CSEW Speaker Series
Joe Berry and Vicky Smallman
Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education
OISE/UT
February 6, 2004

CSEW Speaker Series

Contingent Faculty in Higher and Adult Education

Joe Berry and Vicky Smallman

Joe Berry is a contingent (non-tenure track) faculty member in both history and labor education at a number of Chicago-area colleges, including Roosevelt University, where he is part of the leadership of the Roosevelt Adjunct Faculty Organization, the union there. He is also the Chair of the Chicago Chapter of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) and the Chair of the upcoming North American (US, Canada and Mexico) COCAL VI conference to be held in Chicago, August 6-8, 2004. Berry's Ph.D. dissertation from the Union Institute and University (Cincinnati, OH, USA) was about organizing strategies for contingent faculty. He is also on the Coordinating Committee of the North American Alliance For Fair Employment, the network of contingent worker groups in the US and Canada.

Vicky Smallman completed her B.A. (Honours) in English at St. Francis Xavier University, and her M.A. in Irish Literature at University College, Dublin. Prior to her current position as a professional officer with the Canadian Association of University Teachers, Vicky performed contract research, government relations and policy analysis work for the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, the New Democratic Party and the Canadian Council for International Cooperation. She formerly served as the Ontario Chair of the Canadian Federation of Students. Smallman lives in Ottawa, where she is active in her local community association, is a founding member of the Ottawa Witness Group, a community policing watchdog, and is currently a director of Creative Neighbourhoods, Inc, a non-profit organization dedicated to strengthening neighbourhood identity and improving the use of public space in all of Ottawa's neighbourhoods. She is also the Vice-Chair of the National Capital Region Chapter of Equal Voice, a national advocacy group addressing the issue of women's under-representation at all levels of government in Canada. She maintains a weblog, Miss Vicky's Offhand Remarks.

Abstract

Contingent faculty, whether called adjuncts, sessionals, teaching assistants or a hundred other labels, are now the majority of teaching faculty in higher education in both the US and Canada (and Mexico as well). Though there are differences between countries, in general they labour without job security (tenure) or the benefits or perquisites that are traditional in colleges and universities. In response to this situation, a movement has grown up from the grassroots, in relationship with the established unions in higher education, to fight against these inequities and to protect the entire enterprise of higher education from further corporate-style degradation, both for faculty and students.
Smallman and Berry will discuss the outlines of this movement in both countries and its prospects for the future. Of particular interest are the innovative organizing techniques, such as Campus Equity Week/Fair Employment Week (CEW/FEW) and the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor conferences that have occurred across organizational and national lines. These, and other creative organizing strategies, may hold lessons for organizing other workers, especially contingents and /or professionals.

Introduction: Contingent Labour and the Academy
Peter Sawchuk

The issue at hand here today is that of contingent labour, specifically in academia. The notion of contingency and contingent work is hardly a new phenomenon, and, in fact, it is an important phenomenon in all sectors of the economy. Until recently, many people believed that the academy was insulated from contingency, but as we shall see, this is far from the truth.

To speak on this issue, and hopefully bring an international perspective, are Joe Berry and Vicky Smallman.

First Thoughts: The Rise of Contingent Labour in Academia
Joe Berry

I'd like to start by drawing a couple of parallels that recently jumped out at me while reading a paper presented by David Livingston in Finland. He argues that the rise of contingent labour and, in general, the casualization of the labour force represents an aspect of the de-democratization of society. This is happening in the academy. There is a de-democratization of what was once one of the most democratic workplaces - for faculty, not for staff - in terms of shared governance and that sort of thing. It is a leading edge of what is called by many the corporatization of the university. This process could also be called "class clarification" both in the mission and the internal structure of higher education. And my understanding is that the pattern exists in the U.S., in Canada, and - I'm beginning to learn - in Mexico as well as throughout much of the industrial and industrializing world. The rise of contingent faculty is linked, of course, to larger trends in society as a whole, and, as Livingston points out in his paper, it has formed a credentials arms race, which is particularly striking in academia, where we are attached to paper credentials anyway. It is part of the overall increased casualization found in many sectors of the workforce.

