Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education

By Joe Berry and Helena Worthen

Higher education is the site of an ongoing conflict. At the heart of this struggle are the precariously employed faculty ‘contingents’ who work without basic job security, living wages or benefits. Yet they have the incentive and, if organized, the power to shape the future of higher education.

Power Despite Precarity is part history, part handbook and a wholly indispensable resource in this fight. Joe Berry and Helena Worthen outline the four historical periods that led to major transitions in the worklives of faculty of this sector. They then take a deep dive into the 30-year-long struggle by California State University lecturers to negotiate what is recognized as the best contract for contingents in the US.

The authors ask: what is the role of universities in society? Whose interests should they serve? What are the necessary conditions for the exercise of academic freedom?  Providing strategic insight for activists at every organizing level, they also tackle 'troublesome questions’ around legality, union politics, academic freedom and how to recognize friends (and foes) in the struggle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Release date: Aug 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9780745345543

Joe Berry

Joe Berry is a founder of the Chicago Coalition of Academic Labor and a long-time leader of the international COCAL and New Faculty Majority. He has served on many national contingent faculty committees. He is the author of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education (Monthly Review Press, 2005).

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Power Despite Precarity

A masterful look at the challenges involved with organizing workers in higher education. Berry and Worthen provide excellent recommendations regarding vision and strategy, making the book valuable beyond the field of higher education.

—Bill Fletcher, Jr., author of They’re Bankrupting Us: And Twenty Other Myths About Unions

"Academic precarity screws over college and university teachers, partly via obfuscation about whether better working conditions are possible and partly by stealing our access to institutional memories of how precarious workers have risen up to win those better conditions—or something closer to them—in the past. Who fought for something better? How did they define what ‘better’ meant? What strategy and tactics did they use to make progress? What didn’t work, wasn’t worth fighting for, or wasted time along the way? Power Despite Precarity is an essential primer on these questions and more; a must-read for new adjuncts and organizers, as well as for movement veterans seeking a clear and coherent telling of the story of which they are a part, and some sparing but wise words of advice along the way."

—Alyssa Picard, Director, American Federation of Teachers’ higher education division

Empowers us to fight for the higher education and unions we believe in, uniting theory and practice to chart an inspiring path toward labor and education justice.

—Mia L. McIver, Ph.D., Lecturer, UCLA, President, University Council-American Federation of Teachers

"Written from both an organizer’s and historian’s perspective, Power Despite Precarity is essential reading for anyone working in higher education who wants a better world and wonders what it takes. Berry and Worthen provide a handbook on how the growing number of contingent faculty can unite in common cause. While it is about education, many of the lessons dealing with internal problems inside unions are not issues confined to the education sector (alas) and I especially enjoyed those parts."

—Elaine Bernard, Fellow, Labor & Worklife Program, Harvard Law School

This is not just an important book but an essential one for anyone concerned about higher education. It is impossible to separate the working conditions of faculty from the learning conditions of students, and Berry and Worthen explain how it is possible to transform both for the better of all.

—Maria Maisto, President, New Faculty Majority

Wildcat: Workers’ Movements and Global Capitalism

Series Editors:

Immanuel Ness (City University of New York)

Peter Cole (Western Illinois University)

Raquel Varela (Instituto de História Contemporânea [IHC] of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon New University)

Tim Pringle (SOAS, University of London)

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Power Despite Precarity

Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education

Joe Berry and Helena Worthen

illustration

First published 2021 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Joe Berry and Helena Worthen 2021

The right of Joe Berry and Helena Worthen to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 4553 6 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 4552 9 Paperback

ISBN 978 0 7453 4556 7 PDF

ISBN 978 0 7453 4554 3 EPUB

ISBN 978 0 7453 4555 0 Kindle

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Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

