CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES TODAY

CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES TODAY!

This appearance by GET-UP seems unusually promising with respect to the national, political dimension of the struggle. For what it's worth, I sent this note to the Senate subcommittee members individually. Contact info for the committee is at:
http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/cgi-bin/newcommittee.cgi?commcode=sapprop_labor&site=ctc

Most of the committee uses individual webforms, so it can be a pain to do the individual data entry. Took me about twenty minutes after I wrote the letter to make individual contacts. It might be worth forwarding the notice of this hearing more widely. Regards, solidarity, Marc

September 16, 2004

From: Prof. Marc Bousquet, founding editor, Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, University of Louisville

To: Senator Arlen Specter, chair, and membership, Labor, Health and Human Services Education subcommittee

Re: GET-UP and NLRB ruling on graduate employees

I write as a friend of the committee. My qualifications are discussed below, together with the names & qualifications of several others the committee may wish to consult.

Please allow me to make a few points.

1. Campus employers abuse apprenticeship in order to save labor costs, resulting in a vast corps of “revolving door” disposable student teachers and researchers. Since 1970, campus employers have improperly over-converted professorial positions into cheap assistantships.

2. This improper over-conversion means that there are tens of thousands of persons with Ph.D.s who have taught and researched as many as ten years as a “student” but who cannot get work as faculty teachers and researchers when they receive their degree.

3. Essentially this means that in many fields most graduate employees are already working in the only academic job they’ll ever have.

4. The improper circumstances of graduate employment fuel perma-temping even on campuses without graduate education. In my field, at Louisville and many other non-Ivy institutions, graduate students teach the same 4-course annual load as the faculty (and are in many cases under more pressure to research and publish than the faculty), for 25% of the compensation or less. Faculty earn about $60,000 for research and teaching four courses; graduate employees, many of them with children, earn under $15,000 for research and the same four course load. With this improper workload and a dim future, many graduate employees, especially at non-Ivy institutions, drop out or take an extended leave. Others remain enrolled but take an extended time to degree: ten or twelve years being quite common in many fields. The persons who have dropped out or are on an extended path to their degree commonly serve as the cheap-teaching “term” labor force for community colleges and four-year campuses!
without graduate programs.

5. Because term faculty are often also graduate employees, persons on leave from a graduate program, persons whose graduate assistantship has run out, or persons who have dropped out/are considering dropping out from graduate education, it shouldn’t be surprising that the workloads, wages and benefits of term faculty closely parallel those of graduate employees. In my field, English language and literature, term workers typically earn a median wage of 2,000 a class, or about the same as non-Ivy graduate employees teaching four courses for about $15,000, generally with few benefits.

6. The majority of college faculty are term faculty.

7. In short, the terms of graduate employment have a massive impact upon the terms of academic employment generally. It is abundantly clear that the circumstances of graduate employees, especially at non-Ivy institutions, help to set the (incredibly poor) standard of wages, benefits and working conditions for the majority of the faculty workforce.

(Like graduate employees: most term faculty do not hold the Ph.D. In an historically unprecedented shift, campus employers increasingly prefer to hire non-Ph.D. teachers at impossibly cheap wages than any of the tens of thousands of highly-experienced and qualified Ph.D. holders looking for faculty work and eager to serve at anything resembling a fair wage. Most Ph.D. holders, despite having worked for years at a sub-living wage and holding substantial debt, are willing to work for wages lower than that of the average unionized police officer.)

8. Wages for tenure-stream faculty are often below the median in academic fields where graduate employment and term employment is high.

9. Women and minorities bear the brunt of the abuse of graduate employment, often representing far larger a percentage of the total workforce in low-wage academic fields where graduate employment and term employment is high.

10. Someone has to oversee the cheap-teaching corps of graduate employees and grad employees/former and intermittent grad employees working as term faculty.

11. Increasingly this work of overseeing displaces the teaching and research of the now-minority group of tenured faculty. Having tenure increasingly means: being a manager of persons who are currently, recently, or intermittently enrolled in a graduate program, whether at one’s own institution or a graduate-granting campus nearby.

