Degrees of Shame, Part-Time Faculty: Migrant Workers of the Information Economy, and: A Simple Matter of Justice: Contingent Faculty Organize (review)

These two videotapes provide the best descriptions of the "new-majority" college faculty, and model how videos can document, engagingly, labor-force changes and their struggles. This reviewer must acknowledge that I am one of the interviewees in Simple Matter of Justice, and that I have personal and professional relationships with the filmmaker. I write this review, however, as both a labor educator and an activist in the movement with a strong interest in seeing good materials promulgated and bad ones ignored, whatever their sources.

Degrees of Shame is an exposé in the tradition of Edward R. Morrow's famous farm-worker film, Harvest of Shame. Based mainly upon interviews with contingent faculty, it exposes a secret of higher education: most faculty now work part time without job security, health benefits, or even living wages. With its broad overview, the video is similar to Freeway Flyers, which the American Federation of Teachers did over fifteen years ago. Like most exposés, Degrees of Shame suffers from leaving the viewer wiser but possibly skeptical that anything can be done to change the situation. For that reason, it should be shown only when accompanied with supplementary discussion and information about the movement. Nevertheless, the video has been used effectively in organizing efforts, and the NEA made hundreds of copies to distribute to higher-education locals. Partly because of the criticism leveled at this type of exposé, Wolf embarked upon a much more ambitious project—to document the growing contingent-faculty movement in North America. Wolf's effort became a new video, A Simple Matter of Justice.

A Simple Matter is organized in chapter form. Subjects of chapters include: political economy and history, a supportive administration at the University of Kentucky, the statewide part-timers' lawsuit in Washington state, joining a full-time faculty union in Lennoxville, Quebec, the metro strategy in Boston, statewide organizing in California, organizing in Chicago (especially the breakthrough at Columbia College), and an afterward at the 2001 conference of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor IV in San Jose that shows the birth of Campus Equity Week. Used separately, the chapters have proved effective in organizing meetings, and fuller screenings have helped to educate new activists about the movement. The videotape documents how fearful "second-class" workers created a movement complete with a bi-national leadership, in coalition with the established unions but also outside their structures and control. It gives heart and courage to those thinking of organizing—and that is what any organizing video should do.

In addition, labor education could use A Simple Matter of Justice as a model organizing video and to illustrate both the obstacles and counter-strategies of organizing efforts generally. It overlaps particularly with problems faced by other contingent workers, professionals, largely female workforces, and especially those not traditionally organized. Finally, we who work as university-based labor educators should view these videotapes to learn more about our own still mostly unorganized workplaces, and how we might help change that embarrassing reality.

Degrees of Shame, Part-Time Faculty: Migrant Workers of the Information Economy, Barbara Wolf, 1999, and A Simple Matter of Justice: Contingent Faculty Organize, Barbara Wolf, 2002, two volumes, in chapters, are available from Wolf at 1709 Pomona Court, Cincinnati, OH 45206, phone 513-861-2462, fax 513-861-6273, <br_wolf@hotmail.com>. Degrees is $15 to adjuncts, $20 to individuals and $50 to institutions. Simple Matter (2 vols.) is $60 to individuals, $150 to institutions, plus $10 if purchase order. No written guide is provided, but a detailed table of contents, with running times, accompanies the two-volume video set.