Contents

Photographs

Series Preface

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Introduction

PART I    THE CASE OF THE LECTURERS IN THE CSU SYSTEM

1 Student Strikes and Union Battles

2 Layoffs and Hard Years for Organizing

3 Revolution in the Union

4 They have nothing to teach us

PART II    HIGHER ED WAS NEVER A LEVEL TERRAIN OF STRUGGLE

5 Four Transitions and How Casualization Served Managers

PART III    WHAT WE WANT AND WHAT THE CFA GOT

6 Blue Sky #1 Organizing and Economics

7 Blue Sky #2 Job Security, Academic Freedom and the Common Good

8 Beyond the Sausage-making: A Close Look at the CFA-CSU Contract

PART IV    THE DIFFICULTY OF THINKING STRATEGICALLY

9 Strategies Emerging From Practice

10 The Contingent Faculty Movement as a Social Movement

PART V    SEVEN TROUBLESOME QUESTIONS

11 What Gets People Moving?

12 Who is the Enemy? Who are Our Allies?

13 What is Professionalism for Us?

14 How Does It Feel?

15 Is this legal?

16 What About Leftists?

17 How Do We Deal With Union Politics?

PART VI    USING THE POWER WE HAVE

18 Hopes and Dangers

Essential Terms

John Hess: A Life in the Movement

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Photographs

(pages 149–154)

1a. Buttons from contingent faculty movement, mainly from the CFA. 1b. Buttons and ephemera from separate contingent faculty movement campaigns since 1997 in US, Canada and Mexico.

1c. Logo from the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, used from the late 1990s to the present in various campaigns.

1d. Posters, buttons and news articles from the CFA.

1e. Protest against massive class cuts and layoffs at City College of San Francisco, 2021.

2. Gary Zabel and Harry Brill, early COCAL founders, at UMass Boston in the late 1990s.

3a. John Hess, circa 2005.

3b. The CFA’s Dog and Pony Show satire on management presentations and programs.

3c. CFA San Francisco State University Action.

3d. Jonathan Karpf and Alison McKee, Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Radio, Television and Film at San Jose State University and Chapter Vice-Chair for CFA with a Credible Strike Threat at San Jose State University.

3e. The CFA at California State Capitol in Sacramento, CA.

3f. Mayra Besosa (chair of AAUP Committee on Contingency and leader of the CFA from CSU San Marcos) and John Hess.

3g. CFA Lecturers’ Council Meeting.

3h. CFA leaders from various campuses, delegates to the Edmonton COCAL conference.

4a. COCAL VI march in downtown Chicago to five higher-ed institutions to present report cards on treatment of contingent faculty.

4b. Marchers preparing at Roosevelt U. Joe Berry speaking to COCAL VI rally before the march.

4c. Joe Berry and Christine Pfeiffer presenting report card at Columbia College, Chicago.

4d. Joe Berry and Frank Brooks presenting report card at Roosevelt University.

4e. CFA delegates to COCAL VI, Chicago.

4f. March stops in front of Harold Washington College.

5a. Mexican delegation at University of Alberta, Edmonton.

5b. Ontario Public Service Employees Union action to gain bargaining rights and contract for contingent faculty and staff in colleges in Ontario.

5c. Action at George Brown College, Toronto, Ontario. Contract faculty is a Canadian term for contingent faculty, referring to a limited contract.

5d. Canadian student support action.

5e. Ontario colleges strike action.

6a. Plenary session at COCAL X.

6b. Arturo Ramos Alamazan 2004 in Chicago.

6c. Welcome banquet sponsored by AAPAUNAM, and STUNAM.

6d. Open COCAL X International Advisory Committee discussion to evaluate conference and plan future actions.

6e. Sylvain Marois, FNEEQ and Université Laval Québec; Arturo Ramos Alamazán, Maria Teresa Lechuga, David Rives, Oregon Federation of Teachers and COCAL Webmaster; members of the COCAL International Committee.

6f. Lunch gathering of partial COCAL Advisory Committee in Mexico. 6g. Maria Teresa Lechuga and Mary Ellen Goodwin.

6h. Marcia Newfield, vice president of Professional Staff Congress, AFT, CUNY and COCAL International Advisory Committee.

Series Preface

Workers’ movements are a common and recurring feature in contemporary capitalism. The same militancy that inspired the mass labor movements of the twentieth century continues to define worker struggles that proliferate throughout the world today.

For more than a century, labor unions have mobilized to represent the political-economic interests of workers by uncovering the abuses of capitalism, establishing wage standards, improving oppressive working conditions, and bargaining with employers and the state. Since the 1970s, organized labor has declined in size and influence as the global power and influence of capital has expanded dramatically. The world over, existing unions are in a condition of fracture and turbulence in response to neoliberalism, financialization, and the reappearance of rapacious forms of imperialism. New and modernized unions are adapting to conditions and creating class-conscious workers’ movement rooted in militancy and solidarity. Ironically, while the power of organized labor contracts, working-class militancy and resistance persists and is growing in the Global South.

Wildcat publishes ambitious and innovative works on the history and political economy of workers’ movements and is a forum for debate on pivotal movements and labor struggles. The series applies a broad definition of the labor movement to include workers in and out of unions, and seeks works that examine proletarianization and class formation; mass production; gender, affective and reproductive labor; imperialism and workers; syndicalism and independent unions, and labor and Leftist social and political movements.

Acknowledgements

Both of us would like to begin by thanking our parents. On both sides, our mothers and our fathers were teachers. Their lives would have been very different if they had had a union.

Then we thank John Hess, in memory, his son Andy Hess and Gail Sullivan’s son Sean Sullivan. We thank Catherine Powell, the Director of the San Francisco State University Labor Archives.

Un-named individually but essential to this project are the activists who are engaged in this struggle across North America, including the now 3,000 plus subscribers to COCAL Updates who have read and forwarded this news aggregator for over 20 years now. They have also written reports, sought and given advice and generally been the backbone of this movement as well as serving as guinea pigs for innumerable academic survey studies about contingent faculty.

This book is a channel of movement knowledge. Although we are responsible to a great extent for what is included, we are not going to say that all mistakes are our responsibility. They are not. Some of the errors and misapprehensions that will be cringe-worthy ten years from now are not our fault. This is one of the consequences of something being a collective project. Fixing those errors in print or in practice will be the responsibility of whoever writes the next book and makes new errors. We hope this extended acknowledgement section demonstrates a bit of how movement or union learning happens, with a bow to D’Arcy Martin for coining the term, union learning. This concept is discussed at much greater length in Helena Worthen’s book What Did You Learn at Work Today.

In many ways this book is a sequel to Joe’s 2005 book, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower (RIT), which was about organizing contingent faculty. It was published the year after the 2004 COCAL VI conference in Chicago where we first tried to define a strategy for the contingent faculty movement. Since the publication of RIT, people have asked for something that talks about the work of representing contingent faculty and the movement overall. A lot of the same people who helped us with that book and then pushed us to do this one are still around, although older. So to start we want to thank again all those who agreed to be interviewed for RIT, especially Earl Silbar from AFSCME Adult Educators in Chicago City Colleges and Tom Suhrbur from IEA/NEA. Steve Hiatt and Beverly Stewart were Joe’s key readers and editors before that book was handed off to Monthly Review Press.

Therefore we want to start with thanking our friends in Chicago who have stayed in the fight and contributed to the book which you are reading now, more than 15 years later. We include among these Beverly Stewart, Frank Rogaczewski, Frank Brooks, Joe Fedorko and LuAnn Schwartzlander at RAFO; Jocelyn Graf; Richard Schneirov in Indiana; Curtis Keyes at East-West University, Diane Stokes and Steve Edwards at AFSCME 2858; Rick Packard, Marie Cassady, and John Bolter at CCCLOC; Tony Johnson at AFT 1600; Tom Gradel, Karen Ford and Sergio Finardi of the NWU; and Penny Pixler of the IWW. In Champaign: our colleagues Martha Glotzhober, Toby Higbee, Gene Vanderport, Jim and Jenny Barrett, and especially Ed Hertenstein, our Director of Labor Ed at the School for Labor and Employment Relations, and Joel Cutcher-Gerschenfield, who was Dean while we were there. Like a lot of people, we took inspiration from the Chicago Teachers Union, CTU/AFT Local 1, their 2012 and subsequent strikes.

