| Bargaining for a Better Academic Staffing Structure |
| Tuesday, 27 October 2009 | |
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Today, AFT Higher Education is pleased to present another tool to help in the fight at your local campus centered on collective bargaining campaigns designed to educate, activate and ultimately achieve a more stable, fairly paid professional instructional workforce: The FACE Collective Bargaining Toolkit [.pdf]. The toolkit is designed to help higher education unions take the important work they're already doing at the bargaining table and integrate it into the broader campaign to change the academic structure. The toolkit provides strategies and processes to help local unions mount a campaign that will not only improve the working conditions of your members, but also strengthen your union and lay the groundwork for attacking the problems of academic staffing outside of contract negotiations. The toolkit is detailed enough for first-time bargainers to design a comprehensive campaign, but contains practical advice for even the most seasoned veteran of contract negotiations. We hope you will download the FACE Collective Bargaining Toolkit and bring the fight for a more just academic staffing structure to your campus! |
Although the problems stemming from the current academic structure are national in scope - and at times seem insurmountable - there can be no doubt that a large part of the solution requires action at the local level. National and state organizations can push for better policy and raise awareness of the issues surrounding academic staffing, but it is at the institutional level where most of the action is--whether that is political action, collective bargaining, or community education.
"Contingent faculty members make an amazing effort to be professionals, stay connected and provide students with a quality education, despite the lack of institutional investment. But the cost to our institutions, our profession and our union is terribly high. Recognizing this, AFT members have called for AFT Higher Education to put academic staffing at the center of our work, not only to improve the working conditions of contingent faculty and create better jobs, but for the sake of the profession and for our system of higher education."
I hope the prejudice here is inadvertent. The statement says that the cost of the "amazing effort" that contingent faculty make "to be professionals" is "terribly high" – to "our institutions, our profession and our union." There's no suggestion here that contingent faculty are one of "us" or that their own efforts have deserved the support of "our profession" and so forth.
I don't see why it is so hard for FACE to put the case plainly. The contingent faculty on whom the profession has come to rely aren't trying to be professionals: they are professionals, and they need the unequivocal support of those members of the profession whose work they've supported year after year.
I think that some of the language in the new FACE Collective Bargaining Toolkit is insulting to adjuncts and contingents and I urge you to immediately change it.
The most insulting notion is that "Contingent faculty members make an amazing effort to be professionals.”
What exactly does this mean? Our contributions, year for year of experience, are exactly as good as those of our FT/TT colleagues.
The FACE language continues “But the cost to our institutions, our profession and our union is terribly high.”
It is, in fact, the institutions, the profession, and the unions that have allowed the situation to degrade into what we have now: an inequitable academic apartheid that divides people not on the basis of ability or experience, but on the basis of arbitrary categories. To reverse this requires that our FT/TT colleagues recognize their own interests and their own responsibilities, else they will all of them one day be in our scruffy little neighborhood.
alan t.
That said, we urge everyone to take a good look at the toolkit as we hope it will give people ideas for employing it on their campus. We believe that this a valuable resource to help forward a priority we deeply believe in, which is that our system of higher education should have a more stable, equitably paid workforce that is respected. The toolkit is designed to show locals how to put long and short-term term staffing and equity issues at the center of their bargaining agendas and, among other things, to involve all constituencies in shaping positions and carrying out the campaign.
We hope that local unions will take a close look at the Toolkit and see what aspects might be helpful as they approach bargaining--that might mean assessing the local's structural capacity, creating broader and more inclusive bargaining surveys, developing more effective communication mechanisms or something else. These are all areas that require constant work and the goal is to make sure that academic staffing is front and center in those activities.
Lastly--a couple folks noted having difficulty opening the toolkit--we uploaded it as a full PDF (not optimized this time) so please let us know if the difficulty persists.
In solidarity--
AFT's FACE Team