Livingston suggests that part of the answer to this is the democratization of the workload, and, I completely agree. However, I think that in the case of contingent faculty, it's important to note that the democratization of the workplace will not speak to this if the multi-tier segmentation of the workforce is kept and reinforced. This will only result in the reproduction of the type of democracy found in ancient Greece and Rome, where the minority were citizens and the majority who did the work were un-free slaves and other non-citizens. In this type of situation, you don't have democracy in any kind of meaningful social way. You have democracy for an elite, and fake participation - if that - for the contingent.

To briefly bring people up to date on the conditions in the United States, the majority of people teaching postsecondary classes in the United States are contingent faculty, the absolute majority. Nobody even disputes this fact anymore. People with temporary full-time appointments are now the majority of full-time appointments in academia. The majority of full-time appointments are off the tenured track now in the United States. If you include part-time adjunct folks, graduate employees, and the people who teach postsecondary non-credit courses like Adult Education and ESL (where the number of contingents are 90 to 95 percent of teaching staff) contingent faculty make up 80 percent or more of postsecondary teachers. And, the number is constantly growing.

In the United States, the shift to contingent faculty really began during the 1970s, with the weakening of the economy, stagflation, and the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War impacted the budgets of both the public and private sectors, and a good portion of higher education is private non-profit. Similarly, in the seventies, the student body began to change; larger and larger percentages of students were no longer full-time and straight out of high school, but, rather, were adults re-entering school. They were more likely to be part-time students, and it was harder to predict how many courses they would take, and when and where, because they were working around other commitments such as work and family. This new reality led to two enticements entering administrators' heads. One was the great desire to save money because relative funding was declining. Their discretionary budgets were declining. And two, there was a much greater need for flexibility because they couldn't predict their enrolments. Those two needs on the part of administrators resulted in a gradual increase in the use of contingent faculty.

As a result, contingent faculty shifted from being a small number of community professionals who were brought in to teach the occasional specialty course as a professional courtesy, to being a central part of the instructional and research function of the university. For the administration, it was about money and flexibility. This resulted in changes for full-time tenure track faculty, which have become more and more pronounced over time. As their numbers declined, the bar was raised in terms of increasing demands for research, and yet there was not a corresponding decline in their teaching demands. The number of full-time tenure track faculty began to shrink as when they retired, their positions were filled by one or two part-time contingents. So the work of the departments and divisions that had to be done collectively by faculty - curriculum, committee work, all sorts of things - fell on fewer and fewer hands.

Now, you have the spectacle in many institutions of higher education in the United States, especially in the community colleges, of entire departments and even divisions staffed by one full-time tenure track faculty member and a flock of part-timers. The net result, I would argue, is that this represents the net disempowerment of faculty collectively; and at the same time, it demonstrates that contingent faculty are becoming the norm. When we say "faculty," what we should think of now is "contingent faculty" because that is the norm, that is the majority, unfortunately. It has become normative.

The Two Tiers of Academia: Tenure Track versus Contingent Faculty

That being said, these two tiers - tenure track and contingent faculty - are not homogenous, nor are they identical. The full-time tenure track faculty are much more likely to be older, white, native-born men; the contingents are much more likely to be otherwise. And that, of course, has an impact on all kinds of things, including organizing. In some areas, both curriculum areas and geographic areas, there's tremendous variation. According to recent studies, in the United States the pay for contingent faculty probably averages about $2000 U.S. for a three-unit course and, under Carnegie units, that's a 3-unit course meaning fifteen weeks and forty-five class hours. Basically, they are paid less than half what a tenure track faculty member would make for the same amount of work. Usually, contingent faculty are given a two-and-a-half or three-credit class, with up to five-classes per-semester, depending on what sector of higher education they're working in. You can multiply $2000 times ten really easily and see that they are making about $20,000 per year. And, in the United States that's without health benefits, without retirement, without anything else. It is also often without offices, without clerical support, without even a phone number, without computers - you carry all that overhead yourself. That's typical. Of course, it varies tremendously by region and based upon the level of organizing and unionization that exists.