The following people have played multiple roles in our lives over many years. Among them are Fred Glass, who has been at various times our colleague, editor, supervisor, fellow labor educator, friend and comrade. Steve Hiatt, our long time friend, read the entire manuscript several times and has been an ongoing strategic advisor about everything related to publishing. Rodger Scott, colleague of many decades, former AFT 2121 union president, author and documentary film maker, persistently encouraged Joe Berry to write more and get a PhD. Maria Teresa Lechuga, who has taught at the UNAM (Autonomous University of Mexico) for 20 years in the Acatlán Faculty of Higher Studies. and Arturo Ramos Almazan, who is a professor at UNAM and was President of the University of Chapingo Academic Union (2001–2003), are friends, colleagues, and have provided essential support for the participation of Mexican faculty in the COCAL International conferences. Brian Simmons, carpenter and contingent faculty member for many years before finally getting hired full-time, helped us keep bikes, phones and computers running and asked the best questions. Frank Cosco, former president of the Vancouver Community College Faculty Association, where contingents have the best contract in North America, inspired this book on the best contract in the United States. He also co-authored the Program for Change with Jack Longmate, to whom we also owe deep thanks. Jonathan Karpf read this manuscript, corrected many errors and persuaded the CFA to subsidize this project financially and politically. Gary Rhoades of the University of Arizona has published some of the best research on faculty and their unions and has encouraged us in our work for many years.

There are also groups, networks and organizations that have been a home base, sometimes a refuge for us and others in this movement. These are places where the goal of the elimination of contingency is not debatable. The COCAL International Committee is an evolving group we have been part of since 1999, and without them this book definitely would not exist. Of that group especially Marcia Newfield, Vinnie Tirelli and David Rives have been consistent supporters. Emerging from COCAL, the Campus Equity Week national committees and the workers on those committees all over America since 2000, especially in California and Illinois, have been important. We have been long-time members of the California Federation of Teachers, especially the Part-timers Committee (where Joe and Helena met in the late 1980s) and the Coalition to Save City College. For Joe, AFT 2121 and recently the Retirees’ Chapter have been critically important. Both former President Alisa Messer and now-retired Executive Director Chris Hanzo have discussed many of the ideas in this book over the years. The Labor Notes network, its publications and conferences, has been essential for us, as it has for thousands of others. The New Faculty Majority National Board, including Judy Olson, Anne Wiegard, and Robin Sowards, led by Maria Maisto, has provided an example of how to apply our strategies in real life. The Service Employees International Union’s Adjunct Action AKA Faculty Forward campaign, led nationally by Melini Cadambi Daniels, is patterned after the pioneering work done at SEIU Local 500 in Washington, DC, and Anne McLeer. The United Association for Labor Education and its journal, Labor Studies Journal, has enabled us to publish and find colleagues in the United States and Canada, in particular long-time friend Bruce Nissen, faculty activist in Florida. The Journal of Labor and Society, formerly WorkingUSA, edited by Manny Ness, has published our work on this and other labor topics and appointed us both to their editorial board. We thank him for inviting us to submit our manuscript to Pluto’s Wildcat series. We have also benefited from the behind-the-scenes, priceless work of the San Francisco Bay Area Labor History Workshop and the Illinois Labor History Society. Last but not least, Joe thanks the old labor guys in the Bay Area BOYZ Group.

