Why Unions for Teachers in Public Schools and Colleges?
Why do educators need unions? Aren’t teachers professionals and doesn’t it diminish their professionalism if they join unions? These are questions underneath several of the big issues in education—charter schools as non-unionized competitors for public schools—the role of due-process rights for teachers—the cost of professional salaries for teachers and the cost of fringe benefits and pensions at a time when many politicians want to slash taxes and reduce the size of government. It is sometimes instructive to look at an old issue from another angle, however, and the plight of adjunct faculty in colleges and universities is another context to examine the need for unions.
Adjunct faculty are the teachers who, these days, are likely to have earned a Ph.D. but have not found full time work. It used to be that these part time college teachers were found teaching remedial classes or any of the many sections of freshman English, but increasingly they are picking up courses across the academic disciplines. In an important piece in TheAmerican Prospect, Justin Miller explains: “Part-time. Contingent. Non-tenure track. Casual. Adjunct. Non-standard. Peripheral. External. Ad hoc. Limited contract. New model. Occasional. Sessional. Call them what you will, but these professors have now become the majority of college and university faculty. Their jobs are defined by low pay, limited instructional resources, tenuous employment security, and a complete lack of institutional support for their own research and writing. Contingent faculty has become a subset of the new working poor—the subset with Ph.D.s… Today, part-time adjunct instructors comprise more than half of all faculty (not including those at for-profit institutions); another 20 percent are full-time without tenure.” Miller adds that of all college faculty, “Just 30 percent are traditional tenured or tenure-track appointments.”
The phenomenon of colleges hiring adjunct faculty is a subset of what is now called “just-in-time” employment. Instead of staffing on a regular, full-time schedule, employers wait to see exactly their needs and then hire by the task—whether it is hiring a waitress on short notice for peak hours or finding guys to unload a truck right after it has come into town or hiring a college teacher for an extra section of freshman English during fall semester when most arriving students try to take that course. Originally the idea was that contingent faculty would spend a few years gaining experience before joining a tenured faculty, but as colleges have been forced to cut spending, more and more adjuncts have become trapped in a system in which they earn between $2,700 and $3,500 per course and patch together employment from a number of colleges and universities across a region just to try to make ends meet. Many find that no matter how hard they hustle, Why Unions for Teachers in Public Schools and Colleges? | janresseger: