Category: Labor

Are Adjunct Professors the New Fast-Food Workers?

By Ana Beatriz Cholo
Beyond Chron

Feb 12, 2015 – Patti Donze, is a California State University, Dominguez Hills sociology lecturer doing everything right to become a tenured college professor. She has advanced degrees from well-respected universities and is teaching a full load of five classes this semester. But her net income is $2,500 a month, just barely enough to buy food and pay rent on a studio apartment in Culver City.

She has $50,000 in school loan debt — not an extreme amount considering the Juris Doctorate and Ph.D. that she has under her belt, but she said it’s not feasible to pay even the minimum monthly payment and is researching loan forgiveness programs.

Besides fast-food workers, there is another face of low-wage workers across the country. For many universities and colleges, both public and private, it’s their most embarrassing secret — paying educated professionals minimum wage salaries with no benefits. Adjuncts are paid much less than tenured and full-time faculty and typically do not have union representation.

For many adjuncts, banding together to speak up is one approach to winning better pay, benefits and some job security, such as longer and more stable contracts. These are the aims of academic unions and the New Faculty Majority, an advocacy organization committed to bringing about income equality for all college faculty in areas where unions are weak.

Adrianna Kezar, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education and co-director of the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, is an expert on change and leadership in higher education. She believes the unionization movement has been the big catalyst for the recent focus on unfair working conditions for these highly qualified educators.

“Fifty percent of the faculty in our country make what somebody at McDonalds makes,” she said, adding that more and more adjuncts are going on public assistance and needing food stamps to survive.

Last year in California, Local 1021 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) began an intense campaign to organize adjunct faculty members in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, part of a national Adjunct Action campaign that is taking place in American cities. (Disclosure: Both SEIU 1021 and the California Faculty Association are financial supporters of Capital & Main.) (Continued)

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A Revitalized Teacher Union Movement

Reflections from the field

By Bob Peterson
Rethinking Schools / Winter 2014/2015

If we don’t transform teacher unions now, our schools, our profession, and our democracy—what’s left of it—will likely be destroyed. I know. I am from Wisconsin, the home of Scott Walker and Paul Ryan.

In 2011, in the wake of the largest workers uprising in recent U.S. history, I was elected president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association (MTEA). Unfortunately, that spring uprising, although massive and inspirational, was not strong enough to stop Gov. Walker from enacting the most draconian anti-public sector labor law in the nation.

That law, known as Act 10, received support from the Koch brothers and a cabal of national right-wing funders and organizations. It was imposed on all public sector workers except the police and firefighter unions that endorsed Walker and whose members are predominantly white and male.

Act 10 took away virtually all collective bargaining rights, including the right to arbitration. It left intact only the right to bargain base-wage increases up to the cost of living. The new law prohibited “agency shops,” in which all employees of a bargaining unit pay union dues. It also prohibited payroll deduction of dues. It imposed an unprecedented annual recertification requirement on public sector unions, requiring a 51 percent (not 50 percent plus one) vote of all eligible employees, counting anyone who does not vote as a “no.” Using those criteria, Walker would never have been elected.

Immediately following Act 10, Walker and the Republican-dominated state legislature made the largest cuts to public education of any state in the nation and gerrymandered state legislative districts to privilege conservative, white-populated areas of the state.

Having decimated labor law and defunded public education, Walker proceeded to expand statewide the private school voucher program that has wreaked havoc on Milwaukee, and enacted one of the nation’s most generous income tax deductions for private school tuition.

Under these conditions, public sector union membership has plummeted, staff has been reduced, and resources to lobby, organize, and influence elections have shrunk.

People familiar with Wisconsin’s progressive history—in 1959, for example, we were the first state to legalize collective bargaining for public sector workers—find these events startling. And they should. If it happened in Wisconsin, it could happen anywhere.

And it has. In New Orleans, following Katrina, unionized teachers were fired and the entire system charterized. Following Wisconsin’s lead, Tennessee abolished the right for teachers to bargain collectively. In Philadelphia, the School Reform Commission unilaterally canceled its expired contract with the teacher union. In city after city, privately run charter schools are dominating the education landscape.

Fortunately, teacher union activists across the country are revitalizing their unions and standing up to these relentless attacks. And this growing transformation of the teachers’ union movement may well be the most important force in our nation to defend and improve public schools and, in so doing, defend and improve our communities and what’s left of our democratic institutions.

The revitalization builds on the strengths of traditional “bread and butter” unionism. But it recognizes that our future depends on redefining unionism from a narrow trade union model, focused almost exclusively on protecting union members, to a broader vision that sees the future of unionized workers tied directly to the interests of the entire working class and the communities, particularly communities of color, in which we live and work.