There are also important places where ideas in this book have been debated, developed and clarified, where participants have a specific stake in these issues but where our view is not taken for granted. The work here ranges from common projects, movement campaigns, to writing and publishing articles. These include the San Francisco Bay Area Higher Educators United; the National AAUP and its Committee on Contingency and the Professions and Joint Committee on Contingent Faculty and Governance, chaired by Mayra Besosa of CFA; the Organization of American Historians Committee on Part-time, Adjunct and Contingent Employment; the California Part Time Faculty Association and its conferences; the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges conferences; the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education; the Left Forum conferences and journal, Radical Teacher; the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education, especially Michelle Savarese, co-author with Joe Berry of the 2012 directory of faculty unions and contracts; the Coalition on the Academic Workforce; the Part-time and Contingent Faculty Caucus of National AFT and Alyssa Picard of AFT; the Center for the Study of Academic Labor, Colorado St. U, and the Contingent Faculty Committee of the NEA.

Of course, the primary organization that informed this project was the California Faculty Association. John Hess was able to provide both the personal experience and the contacts in CFA who could fill in a retrospective participant action research case study. In addition to the people who were interviewed and quoted at length in this book, we want to thank Alice Sunshine, Lil Taiz, Craig Flannery, Chris Cox and Vincent Cevasco who provided some of the photos and IDs.

We especially want to thank the people who agreed to be interviewed: Susan Meisenhelder, Nina Fendel, Jane Kerlinger, Jack Kurzweil, Katie Quan, Jonathan Karpf, Anne Robertson, Elizabeth Hoffman, Gretchen Reavy, Craig Flannery, and Bob Muscat.

People who read and commented on early drafts include Marcy Rein, Michael Mauer, Gary Zabel, James Tracy, Steven Herzenberg, Richard Moser, Robert Ovetz, David Kellogg, Fang Li and Earl Silbar.

Many people listened critically to our thumbnail summaries, gave us places to stay, interviewed us and asked hard questions, loaned us a car or otherwise provided material support. These include Kathy Kahn, Gail Sullivan, Mona Field, Martin Goldstein, Leanna Noble and Hollis Stewart, Pamela Vossenas and Michael Italie, Frank Bardacke and Julie Miller, Gary Zabel, Harry Brill, Heather Reimer, Jonathan Kissam, Bill Shields, Toni Mester, Mark Greenside, Bob Gabriner, Michael Zweig, Carol Stein, Cita Cook, David Slavin, Barbara Wolf, Ishmael Minune, Wendy Rader-Konofalski, Barbara Byrd, David Rives, Bob Bezemek, Keith Hoeller, Gifford Hartman, John Blanchette, Don Ehron, Sue Doe, Suzanne Hudson and Patrice Lawless.

Finally, the team at Pluto has been incredible. After a COVID-delayed start, our experience working with Pluto has been marked by seriousness, promptness, good communication and the sort of professionalism that comes from seeing a project as part of a movement, not a commercial venture.

Joe Berry and Helena Worthen

Berkeley, California

May 2021

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Introduction

These days it’s easy to imagine global disaster. It’s harder to imagine how to build a sustainable, safe, equitable society. However, that’s what we have to do. More specifically, we have to visualize the role to be played in that transition by higher education faculty. The changes we see taking place today, in the wider world as well as in higher education, are accelerating trends that have been in motion since the late 1970s. Foremost among them is increasing inequality, both economic and racial, which is taking place in the context of the climate crisis. These trends have serious political ramifications.

This book focuses on workers in higher education. Although we are college and university faculty, we are also precarious or contingent workers—in the sense that our jobs are contingent on factors that have nothing to do with the quality or importance of our work. Our employment lacks the necessary rights and conditions to make the best education for students or to provide a decent life for ourselves. We are now the majority, between two-thirds and three-fourths of all faculty. Our industry is in a crisis. Since the pandemic began, thousands of us have been laid off. Universities and colleges have sent students home (sometimes to other countries), moved to online classes, dropped traditional grading and assessment systems, paused admissions processes and passed emergency rules to allow layoffs of all faculty, including tenured faculty.1 Even before the pandemic, public institutions faced huge deficits that challenged our system of funding but now many small institutions have checked their balance sheets and decided to fold completely. At the same time, new flexible employment strategies that build on Internet communications are emerging. All of them assume contingency, gig work, as a fundamental feature.2 This is to say nothing of defaults on the debts incurred by our students, which can only be paid if those who owe have jobs, and will likely trigger a chain reaction similar to the defaults on real estate in 2008.

