The Crisis in Academic Employment: A Local Story

April 2006: Over the last few weeks, as I have put the finishing touches on this issue of Cinema Journal, I have followed closely a story set at a university just twenty miles up the road from here—a story that brings into further relief the focus of this In Focus section.

The local story concerns Western Oregon University (WOU), a small state school (enrollment 3,917) in tiny Monmouth, Oregon (population 8,795), where in late March and early April 2006, the full and part-time faculty (represented by the American Federation of Teachers, Local 2278) prepared to go out on strike. The story of the WOU labor struggle is worth telling here if only to emphasize the extent of the present crisis in academic employment—that it affects all sorts of schools (as different in size and mission and visibility as NYU and WOU).

The first sign that there was a problem brewing in Monmouth came in mid-July 2005 when the SEIU (Service Employees International Union), the largest public employee union in the state, gained for many classified staff (comprised of mostly office workers) considerable salary increases. The staff's good fortune served only to fuel the discontent of the faculty, stuck as it was in its second straight year of a salary freeze. Collective bargaining on a new faculty contract at WOU began in July. The faculty union pressed for a higher starting salary for Step 1 employees (the bottom end of the full-time, tenure-line pay scale), pay raises to combat wage compression in the middle ranks (meant to repair long standing pay inequities) and the implementation of a system by which increased compensation would be provided for course overloads, writing intensive and independent study classes. The union collective bargaining team also focused on the problems faced by "contingent labor," and called for "significant" salary increases for these part- and full-time, year-by-year (in some cases term-by term) contract employees.

For the union (as for the administration with which they would have to bargain), the tenure-line ranks and the adjunct or contingent pool represented two very different constituencies. In what has always been a hierarchical system, academic adjuncts have emerged as a sprawling underclass, one with very different problems from and needs than the professoriate. How to balance the interests of these two constituencies was a question the union at WOU could not in the end adequately answer—this despite working diligently for both groups. (The differences between the two groups are so significant it is fair to argue that the two groups need separate unions.)

The conflict between the WOU faculty and administration followed a familiar course. Faculty proposed what in their view was a fair compensation package and then management countered with their own, which in this case included modest across-the-board salary increases coupled with cuts in summer session compensation and a dramatic reduction in faculty development funds. After several months of failed negotiations, in late March 2006, the union polled its membership and 84 percent voted in favor of going out on strike.

Once faculty declared their intention to go out on strike, the administration played hardball. In a particularly smarmy (and effective) move, management blocked faculty access to their university e-mail accounts—a strategy that did a lot more than just block faculty-to-faculty strike strategizing. The strike team recommended to all faculty that they acquire alternative accounts (through hotmail, for example), but such a suggestion did little for those on the faculty who could no longer access ongoing work and could no longer trust the security of their primary e-mail accounts.

Late in March, full- and part-time, tenure-line and adjunct faculty at WOU received a letter from the university administration asking them to declare whether or not they intended to strike. The union advised tenure-line faculty to ignore the letters; the union could assure them that their jobs would be waiting for them even after a strike. But for those working part-time, off tenure-line—the pool of low-paid, interchangeable adjuncts...