Pandemic magnifies adjunct precarity: Here’s what we’re doing about it

By Daniel Pieczkolon

Several weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels somewhat silly to remark upon how this global catastrophe has changed everything. Our work lives, our home lives and our civic lives have all been altered. What hasn’t changed though, at least in any foundational way, is the precariousness of the contingent faculty member in higher education.

As “An Army of Temps” — the AFT’s new report on contingent faculty’s working and living conditions — illustrates in painstaking detail, contingent faculty are accustomed to operating in a state of economic anxiety, healthcare insecurity and general uncertainty. The pandemic did not create these conditions, but it has exacerbated them.

In the short term, it has added substantial (largely uncompensated) work to already-burdened faculty members’ plates — many of whom teach at several institutions simultaneously to try to cobble together a “full-time salary” and are now tasked with learning and operating different learning management systems. In the medium term, it threatens the already-fragile job prospects of many contingent faculty members. With enrollments sure to dip in the fall, contingent faculty will be forced to watch with bated breath as their courses are canceled or reassigned to full-time faculty members. And, while none of us can say for certain what the long-term consequences of this will be, universities have implemented austerity measures and used them as grounds to mistreat this fungible workforce for far less than a global health crisis.

Contingent faculty are accustomed to operating in a state of economic anxiety, healthcare insecurity and general uncertainty. The pandemic did not create these conditions, but it has exacerbated them.

At the United Academics of Philadelphia, where I serve as president, we are combating these unprecedented circumstances with our innovative metrowide model. Over the past several years, we have built a dual project designed to improve the living and working conditions of contingent faculty in higher education via both traditional collective bargaining methods and some newer organizing practices that recognize the transience of higher ed workers.

We helped to organize the adjunct faculty at Temple University (who then joined the full-time academics union, the Temple Association of University Professionals, on their campus), and, at Arcadia University, we successfully organized a union and negotiated a first contract. Alongside this work, we have been building a coalition of “non-collective bargaining members” who teach and work at schools across the Philadelphia metro region. These members pay a voluntary flat dues rate each month and help us continue to grow as we embark upon the quixotic goal of organizing contingent faculty at every school in the area. (We are currently deep into the process of organizing another school in the city and will be going public with that campaign soon!)

With enrollments sure to dip in the fall, contingent faculty will be forced to watch with bated breath as their courses are canceled or reassigned to full-time faculty members.

In this moment of triage, we have tried to carry over our dual-pronged organizing approach. For our collective bargaining members, we are relying on the collective bargaining agreement we’ve negotiated to protect contingent faculty members where it can, and planning for ways to bolster and improve those protections in the next round of negotiations. For our non-collective bargaining members, we are offering solidarity and community and, perhaps most notably, resources that try to recognize the tangible consequences of this exploitative system.

Thanks to the tireless work of our treasurer, Anna Neighbor, we are running unemployment insurance workshops to help contingent faculty members navigate an ever-changing bureaucratic aid process that is still learning how to properly classify our labor (and the access to essential resources it warrants). We are leading student debt clinics to make sure that contingent faculty members’ paychecks aren’t lower than their student debt payments (which are sometimes accrued at the same universities that are currently underpaying them). And we are hosting tax filing workshops to help faculty make sense of a “salary” comprised of disparate revenue streams.

Now more than ever, we recognize the importance of finding ways to fill the immense void created by a higher education system predicated upon treating our labor as simultaneously cheap, disposable and essential.

These are all things we did pre-COVID-19, but just as this pandemic has magnified the inequities inherent to the system, so too has it amplified the significance of these programs. We are using our collective power to organize for a better future, but, perhaps now more than ever, we recognize the importance of finding ways to make the present sustainable — finding ways to fill the immense void created by a higher education system predicated upon treating our labor as simultaneously cheap, disposable and essential.

Daniel Pieczkolon teaches writing at Arcadia University and literature at Rowan University. He has been the president of the United Academics of Philadelphia since its chartering in 2019.

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