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Hourly Advocate Table of Contents | Santa Monica College Faculty Association
Volume 16, Issue 2 |
December 2001 |
Part-Time Faculty Go On Strike over Working Conditions!!
By Andrew Walzer
Not exactly. At this point in time this is not a likely scenario. yet we all know how bad teaching conditions are for part-timers. Poor pay, insane teaching schedules, few if any paid office hours, scurrying from one campus to another. We know the statistics: most part-timers at Santa monica College receive 65% wages of the full-time faculty. We all know we are rendered invisible by our working conditions. We know these things, we know there're wrong, and yet the majority of part-timers largely acquiesce. Many part-timers do not even make the effort to join faculty associations, even though both Santa monica college and the Cal State system are both agency shops, which means that part-timers pay union dues in any case.
Why are part timers so inactive? Why don't we say: "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore?" What holds part-timers back? What can we as organizers do to get more part-timers involved in working to obtain pay equity, to lobby, to put pressure on both our faculty associations and on the administration to meet our needs?
Part-timers often tell me that they are so overwhelmed by their busy schedules that they simply don't have time for activism. Yet the history of union organizing suggests that when workers are successfully politicized around their issues and have a sense of hope for change, they find the time for activism. The recent campaign to organize home health care workers in Los Angeles is a case in point. here was a group of workers with seemingly insurmountable obstacles to organizing: they had busy schedules, they rarely worked in the same place at the same time, and they were at the bottom of the health profession. and yet they did in fact successfully organize.
So what is it that holds part-timers back? Yes, logistically part-timers are often spread so thin that they are hard to track down. yes, because they are spread between campuses they often have little loyalty to one place. But there is also a psychological and cultural dimension that we need to confront if we are going to successfully organize. Part-timers often feel shame because we see our status as lower than that of full-time faculty. In addition, because we are professionals, we are trained to think of workplace issues in individualized terms; the reason, we think to ourselves, that we are not full-time faculty is that we do not work hard enough, or not smart enough, and if we just work harder and think harder, we can make it on our own and get that tenure track job. of course, the facts don't show this. The number of job openings for full time faculty is been reduced significantly in recent years. There is clearly a structural strategy to hire part-timers as a way of reducing costs, and in order to maintain a disempowered work force.
As in all social movement organizing, we need to challenge the attitudes among part-timers so that we come to realize that our conditions are not due to our failures as individuals, but are in fact related to structural problems in the contemporary workforce. We need to realize that we are not alone in our struggles. We need to create a space where we part-timers can come together and voice our struggles, and begin to see that our problems are shared by others. Out of this realization arises an analysis that these problems are not individual but structural; that our shame is the mechanism that keeps us down. We need to have a critique of the economic system that systematically disempowers us and keeps os scrambling for work, running from place to place at a frenzied pace.
As a result of this mindset, many part-timers have just given up hope. yet this attitude is unwarranted. We've made some gains in recent years for part-timers: paid office hours, state money for part-time equity, making more part-timers eligible for associate faculty status, re-hiring rights. We need to continue on this path, and build a successful movement to fundamentally alter our workplace conditions. And the only way we can do this is with the broad based participation of part-timers. This means you!