Organizing Contingent Faculty

Unlike Canada, the vast majority of contingent faculty in the U.S. are not organized. However, a high percentage of full-time tenure track faculty in the public sector are organized. In fact, it's one of the most unionized occupations in the United States. It's still not at 50 percent, but it's approaching that. The number of organized contingent faculty in the public sector is lower and in the private sector, it's lower yet. I would say that, nationally, perhaps 15 to 20 percent of contingent faculty are represented. And I hesitate to use the word "unionized" because many of them are represented solely on paper. They really aren't organized in a participatory sense. These figures are very, very difficult to put together. It was my dissertation to try to do that. They're guesswork, in part. The number of unionized contingent faculty is strongest on the coasts - California, Washington, New York, Massachusetts. But, in whole states in places like the Midwest, the West, and the South, there's not a single unionized contingent faculty.

Also, in the United States, another factor is the Yeshiva decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, which basically declared full-time tenured and tenure track faculty members in private higher education to be managers and, therefore, not eligible for unionization under the labour laws. This was a terrible decision that was based on the facts of the time, and it's become worse. As the years went by, people lost most of their managerial and shared governance functions. For a variety of reasons, of the three major faculty unions, none of them have decided to put in the resources necessary to take the Yeshiva decision on directly. The result has been a stagnation of organizing among full-time tenured and tenure track faculty in the private sector. However, it has started again amongst the contingent faculty who, nobody can argue, were managers in any sense. Sometimes this has resulted in contingent-only units existing, but the best collective agreements that exist in the country are in places where contingents and non-contingents are in the same bargaining unit bargaining together. But, there are always problems, there are always contradictions, there are always differences.

Sometimes, depending on the particular environment, joint contingent-non-contingent units are just not possible politically, legally, or historically. There are three major unions for postsecondary educators in the United States: the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and the American Association of University Professors. The American Association of University Professors, and to some extent the NEA, share a heritage with the CAUT in terms of transforming themselves from being professional associations to partially being unions as well. However, none of these organizations primarily represent contingent faculty. We are a stepsister in all of those organizations. And recently other unions from outside the traditional education sector have been organizing contingent faculty - both graduate employees and others - including the United Auto Workers, the American Federation of State and County Municipal Employees, which is more or less the American equivalent to CUPE, and others.

Over the course of a generation, no real strategy has emerged. None of the national unions have chosen to put resources into developing a national strategy for this sector which probably numbers half a million people. In fact, strategy discussion is developing from the ground up as part of the new organizing initiatives that have developed in the last fifteen years. But, these changes are occurring in collaboration and in contact with the leadership of the national unions, not from them. And those new organizing models are what I'd like to finish with.

A New Organizing Model for Contingent Faculty

One of the organizing initiatives that seeks to move beyond an attempt to organize particular bargaining units at a particular place or a particular employer, is called the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labour (COCAL), which has sponsored floating conferences around North America, in Washington, Boston, New York, Montreal, San Jose, and this coming summer in Chicago. I'll pass this button around. This is the logo of COCAL, which actually began out of a caucus in a professional association - not the union, not any of the unions - in the early nineties. But what COCAL has done is sponsor these conferences across organizational lines, across regional lines, and now across international lines, including folks from Canada and Mexico and beyond. It has essentially sparked other kinds of activities like Campus Equity Week and Fair Employment Week. The implicit guiding notion of - oh, it's also sparked some regional chapters that are completely autonomous but use the COCAL framework and sort of named a chapter in Chicago, a chapter in the Boston area, and a state-wide chapter in California on somewhat different bases. The thing they share is the concept of the inside-outside strategy; this is the type of strategy that oppressed groups within a larger organization have always tried to use in order to gain equity. In other words, they wish to organize on their own while also organizing in the context of their immediate allies, in our case, full-time faculty and other campus staff. Essentially, we recognize that we have to have our own independent force, whether it's a caucus within an existing union or an independent organization, or else we will be forgotten about. This is comparable to minority and women's caucuses in unions - I think there are many of those kinds of parallels.

This has also led to people taking a closer look at the actual workforce. Contingent faculty members work in different places at different times. I currently work at three different colleges and universities in the Chicago area, but at other times, in just these past two years, I've worked at two others and I've had times when I didn't work at the ones I'm working at now. It's a flow-through metropolitan workforce and the implication is that it needs to be organized on that basis. And there have been some beginnings in that direction in Boston, and the very beginnings in Chicago, and discussion in other places.

The other thing that has come out of this new grassroots sort of movement has been the initiatives of Campus Equity Week and Fair Employment Week in 2001 and 2003 throughout North America, under the sort of general slogans of "Teacher Working Conditions are Student Learning Conditions" and "Equal Pay Compensation for Equal Work." This is an explicit appeal to our folks as professional workers who are concerned not only with the tremendous material needs that we face, but who are also concerned about the process we're involved in. People are not doing this to make money; people are doing this because it's wonderful work and they feel like they're making a contribution. They believe in the educational process and they believe in the progressive aspects of the mission of higher education, and that has to be appealed to as well.

And, of course, the third factor is the general factor that's true in every organizing situation, which is that people feel that there is a lack of respect for what they do. That's the label on the umbrella over everything. It is reflected in the fact that you have to apply separately for a parking permit every semester (even though you've worked at a place for twenty years) and in the fact that you aren't able to have a mailbox with your actual name on it. All of those incredibly irritating things that drive people bonkers. And, it is present when people use the word "faculty" but only mean the minority of full-time tenure track faculty. And the contingent faculty just ask ourselves, what are we? Chopped liver? Eventually, all of those little irritations get through the skin like sandpaper and you start bleeding. And that's what people notice most often, rather than the knife at their throat because they don't know how to move the knife away from their throat. So, all of you in the room who have been organizers know that often people grab what they can grab and not what they can't imagine grabbing. That's later.

What Does the Future Hold for Contingent Faculty?

The future? I would argue that this sector holds special importance to the labour movement and to society as a whole. Both because we work on human beings, not just widgets, and because higher education is now a mass phenomenon in North America. It's no longer just the elite. The average person now has some post-secondary education, and we speak to those folks. And it is now the case that the majority of people teaching college classes are members of the working class. They are not in the contradictory position of the traditional full-time tenure track faculty, but rather they are skilled professionals, academic workers who stand up in front of our mostly working-class students and talk about the world using the pronoun "we" in a way that's never been possible before. That creates the potential for a labour movement in higher education that isn't based merely on sympathy with the working class struggle in general, which is the history of most higher education unionism up until recently, but rather, which is based on real intra-class solidarity and that, I think, is the cloud's silver lining.

Transition: Peter Sawchuk

Okay, thank you, Joe. Unless there are immediate pressing questions, I'd prefer it if we could move on to the next speaker. Joe, you've animated your comments and your descriptions of the United States with a vision of a participatory workplace, professionally governed workplace, and, of course, at the basis of all that is the democratized workplace. And these things like the Yeshiva decision - which I have not heard of - sound atrocious, but surely none of these things - we have a phrase "Canada the Good" - surely none of these things could be the case here in Canada. Vicky?

The Canadian Contingent Faculty Experience
Vicky Smallman

Well, it's funny that you should mention the Yeshiva decision. Mount Allison University tried to use the Yeshiva decision when the faculty unionized in the 1970s. They presented their case for not allowing the faculty to unionize, and it was just chopped out by the labour board there. So, we don't have the same kind of organizing history in Canada. I think it was recognized that collegial governance doesn't necessarily mean that you're managers, and that there are real managers on university campuses and that they are excluded from the faculty bargaining units (e.g. administrators) and, in many cases, depending on the structure of the university, those are the managers. So, there was that discussion in the seventies when faculty first started to unionize and labour boards determined that, indeed, like any other employee group, faculty have the right to bargain collectively.