Now we are faced with a sharp choice. Either we submit to what Naomi Klein calls the shock doctrine and open the door to disaster capitalism, or we wield our power to make this social and political crisis deliver something positive for us. In order to do this, we need to think strategically.

STARTING WITH A HISTORY

To construct a picture of what can be done, we begin with the history of faculty organizing in the California State University (CSU) system starting (though not from scratch) in the early 1970s. We follow it through into the present, showing the many alliances that were built and the different fights on different terrains that eventually produced what is considered by many to be the best contract and the best working conditions for contingent faculty in the United States. Most of this history took place before there was a real contingent faculty movement, before we used the term precarious to describe employment, and before there were lively Internet connections. During this time, faculties were experiencing casualization without really understanding its significance. We make the point that this long fight played a major role in the development of what is now a national and in fact international movement of contingent faculty. We know there will be a new normal: This fight is over what that new normal will be and who will decide it.

Despite the immediate crises, we think that the key characteristic of this struggle is its continuity. A summary update on the 2021 situation in the CSUs is that the struggle has continued, both vis-à-vis the employer and within the union. The Lecturers’ Council of the California Faculty Association (CFA) continues to be the locus of debates, the Lecturer leadership has become more diverse, contingent faculty have taken leading roles throughout the union, the union itself has maintained a high level of internal organization and membership despite the loss of agency fee funding, and the contract continues to be likely the best in the US. More good news is that other contracts at other institutions are rising toward this standard.

Today we are still fighting for the same fundamental conditions we fought for in the 1970s. Our working conditions are still our students’ learning conditions. It still takes a long, long time to build solidarity. Our arguments about organizing, who should be organized, and how, still hold, with their implications for how we relate to our students and the rest of society. Our definition of tenure as just cause dismissal has not changed: just as in other workplaces, employees in higher ed should presume continued employment unless there is a just cause—a good, transparent, non-discriminatory reason (and there are legal definitions of this)—for firing someone. Our arguments about the general social wage and bargaining for the public good have not changed. Nor has our Blue Sky vision of what a union can mean for faculty.

HIGHER EDUCATION: A PROFIT-SEEKING INDUSTRY THAT HAS BECOME A BUBBLE

In the last forty years, but especially in the last twenty years in the US, we have seen higher education transformed into a profit-seeking industry. This goes beyond the for-profit sector itself (examples are the University of Phoenix, Kaplan, Grand Canyon University, and the various Academies of Art, to say nothing of the fraudulent Trump University). It has also reshaped the public and non-profit sectors through the ratcheting-up of the cost of tuition, the privatization of student loans, the recruiting of overseas students to stuff sagging budgets, the competition for rankings and the promotional displays of luxury accommodations and recreational facilities. The flow of money through the whole project of academic research has distorted what is studied, what is judged, what is published and who has access to it. The higher ed industry, like the real estate industry and its sibling, the finance industry, has found a way to suck down the wealth accumulated by the previous generation during the 1950s and 1960s, the years post-World War II when inequality for a while actually leveled off and conditions for the working class improved. Many people have noticed that there is a higher ed bubble, a bubble that, when it collapses, will hurt most those who have bought into it, trusting that another credential will make a difference in their employment expectations. This pain will be felt the most, as usual, by those who can least afford it: both teachers and students.

So what remains of higher education when selling diplomas is no longer a quick way to turn a profit, when no number of credentials can get a graduate a job in an economy where there is between 15 and 30 percent actual unemployment, where universities and colleges are stripped of tax support and parents are challenging the price charged for online classes? What does higher education for the public good look like in this day and age?

OUR PLACE IN THE LABOR MOVEMENT