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Part-Time Faculty Meet at Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) VI

Dominic Wetzel

More than 200 adjuncts - instructors, teaching assistants, graduate assistants and non-tenured faculty - from throughout North America, Canada, Mexico and the US convened in Chicago during the first weekend in August to address the direction and future of the part-time faculty movement.

Spirits were mixed. Many were buoyed by the achievement of NYU TAs, who recently secured themselves a contract that greatly increased their wages and benefits, yet most were frustrated by reports of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which recently declared grad assistants and teaching assistants to be primarily “students” rather than “workers.” Voting along strict partisan lines, the panel reversed its former ruling, which had allowed NYU TAs to form a union. In other words, a panel of Republicans appointed by Bush nullified Brown University grad and teaching assistants’ attempts to form a union - threatening the part-time faculty union movement.

Little do most CUNY grad students know that our own little Doctoral Student Council helped to jump-start the part-time faculty movement. The DSC was crucial in initiating the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL), which then spread to regional alliances, which are particularly strong in California, the Pacific Northwest and the Boston area. The biennial conference, which migrates around North America, has served as a meeting point and opportunity for strategy-building for contingent academic activists. It also supports Campus Equity Week, last held in October 2003, which highlights the plight of contingent academic labor by holding teach-ins, educational and political campaigns on campuses throughout North America.

COCAL’s conference, which shrugged off funding from major unions in order to preserve its autonomous nature, provided a remarkable opportunity in its workshops for networking. In one workshop, activists from California, Michigan, Wisconsin, Boston, Iowa, Illinois, New Jersey and New York City discussed their own homegrown organizing strategies. They debated the benefits of starting unions versus joining the unions of full-time staff, as well as other dilemmas of organizing, but also traded success stories. For instance, at the University of Iowa, wages and benefits for graduate employees were the lowest in the Big 10. Since starting a union in 1996, Iowa is now at the top. At the University of Michigan, “grade strikes” over healthcare “takebacks” proved a very successful tactic. Another workshop discussed strategies of “coming out” as a contingent laborer.

It was particularly interesting to hear the experiences of Mexican contingent academic laborers about their exploitation, demonstrating how global the corporatization of the university has become. Attendees also discussed the creation of linkages with other types of temporary workers, as many members of COCAL are also part of NAFFE (North American Alliance for Fair Employment), which advocates for the rights of all contingent workers. The conference ended with a raucous march to various colleges and universities in the Chicago area, which were handed report cards gauging the conditions of their contingent laborers (needless to say, if these institutions had parents, their asses would be red).

The conference provided the opportunity for adjuncts, TAs, and grad assistants from the New York-New Jersey area to meet and plan to form a regional COCAL network, which can then be used to support a diverse range of activist efforts at various universities and sites. A listserv has been set up for the NY/NJ regional COCAL for those interested in networking with other contingent academic labor activists and workers to better your conditions of work and pay (one can join the listserv by sending an email to dwetzel@gc.cuny.edu). For more information on COCAL IV and plans for COCAL VII in the Pacific Northwest in 2006, go to www.chicagococal.org.

Dominic Wetzel is a student in the PhD program in Sociology.