Maybe what I'll do is talk a little bit about how these stats are different in Canada. Then, I'll talk a bit about the organizing history, maybe touch a little bit on who contingent faculty are on Canadian university campuses. And, finally, I'll try to hint at some of our current issues and challenges in collective bargaining, because right now organizing isn't "the" hot topic, but collective bargaining and trying to establish a career path for contract academic staff is the real hot topic in our academic labour movement.

Contingent Faculty: The Statistics

We actually don't have very good numbers on contract academic staff - or contingent faculty - in Canadian universities. We do know that full-time faculty members have been in decline in the last ten years or so, and we do know that contract appointments are on the rise, but, unfortunately, we don't have information on the specific ratio...and there's a reason. Every year, Statistics Canada runs two surveys of academic staff: one for full-time academic staff and one for part-time. As for the full-time numbers, the universities are very faithful in providing information. The reports come out regularly and are fairly reliable although they don't distinguish between full-time tenure stream and full-time contract which is one of the problems in the survey. As far as a part-time survey is concerned, there are several universities, which shall remain nameless (U of T), which actually don't provide the statistics to Statistics Canada on a regular or reliable basis. They claim that they don't know; well, they know, they just don't want to do the work. In some cases, it's so decentralized that it actually is very difficult, but in other cases they just don't want to admit how many people are teaching on contract in their universities.

We're pretty sure, though, that the numbers are not as extreme in Canada as they are in the United States. We still have the majority of tenure-streamed faculty teaching in universities. And the theory is that the number of contract faculty is probably along the lines of 30 or 40 percent. We know this because we are actually able to get some reliable stats from some of our member associations who have negotiated access to this information; essentially, they forced the university to report every year on how many people are teaching what.

So, for example, we know that at Western in 2000-2001- actually, Western is a pretty extreme case. Only 51.4 percent of undergraduate courses were taught by tenured and tenure-track faculty. So it's the majority, but a very narrow majority at Western. Twenty-five percent were taught by part-time members of the University of Western Ontario Bargaining Unit, which is the part-time people, everybody teaching one course or more; and 12.9 percent were taught by other members of the bargaining unit - that's limited term appointments, the full-time temporary appointments; and 10 percent were taught by people teaching less than one full course that were unfortunately outside of the bargaining unit. We've also got some data for Carlton. Actually, they've been pretty good at putting this up on their website every year, so we've got the last four years of data. And we have seen a decrease in the amount of teaching by academic staff in the professorial ranks, especially in the first-year courses, where they only teach 39.6 percent of the sections. And there has been an increase in the other ranks; that's non-tenurable ranks, so teaching-only or contingent non-tenurable ranks. Sessional teaching at Carlton rose from 20.5 percent in 1998-99 up to 24.5 percent in 2000-2001, and then it dipped down a little bit in 2001-2002 to 21.5 percent.

So, it is tapering off a little bit, but my feeling is that there's a trend going on at the university campuses where they're now starting to move away from sessionals. I mean, I think there is still going to be this large pool of the per-course appointments that - most places here call them "sessionals" - moving towards this limited-term appointment or teaching-only appointments. So we're adding another layer or tier of exploitation onto an already overly-tiered professoriate. And those are the statistics.

Defining Canada's Contingent Faculty: Who are they?

Before I turn to the organizational history of Canada's contingent faculty, I'd like to do a little glossary because I'll be using different terms, and sometimes it gets confusing because different people use different terms to refer to the same kind of stuff. The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) uses the term "contract academic staff" as an inclusive term referring to anybody who performs academic work on a contract basis. And that can be all kinds of different appointments. "Per-course contract academic staff" are hired to teach on a course-by-course basis. They are called "adjuncts" in some places, for example at Queen's University. They are called "sessionals" here at U of T and in many places in Western Canada. Sometimes they're called "part-time instructors" or "part-timers," although many of them have a teaching load that is way more than part-time. In Quebec and at Francophone universities, they're called "chargés de cours." But, the essential point is that they're all hired to teach one course. There's also such a thing as part-time appointments, which are actually continued appointments at a lower course load. And the part-time appointments usually also do a little bit of scholarly activity and service as opposed to the per-course people who are hired to teach only. However, in many agreements, they say they are perfectly welcome to volunteer to sit on committees. And they are often evaluated on their research record while not being given any support for their research.

