics, but changing the nature of the contract appointment itself.
We need to aim for equality. Instead of trying to tinker with the current two-tiered, have vs. have not, model of academia — one conference speaker talked about abolishing campus apartheid — we should be working towards a post-secondary system in which contingent faculty are faculty, period. This requires that compensation, job expectations and working conditions for all academic jobs be equal no matter what the nature of the appointment. Although part-time appointments could still exist, they would be pro-rated accordingly. This would allow for the potential of tenurable or continuing part-time appointments and would provide contingent faculty with a more seamless transition from contract to permanency.
Contingent faculty — the “invisible academics,” as one Canadian sociologist calls them — would then be treated like regular faculty and have the same advantages and responsibilities, engaging in all aspects of academic work: teaching, research and service. Bargaining for access to a career path has become a key priority for contingent academics and some groups have made headway on this front.
This model, which we call the pro-rata approach, will be a tough sell, including among some contract staff who would prefer only teaching duties. It’s not easy to find one solution to fit everyone’s needs, but CAUT believes in safeguarding the integrity of academic work, with its three components, and it opposes the unbundling of this work to suit the demands of administrators for more flexibility in scheduling and course offerings and control.
Although we have achieved interesting results at the bargaining table so far, these should be viewed as transitional, albeit significant in the short term. We cannot accept a few conversions of long-suffering sessionals into limited appointments as good enough. We need to ensure that anyone entering academia through the contingent teaching route is entering the profession, not a labyrinthine house of mirrors.
Will this new model cost more? You bet! But as we all know, the federal government is awash in substantial budget surpluses. The Alternative Federal Budget has shown the federal government can invest a lot more in the issues Canadians really care about, such as health care, post-secondary education and the environment, and still balance the books and keep the economy growing. Instead, Stephen Harper’s government chooses to spend $21 billion over the next two years on tax cuts mainly benefiting the wealthy and billions more on the military, while cutting the $5 billion child care initiative set up by the former Liberal government.
We all have a responsibility to generate popular pressure on the federal government so it realigns its spending priorities according to the wishes of Canadians.
A number of academic employers now want to bargain downwards and to cancel our hard-won gains, and they are offering many limited-term, teaching-only positions. But whether we are tenure stream or contingent faculty, we are all in the same boat — and as an American colleague said, the boat is leaking badly.
Casualization not only divides the professoriate and entails difficult and unfair working conditions for contingent academics, but also undermines academic freedom and tenure for “regular” faculty, not to mention reducing their strength at the bargaining table. The way ahead is to stand united and to fight together, in solidarity, for justice, equality and the quality and integrity of our work.
It won’t be easy, but we can do it. And, we owe it to our students, to our communities, and to ourselves.