The Montreal Declaration

 

In North America, a significant proportion of work in higher education is performed by contingent faculty. This is the same phenomenon affecting employment in other sectors in health care, in communications, in business.

 

In the name of increased corporatization, scarce resources, competition between institutions and a flexible labor market, our working conditions have degenerated.

 

This is why, across North America, we have chosen union and collective action. What was true for workers in the 19th century is true for contract faculty in the 21st century: we are stronger together!

 

We, contingent faculty from across North America meeting in Montreal this October 5, 2002, are committed to our movement’s common struggle to end the exploitation generated by contingency.

 

We seek the recognition of our contribution to quality education and to improve our working conditions.

 

We pledge to continue the struggle, to help one another and to provide support and solidarity from Mexico to Rimouski, from Vancouver to Boston.

 

 

By Martin M. Goldstein

 

    As part of my work for the FA, as well as CPFA,  I attended the fifth Conference on Contingent Academic Labor, held this year at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, October 4-6, 2002. Given the scope and significance of the Conference, we are devoting this entire issue of the ADVOCATE to our report on and impressions of COCAL V.

 

The History of COCAL

    The first National Congress of Adjunct, Part-Time, Graduate Teaching Assistants and Non-Tenure Track Faculty was held in Washington, DC in December, 1996, and the second was held at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City in April, 1998. Primarily an East Coast movement, it was renamed the Conference on Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) and held its third conference in Boston in April, 1999.

    In the fall of 1998 the California Part-Time Faculty Association (CPFA) was formed, and soon after plans for A2K (Action 2000), a California Community College Campus Equity Week was set in motion for the spring of 2000. Through email and personal contacts, the two movements became connected, and at the June CPFA Plenary, following the very successful A2K activities in California, CPFA resolved to host COCAL IV in January, 2001, in San Jose.

    This became the most successful conference yet, with representatives from eleven states and five Canadian provinces. It helped to permanently connect the east and west coast American movements as well  as start to  bring together  the different Canadian movements who, in part due to the French/English language and cultural differences, had not previously met in one place.

    But in San Jose, on neutral ground, they found their common cause, and this instigated a new partnership among organizations from British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, leading to the group from CUPFA (Concordia University Part-Time Faculty Association) committing to host COCAL V in Montreal in 2002.

    This has become without question the most widely attended and productive COCAL of all, with 225 representatives from fifteen states, eight Canadian provinces and Mexico. As we observed participants from virtually every major American faculty organization sharing ideas and enthusiasm over the three days of the conference, we can’t help but feel that our Canadian friends have more than repaid us south of the border folks for the benefit they had gotten from San Jose. Funny how all that works.

 

Un nouveau defi

    After registration, schmoozing among the usual suspects, and introductory remarks by co-chairs Marie Blais of Federation nationale des enseignantes et des enseignants du Quebec and Maria Peluso of CUPFA, the Conference kicked off mid-day on Saturday, October 4 at Concordia University. “It’s Time for a New Deal” was the slogan of the Conference, “un nouveau defi” en francais, with simultaneous translations available through headsets, giving it the aura of a UN session. It was actually tri-lingual, with the Mexican presentation translated from Spanish to English, then simultaneously into French over the  headsets. Way cool.

    The opening Plenary started by raising one of the basic issues of the part-time equity movement: How do you get people involved? Part-time teachers, like all contingent workers, often feel ashamed of their situation. They feel like it’s their fault that they are so marginalized, kind of a Battered Adjunct Syndrome. By the time they realize their actual condition, they have become so beaten down they hesitate to use even the rights they do have, thus perpetuating the system for themselves and others. (We know, of course, that this does not apply to any of you...)

 

But the emergence of activism on the east coast (primarily New York City and Boston) and in the west (primarily California and Washington state) which instigated COCAL, North American Alliance For Fair Employment (NAFFE), etc. began to signal the beginning of the end of this sense of defeatist isolation for part-timers. We are no longer “ghosts in the classroom.”  The drive for equal pay and equal work, the battle for full and fair participation in academic life has been joined, and it is no longer seen as a part-time issue, but rather an issue that affects all of higher education globally.

 

The dreaded “F” word

    Rich Moser, a part-time organizer for American Association of University Professors, contemplated these broadening goals of the movement in his opening remarks. What is needed now, he posited, is a social vision, equivalent in strength and depth to the corporate vision of most administrations, where the dreaded “F” word, “flexibility” is a mantra, and efficiency and the bottom line rule. Our vision must include the democracy, decency and, yes, the idealism that academic freedom, buttressed by job security for all, can engender.