Limited-term appointments are full-time appointments for a specific period of time, they can range from one semester to three years or five years. Sometimes they're renewable, sometimes not. Often, they're renewable for a certain period of time, like five times, and then you're turfed out, which is a real problem. There's also teaching-only appointments. I should also say that limited-term appointments in Eastern Canada are called "sessionals," which leads to a lot of confusion in the use of terminology at CAUT. "Teaching-only appointments" are often called "instructors"; they can be for a limited term, and, in some cases, they can be continuing appointments, and at some universities are actually tenurable. We have somebody on one of our CAUT committees who is a tenured instructor.

There are also appointments that are tied to soft money, really contingent. They're hired on a research grant or postdoctoral fellowship or something like that. They are normally full-time, normally limited term. At some places they're called "contingent term appointments." There are also contract academic staff hired on an hourly basis to instruct in music, to work with people in writing labs, studio courses, or English as a Second Language, and they're paid on an hourly rate. We try to organize them as well as the per-course people or limited-term people. There are also clinical instructors in professional departments, such as nursing or teaching; they often have people working with students on a work term. And they often work with individual students. So as you can see, there is a wide variety of different types of appointments. This poses a big challenge for us in terms of identifying who the contingent faculty are, in organizing contacts, in signing them up, and in determining what their interests are in collective bargaining.

So that's kind of who we're dealing with. They are a very diverse group of people. And, not only are their appointments diverse, but the people who hold them are extremely diverse as well. We have professionals who are just hired to teach a course because of their expertise, kind of the stereotypical part-time faculty member; the accountant who has a full-time job but teaches a course every year. There are lots of people who see part-time teaching as a way to start a university career; that is, they see it as a foot in the door to a full-time appointment, and they can range from the recent graduate to the guy who's trying to finish his dissertation. They're looking for an academic career and they're looking to move into a full-time appointment. And then there are the kind of bitter, jaded people who started thinking that ten years ago, but are still teaching on a per-course basis. And, I mean, I've met people who have been teaching on a per-course basis for eighteen years, often with heavy course loads.

Some people, if they're lucky enough to live in a place like Toronto, where there are multiple postsecondary institutions, are teaching on a per-course basis at multiple universities and cobbling together a living using this piecemeal approach. On the other hand, if you're living in Lennoxville or Sackville, New Brunswick, or some places like that, your options are limited and you just teach at one institution. Some people want to be able to do research, and are actively engaged in research - on their own dime, of course. Sometimes they publish more than the full-time faculty in their departments, present at conferences, and do what they can to participate as a member of the academic profession; but, they are considered to be independent scholars within their profession, even though they actually work in the universities. So there are lots of issues regarding access to SSHRC or NSERC grants or things like that, which often come up in bargaining. And then there are other people who really just want to teach, or they've been doing per-course instruction for so long that they aren't able to keep up a decent research portfolio and wouldn't be able to qualify for a tenure-stream position even if one became available. So they're a really diverse group of people, which poses interesting challenges when you're actually talking about what your priorities are.

The History and Future of Organizing Contingent Faculty

We have a long organizing history in Canada, and the situation is much better than it is in the States. A lot of this is due to our labour laws, and the fact that we don't have the Yeshiva decision hanging over our heads. But we have a long history of both full and part-time faculty organizing that goes back to the seventies. Most faculty associations are unionized in Canada; there are only a small number that are not. And often they're not because of specific cultural reasons at that particular institution.