12. The system of graduate employment is obviously unfair to graduate employees and faculty.

13. But it is also harmful to the public that graduate employees are so eager to serve.

What would happen if we turned over the majority of policing to police-academy students working at ¼ salary, while refusing to hire police academy graduates because they demanded a reasonable wage and health insurance? Those police-academy students may be talented and dedicated, and will gain experience as long a they can work at ¼ salary*but no matter how dedicated, most of them will be unable to work at ¼ salary for much more than two or three years, will moonlight extensively and therefore learn less and develop incompletely as professionals, and so forth. Women with families and minorities (having lower than average family wealth and income, and therefore unable to support work at ¾ volunteer rates) will not be able to embrace policing as a career. Most will quit. The public will, on average, get police workers with less experience, training, development, and degree qualification, less time for the people they encounter on the job and less involvement with the community!
in every respect. Under such a system, the police students who after a grossly extended apprenticeship become actual police officers will be disproportionately white, male, and from wealthy backgrounds (ie, who can afford to donate ¾ of their time). This is more or less the case in higher education.

14. To put this in perspective: in many fields, 35-year-old persons holding a Ph.D., with a ten-year graduate-employee work history and outrageous loan debt, are typically willing to take an assistant professorship at a salary in the upper 30s, or quite a bit less than, say, the starting salary of most 21-year-old accountants with a B.A.

15. But despite this “fire sale” in enormously qualified academic labor, administrators prefer to hire teachers who are willing or able to sell their labor marginally more cheaply, even when the difference in qualifications is huge in comparison to the labor-cost savings.

16. Nearly 60% of the American public enters higher education. The drop-out rate is concentrated in the first year of education, and in courses and campuses most relegated to the cheapest sector of teachers*the term workers who are enrolled, recent, or intermittent graduate employees.

17. The abuse of graduate employment in service of an ever-cheaper workforce will require regulation and oversight. Under budget pressure, the system of accreditation by panels composed of administrators and professional self-management has collapsed.

18. A key element of the moral collapse of accreditation and professional self-regulation is the way in which “student” status has been put to use in a decades-long legal fiction.

The masking of a true employment relation through legal stratagems (hiring though subcontractors, independent contracting, etc) is a strategy currently employed by the most exploitative employers in the U.S.*especially in the garment trades, agriculture, day labor, and so on. Higher education should be leading the way in the most just, not the most exploitative and dishonest, forms of employment.

19. Ending the abuse of graduate employment requires acknowledging graduate employment as such.

20. Permitting graduate employees to exercise the rights of labor will, with improved regulation and oversight, have a ripple effect throughout the academic labor system. By organizing a more proper use of assistantships, graduate employees will be less likely to drop out, to moonlight, take leave, or study intermittently. That is: they’ll be less likely to be shunted into term faculty work. Having to work harder to recruit term faculty means that campus employers without graduate programs will have to raise wages and improve working conditions.

21. By reducing the economic incentive for the most improper forms of term work, graduate employees who exercise their economic rights will help to reconvert professorial work to salaried positions for the tens of thousands of Ph.D. holders eager to share their experience for a modest wage. In my view, this is the single most important element of an improved higher education. This doesn’t mean that many campus employees won’t continue to prefer term work, or that administrations won’t need a proper amount of term workers to handle enrollment fluctuations. But it will eliminate the incentive for improper use of term work and graduate employment, and result in the return of hiring patterns motivated by the quest for the best teachers, not the cheapest teachers.

22. I urge the committee to consider a range of solutions to the crisis in academic labor, including regulation, oversight, and incentives for ending the improper use of graduate employment and term faculty.

The clientele for such regulation and oversight is not the higher education workforce, but the 60% of the American public who seek a better life from their campus experience.

University of Louisville
Louisville, Kentucky 40292
Email: marc.bousquet@louisville.edu

My qualifications include numerous publications, lectures and interviews on the subject of academic labor. Other experts include: Prof. Gordon Lafer, Labor Education Research Center, University of Oregon; Dr. Rich Moser, American Association of University Professors; Jon Curtiss, Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions, and Prof. Gary Rhoades, Director, Center for the Study of Higher Education, University of Arizona.