This is a sea change for teacher unions (and other unions, too). But it’s not an easy one to make. It requires confronting racist attitudes and past practices that have marginalized people of color both inside and outside unions. It also means overcoming old habits and stagnant organizational structures that weigh down efforts to expand internal democracy and member engagement.
From Bread and Butter to Social Justice

The MTEA is a member of the National Education Association (NEA), which has a long history of being staff-dominated. In some locals, elected presidents were (and still are) just figureheads. Allan West, a national NEA staff member, memorialized this staff-run union approach in a widely distributed 1965 speech. According to West, the executive director was the one who should be the public spokesperson, develop agendas for elected executive boards, and direct most of the union’s affairs. This power structure was written into our local’s constitution, and it had profound consequences. When a member of a progressive rank-and-file caucus in Milwaukee was elected president in 1991, for example, it took him six months just to get a key to the office. For nearly a decade we pushed for a full-time release president, a proposal resisted by most professional staff.

Meanwhile, by the late 1980s and into the ’90s, teacher activists in Milwaukee were connecting with other rank-and-file teacher union activists through Rethinking Schools and the newly formed National Coalition of Education Activists (NCEA). In 1994, 29 teachers’ union activists from both the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) met at the Portland, Oregon, NCEA conference and issued a statement: “Social Justice Unionism: A Working Draft” (see sidebar, p. 18).

Social justice unionism is an organizing model that calls for a radical boost in internal union democracy and increased member participation. This contrasts to a business model that is so dependent on staff providing services that it disempowers members and concentrates power in the hands of a small group of elected leaders and/or paid staff. An organizing model, while still providing services to members, focuses on building union power at the school level in alliance with parents, community groups, and other social movements.

Three components of social justice unionism are like the legs of a stool. Unions need all three to be balanced and strong:

    We organize around bread and butter issues.

    We organize around teaching and learning issues to reclaim our profession and our classrooms.

    We organize for social justice in our community and in our curriculum.

Unfortunately, few public sector unions in Wisconsin adopted this model of unionism. As long as we had an agency shop and could protect our members’ compensation and benefits, most members were happy. (Continued)

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Rahm Emanuel Is a Union-buster. So Why Are Chicago Unions Backing Him?

Most of the city’s labor movement is laying low or supporting the mayor in the upcoming election, despite his well-known anti-worker policies

By David Moberg
In These Times

Jan. 28, 2015 – When Rahm Emanuel strode into office as mayor of Chicago in 2011, one of his first targets was the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). He sought and obtained state legislation limiting the right of Chicago teachers to strike. But he lost doubly in the fall of 2012: The CTU successfully mobilized its members to go on strike, then won both a good contract and the battle for public support. Yet Emanuel still closed 49 public schools and expanded charter schools the following spring. Meanwhile, other public employee unions moved into the mayor’s crosshairs as he drastically cut and privatized city jobs and services, often with help from a Democratic governor and state legislature.

Emanuel stands for re-election February 24 in a non-partisan primary against four challengers (and if no one wins 50 percent of the vote plus one, there will be a run-off between the top two on April 7). Polls suggest Chicagoans are not satisfied with their mayor, but most observers give him the odds because of his financial advantage—as of early 2015, he had a $11 million war chest, 10 times that of any opponent.

In theory, labor could be an important part of these calculations. Chicago is a more unionized city than most, and union endorsements typically come with credibility, money and an army of campaign workers. But despite Emanuel’s anti-union record, unions are divided about how to deal with “Mayor 1%,” as Kari Lydersen’s biography of Emanuel is titled.

Emanuel earned that sobriquet not only for the millions he made working for an investment bank and his gift for convincing the rich to empty their pocketbooks for the Democratic Party, but also his disdain for unions. “Fuck the UAW,” he infamously said when serving as Obama’s chief of staff during the auto bailout. He also largely shares the worldview of the financial and corporate elite: Give the hard back of the free-market hand to Jane and Joe Sixpack, the soft palm of friendly government to needy businesses.

Emanuel’s leading—but still longshot— opponent is his opposite on most counts. Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a former alderman and state senator, has been a member of three different unions and strongly supports labor.

“My roots are with working-class people,” Garcia said in an interview with In These Times. “I understand what working-class families need. … Chicago would be better served by a mayor who has that background and would work with unions.” He says that Emanuel’s attempts “to break the CTU” were “heartless” and “spiteful.” Those are harsh words from a man who comes off as modest, self-effacing and “genuine”— as Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308 President Robert Kelly said while endorsing him. Garcia supports the Fight for 15, wants to strengthen neighborhoods and their infrastructure and wants to replace the mayoral appointment of school board members with a board elected by Chicagoans (a major demand of the CTU).

You might imagine that unions would rally behind a seemingly pro-labor challenger to an incumbent with an anti-union record. But as of early January, Chicago’s unions were divided between Garcia, Emanuel and neutrality for a variety of reasons—some peculiar to Chicago, others typical of the U.S. labor movement’s electoral strategy.

Broad shoulder unions

Chicago’s unions, riven with thuggish political squabbles in the late 19th century, grew more unified, progressive and powerful in the first part of the 20th. They often supported labor and socialist party candidates and welcomed organizers like William Z. Foster, a Communist Party leader who led ambitious unionization campaigns in the Chicago meat-packing and steel industries.  (Continued)

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