PrintWayne State adjuncts are primed for victory
Over 800 part-time faculty at Wayne State University are just weeks away from having a union of their own. The organizing committee of the WSU Union of Part-Time Faculty filed cards with the Michigan Employment Relations Commission in February; MERC mailed ballots April 23 and will count the votes May 14, says David Hecker, president of AFT Michigan and an AFT vice president.
Finding people was a challenge, says School of Social Work adjunct Susan Titus. “Everyone’s trying to make a living. They don’t have office hours. They don’t have office phones. It made organizing very difficult.”
Those are also the conditions that make a union long overdue, says philosophy adjunct Alitia Drober. She epitomizes the “roads scholar”: “One semester, I taught seven classes at four institutions in two countries [The University of Windsor is just across the river.]. I figured out that my students were paying over one-half million dollars in tuition that year for which I was compensated $32,000!”
Wage stagnation is a big issue, says Thomas Trimble, an adjunct who teaches composition. Many part-timers at Wayne State have not seen a raise in 10 years. They earn on average about $2,400 a three-credit course, but it can range from as low as $1,500 to as high as $5,000.
“A lot of people who teach at Wayne State also teach at the University of Michigan,” says Trimble. A few years ago, the lecturers formed the Lecturers’ Employees Organization/AFT. “We saw what happened when LEO came in—what a change that brought about for lecturers.”
Another issue is health insurance, an enormous consideration for low-paid adjuncts. Drober has a particularly hair-raising story of learning one semester that she had a life-threatening kidney disease. At the same time, a full-time faculty colleague began treatment for cancer.
“It wasn’t lost on me that about $1 million of insurance money was spent keeping her alive. When I went into kidney failure and needed a $2,000 biopsy, I was sent away until I could get the money. ... In this country, if you have the wrong job, you don’t have the right to live.”
The union is organizing both to improve the lot of individuals and to make Wayne State a better place for students. “There’s a feeling that the growing reliance on a completely unregulated teaching corps is having a detrimental effect in the classroom,” says Trimble, from the students’ tacit acceptance that their teacher may have to end class early to run to the next class across town to a lack of valuable advising for underclassmen.
The AFT represents WSU graduate employees and faculty who are in a union jointly affiliated with the American Association of University Professors.
More than 70 graduate employees who belong to Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania (GET-UP) theatrically pressed the point that Gutmann refuses to meet with them, while holding a demonstration to mark a red-letter day in the union’s history. Feb. 26 is the anniversary of the day the National Labor Relations Board held an election to determine whether nearly 1,000 graduate workers would be represented by GET-UP, an AFT affiliate. The university appealed the outcome of the election and had the ballots impounded. The ballots have never been counted.
Before she was sworn in as the new president of Penn in 2004, Amy Gutmann wrote to GET-UP, agreeing to talk to the graduate employees. But she has reneged. That’s why the graduate employees constructed a 10-foot tall puppet effigy of the president and chased it across campus to the president’s office. There, GET-UP chair Julie Kruidenier delivered a letter signed by GET-UP officers, asking the president to meet with the group and discuss its concerns about compensation, heathcare benefits, the casualization of the academic workforce, and the lack of a viable forum on campus for graduate employees to address these concerns.
Against hard odds and constant membership turnover, GET-UP has proven to be a tenacious force. It was one of several unions immediately affected by an NLRB decision in a 2004 case concerning Brown University, which reversed an earlier ruling that graduate employees at private universities had the right to bargain under the National Labor Relations Act. Since the Brown University decision, universities like Penn and New York University have taken cover behind the ruling, which was decided by a Bush-appointed three-person majority of the NLRB.
GET-UP’s action in Pennsylvania was buttressed by significant events in Washington, D.C.: Also on Feb. 26, the AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers filed a complaint against the U.S. government with the United Nations International Labor Organization. The complaint alleges that the NLRB ruling violates two provisions of the ILO Conventions regarding fundamental rights of teaching assistants. It asks the ILO to condemn the Brown University ruling of the “Bush Labor Board.”
Another significant action in Washington was the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act in the U.S. House of Representatives. This bill is designed to address exactly the kind of challenging organizing odds graduate employees at a private institution face. The law would help level the playing field for workers who want to form a union but face employers who use their resources to fight unions through intimidation and legal stalling.
