Bread and Roses, and Quality Too? A New Faculty Majority Negotiating the New Academy

ABSTRACT

This study of 252 collective bargaining agreements examined language negotiated in “class cancellation fee” provisions addressing “just-in-time” employment of adjunct faculty. The analysis focused on the balance between managerial discretion and professional rights and on whether and how contract language addresses remuneration (bread) and respect (roses) as well as quality, which are at the heart of the contingent faculty labor movement’s mantra about faculty’s working conditions being students’ learning conditions. Comparing the language in 64 bargaining units that cover only adjunct faculty to language in 188 units that combine part- and full-time faculty, and considering the language negotiated in Service Employees International Union “metro campaign” contracts, I found that provisions are both markers of precarious employment and of adjunct faculty’s agency to countermobilize and improve the quality of their working conditions, particularly in part-time-only units and in the new metro campaigns, though not in terms of language explicitly invoking quality concerns.

KEYWORDS:

• Adjunct faculty
• class cancellation
• negotiation
• professional jurisdiction
• union competition
• unionized faculty

Notes

^1. “Adjunct” is descriptively problematic and pejorative but is the most widely used term for faculty employed in part-time (though often multiple such) positions.

^2. The database covers faculty in far more than 502 individual institutions because many contracts are for state systems of 4-year institutions or community college districts. The database also includes many earlier versions of current contracts.

^3. The success of an adjunct faculty campaign at George Washington University and then later at American University and Georgetown University under the umbrella of SEIU Local 500 led other SEIU locals to push the international union to launch other metro campaigns around the country. Boston was the second major effort in this regard. The metro idea has deep roots in labor history, and the AAUP previously tried a variation of it in Boston. Moreover, other unions (AFT in Philadelphia and United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh) are running metro campaigns. Yet the number and prominence of SEIU’s efforts are predominant. The strategy is premised on organizing and servicing employees where they are, working at multiple campuses, and perhaps ultimately having one contract for them, though at present, metro campaigns continue to lead to institution-based CBAs (some campaigns have set up metrowide organizing committees).