What’s it like to be a “roads scholar” and sole family breadwinner on a salary of less than $20,000 a year, with no benefits? Jean Taddie, an adjunct professor at the University of Akron’s Wayne College and two other institutions, took a moment to describe it to Ohio legislators March 9.

Using a chart, she showed her income fluctuations in each of the past five years of teaching courses at three colleges. Whether she was teaching eight classes or 12, her income never rose above $20,000 from 1998 through 2003. Sadly, her annual deductible health insurance costs doubled in that time, from $1,000 in 1999 to $2,000 in 2003.

Sometimes commuting as many as 650 miles a week and forced to use her car and college hallways as makeshift “offices,” she notes, “it’s the students who get the short end of the stick. I am a good example of why it is smart to extend bargaining rights to part-time faculty. It’s a money issue and it’s a quality issue for students.”

Other examples abounded at the hearing before the Ohio House Commerce and Labor Committee. The testimony supported House Bill 249, which would extend collective bargaining rights to Ohio’s part-time faculty and graduate employees. Ohio is the only state in the Big Ten that denies these contingent instructors the right to bargain while full-time faculty have that right, noted Tom Mooney, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers (OFT). Within the state, they are the only significant group of public employees not allowed to negotiate their terms of employment. And this weakness shows in the behavior of public institutions, he noted: “They have increasingly relied on—and exploited—part-time academic labor. They have created academic sweatshops.”

The OFT estimates that the state has 25,000 part-time and other temporary faculty who make about one-third as much as their full-time counterparts. The union is in the midst of organizing campaigns for part-time faculty at the University of Cincinnati and for graduate employees at Ohio State University.

The OFT also is working for passage of a companion bill in the Ohio Senate, SB 142.
[Barbara McKenna / AFT On Campus]