Cindy Oliver (right) who chairs CAUT’s contract academic staff committee, was the impetus behind CAUT’s resolution. She’s seen here at the EI World Congress with Margaret Flomo, national president of the National Teachers Association of Liberia.
Teachers and educators from around the world have joined together to call for fairer treatment for contract academic staff.
Delegates to the Fifth World Congress of Education International — the global federation representing more than 30 million teachers and education workers in more than 160 countries — overwhelmingly supported a CAUT resolution on the rights and academic freedom of fixed-term higher education teaching personnel, meaning academic staff who are employed on a casual, part-time and/or limited-term basis.
“This resolution is about basic fairness,” CAUT president Greg Allain said in putting forward the motion. “It’s about recognizing the valuable contributions of contract staff and it’s about standing up and fighting for their employment and academic rights.”
Allain told delegates the increasing casualization of the academic workforce worldwide is a growing threat to academic freedom. He also noted with concern the widespread violations of basic employment rights of contract staff, including the right to organize and bargain collectively.
Ingrid Stage, president of the Danish Association of Masters and PhDs, seconded the motion, adding, “this is an issue that is not just a problem in Canada, the United States, or Europe only, but is becoming an issue in our profession everywhere. It is a growing international problem that requires a strong international response.”
Other speakers also urged delegates to support the resolution.
“I strongly encourage you to support this motion and to make the fight for fairness for contingent faculty a real priority both nationally and internationally,” said William Scheuerman, vice-president of the American Federation of Teachers.
“For us in the United States, where more than two-thirds of faculty now are hired off the tenure track, this motion is particularly important and sends a clear signal that the international education community will not stand for the continuing exploitation of contingent faculty.”
The resolution, developed by CAUT’s contract academic staff committee, calls on EI to work with international bodies such as UNESCO and the International Labour Organization to promote the rights of contract staff to organize and bargain collectively and their right to freedom from discrimination. It also urges affiliates to work to secure better working conditions and terms of employment for contingent staff.
About 2,000 educators took part in EI’s July congress in Berlin, the largest-ever since the organization’s founding congress in Stockholm almost 15 years ago.
“We come together united by our shared concern for the future of democratic quality public education as a fundamental right for all,” EI president Thulas Nxesi said during opening remarks for the congress. “Education is a human right. We need to defend it in the face of threats to privatize and to subsume education under international trade agreements. Education is a public investment in the well-being of all our societies and it must be adequately funded.”
In keeping with this year’s congress theme “Educators Joining Together for Quality Education and Social Justice,” delegates renewed their commitment to achieving quality public education for all by 2015.
“We are telling governments that they must invest in education and make the teaching profession more attractive, or risk the education of future generations,” said EI general secretary Fred van Leeuwen. “But how can we expect young people to be attracted to a profession in which they cannot make ends meet, especially when they know very well that with their knowledge and skills they can earn much more in the private sector?”
Delegates also passed a number of “urgent” resolutions about issues facing them as teachers, as trade unionists and as global citizens, which included speaking to trade union rights violations
in Ethiopia, where teachers have suffered assassination, torture, imprisonment and persecution for many years; Aboriginal rights violations by the government of Australia, which recently brought in the army to seize control of 64 remote Aboriginal communities; and solidarity with Iraqi workers and teachers, who have been killed and wounded in horrendous numbers.
For additional information on EI and resolutions passed at the Berlin congress, please visit
www.ei-ie.org.