Interestingly enough though, we're still certifying a few. A couple of years ago, the University of Prince Edward Island, which had not certified up until that point because it was not the "island way," decided that they were ready to take this step because of some problems they were experiencing with the administration. The "island way" wasn't really working for them anymore, so they certified. And, in fact, just yesterday, they reached a tentative agreement with their employer, so we're really happy about that. When they certified, they certified everybody - full and part-time - in the same bargaining unit. And, on Sunday, I'm flying to Antigonish, Nova Scotia to Saint Francis Xavier University where they will start an organizing drive. We thought they would never unionize, but apparently they are. So that history is still ongoing.

In terms of contract academic staff, there are three streams of organizing. There are faculty associations, a number of which have had contract academic staff in their bargaining units since the beginning of their faculty association. Regina, Calgary, and St. Thomas More in Saskatchewan have had them from the beginning. Meanwhile others, such as Laurentian and Windsor, added them more gradually through the years through negotiations for separate organizing drives. So that's one stream.

There were a couple of unions that organized contract academic staff that weren't part of the faculty associations. There was the Canadian Union of Educational Workers, my old union, which organized graduate teaching assistants and contract part-time faculty at a number of different places, and they merged with CUPE in the mid-nineties. There had already been a couple of CUPE locals in existence that consisted of graduate students, teaching assistants, and part-time faculty. So now there's a fairly big number of CUPE locals, which are still growing. And then there are a few independent associations as well, at Concordia, at the University of Ottawa and at Simon Fraser. In Quebec there's a whole separate stream and they're pretty much all unionized in Quebec. They're usually with the CSN, which is one of the large public sector unions in Quebec.

There has been a lot of activity recently. CAUT decided about five years ago to make part-time faculty organizing a priority, mostly because there was a broad recognition of some of the implications of the existence of this exploited underclass on the academic profession as a whole, on the workload of full-time faculty - some of the stuff that you were talking about in your talk, Joe - and there have been a number of organizing drives. They created a position for an organizer and hired me and I have been very busy since then. We've had maybe a dozen different drives in different places, and we're almost reaching the end of our efforts. There's not much left to do, which is a really good sign.

Current Challenges

Of course, this poses other challenges in terms of collective bargaining because once you have them organized, then we have to make sure that we're improving - well, keeping them mobilized within the association, improving their wages and working conditions, and so on. We actually held a collective bargaining conference last week in Ottawa. The Collective Bargaining and Economic Benefits Committee of the CAUT devoted its annual conference to the issue of contract academic staff language. And it was great; it was one of the most successful conferences we've ever had. Certainly, it boasted a higher attendance, a real diversity of people, both full-time and part-time, and they had a great discussion about some of the challenges faced by people in this field.

The biggest challenge right now, in addition to the usual issues of wages and access to benefits and rights and dignity that you alluded to, Joe, is that of job security and career mobility. And, I think it poses some of the most significant challenges for us because of the diversity of the bargaining unit. We've started a dialogue within the profession in order to outline the best ways of getting through some of the most difficult bargaining issues, and they're difficult because there are, within the per-course contract, some real conflicts in priorities, in issues and in concerns and desires. And it's something that I'm really gratified that CAUT has taken on because without some kind of central discussion of these issues, people are negotiating things that may or may not have positive long-term implications on the profession as a whole.

Often, what happens when you're addressing issues of contingency is that you may bargain for something that is good for some people in the short term, but is not good for the profession in the long term, for example, teaching-only positions. It's very tempting to bundle together a bunch of part-time contracts and create permanent teaching-only positions. And many people who have been working for a long time on per-course contracts find this appealing because they know that they would find it difficult to qualify for a tenurable position if one was created. The problem with this is that it further unbundles what we consider to be an academic job, which is a proportion of teaching, scholarly professional activity, and service. Instead, it creates two classes of faculty: the researchers and the teachers.

So, what looks good in the short term for some people who have really been exploited actually ends up creating other layers of exploitation or generally damages the quality of education and integrity of the job as a whole. So these are issues that we're wrestling with as a profession. One of the great things about the Coalition of Continued Academic Labour and efforts to broaden the networks beyond just "who is a member of CAUT" is that we're able to have a bigger discussion of these issues and hopefully come to some common understandings about the best ways to afford it. And that's where we're at right now.