    He cited the fact that his boss, Jane Buck, president of the American Association of University Professors, was at this COCAL to  illustrate the dramatic shift in attitude of mainstream academia toward this issue. It is increasingly understood that the long-term cost of contingent academic labor is a long term loss to all faculty of the freedoms they have taken for granted -- while those freedoms slipped away for an increasing percentage of their fellow teachers. Fully 50% of all American higher ed is non-tenure track today; thirty years ago it was zero. You do the math in terms of how much academic freedom has consequently been lost in that time.

    The afternoon Plenary was followed by a festive march from Concordia to UQAM, Universite de Quebec a Montreal, accompanied by a brass band, a stilt walker, and large banners  and  posters.    Canada  has  a  strong populist streak, and the support in the street was upbeat and encouraging, and press coverage was for the most part full and favorable.

    Once at UQAM we had more remarks, a little wine and hors d’oevres, and a Celine Dionne-esque chanteuse recruited from their PT contingent. The evening was soiree libre, free time, and we tried the Metro (clean and efficient, if a tad expensive), then went to dinner in Old Montreal at a restaurant built in 1754, followed by a relaxing walk through  the cobble-stoned streets filled with art galleries and countless restaurants, enjoying the European atmosphere of this beautiful city, which happily seems to have put much of its prior cultural animosity behind it.

 

Job Security = Academic Freedom

    The work of the Conference continued on Saturday, with morning and afternoon Ateliers (Workshops) following a Plenary on the state of contingent academic labor in North America. While the problems are vast, it was clear from the remarks of the panelists that we have reached a new level in the movement recently. No longer are we fighting to have the issue recognized as a problem; we are now united in increasingly larger and more powerful groupings working to solve it.

    Among the diverse workshops were ones on Benefits, Distance Education and Intellectual Property, Academic Freedom, Collective Bargaining, and Inter-Union Collectives, such as CPFA, NAAFE and COCAL itself.

    We spoke in the workshop on Job Security, and presented the recent achievements in Associate Faculty status at SMC to a packed, attentive, and appreciative audience. Discussion during and following the workshop made it clear that our actions will serve as precedents and guidelines for similar efforts by many others. The work towards equity at SMC started here over fifteen years ago, and the fruits of those labors, initially led by The Hourly Advocate’s founder, Jim Prickett, are now serving as examples for all of North America.

While there is much yet to be done, we do have a right to be proud of ourselves, along with the obligation fight for others less fortunate than we are.

    Rich Moser made job security the focus of his remarks during the mid-afternoon plenary, making the simple and clear connection: Job Security = Academic Freedom. With it, you have it; without it, you don’t. And as we enter into an era of  a never-ending “War on Terrorism,” with its associated pressures to conform to the government’s world view, now is an especially dangerous time to lose those freedoms which have traditionally allowed us to debate major issues of public policy in the campus environment.

    As we mulled this over, we came to the understanding that it is precisely us, the academic underclass of contingent employees who, by fighting for our rights, may end up restoring to all of higher ed the value system that helped make it, and our country, so often the world’s benchmark of a functioning democracy.

    That sense of our greater mission was one of the major epiphanies of COCAL V, and it was one that began to pervade the Conference by the time we got some play time at the “soiree” gala dinner that Saturday night. Exhausted as we were by this time, you could sense the elation we all felt from the emotional and intellectual energy that surrounded us, and there are rumors that we even danced by the end of the evening. Fortunately, being three time zones away, this will be hard to prove.

 

The Globalization of Contingency

    Sunday was devoted to a broad perspective on the Globalization of Contingency, with remarks from representatives of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, who’s 40,000 academic workers are two-thirds contingent. 

    One hundred years ago most industrial workers were contingent, we learned.  Then the modern job (and modern unionism) developed,  but   now  we  are  rushing  forward into the past as we see the re-emergence of contingent labor in fully thirty percent of all jobs in this country and in Europe, according to NAFFE. Unionized secure jobs are leaving the developed world and are emerging in the developing world as contingent labor. This exporting of contingency -- “neo-liberal globalization” is how they phrased it in Montreal -- has become, under many different labels, one of the biggest geopolitical issues of our time.

    The conference ended with a discussion of the time and place of the next COCAL’s -- Chicago in 2004, and Mexico in 2006.  After that we’re going to vote for Maui in 2008, by which time we will have won the battle and can really celebrate -- but there’s a bit of work to be done before we get there. So if you want to get involved, drop by the FA office. We’re sure we can find something for you to do.

 

Mission to Montreal

Report on COCAL V