Work is Work!

On International May Day I wrote a little hymn. I wrote:

Teaching is work. Programming is work. Scholarship is work. Science is work. Grading is work. Committee service is work.

Today Chronicle Vitae published a column on academic work as labor, as work.

It's a linked column to this first piece on the language of adjunct labor. In that piece, I worked through a number of different ways in which adjunct advocates speak about their work, using the language of slave, sharecropper, or migrant laborer. I think this language is mistaken. But here's how I finished the piece.

The issue here is not that writers are loosely deploying hyperbolic metaphors. The real problem is that adjuncts and their advocates believe the rest of us aren’t on their side.

We tut-tut and say it’s too bad, but then throw up our hands, blame the budgets, and let the system continue. Civil rights, slavery, sharecropping, migrant laborers—these are terms that evoke sympathy and demand action within the neoliberal world of higher education in ways that just calling adjuncts “temps” does not.

So let’s not be too quick to blame adjunct advocates for invoking historical inequities when trying to change the system. Instead, let’s question why such metaphors seem necessary. I propose that the plight of the adjunct lies squarely alongside that of a long-recognized historically oppressed group: the working class. Why are faculty so resistant to seeing themselves as labor who need to act in solidarity with the exploited adjuncts?

In my next column, I’ll look at what happens when we put all these metaphors aside and just look at adjunctification as a basic labor issue, one in which we all have a stake.

In today's piece, I really just want to make a simple argument.

Work is work.

As academics, we know a lot about the nature of labor, the ebb and flow of power mostly up to management, but not always. We read about the changing nature of the workforce across the country, but for those enough of us lucky - and let's be clear that luck is a huge part of it, there is no meritocracy - to be on the tenure-stream side of things, it's hard to apply such lenses to ourselves.

I find it hard. Maybe you don't. But plenty of other people see little connection between the plight of the adjunct and their own labor situation.

Work is work.

You are paid for your work. You should be paid for your work. Let's apply the lens of "labor" to what we do in academia, to think of administration as management - maybe nice management, maybe trusted management, but management none the less.

I am very lucky in my job and my bosses. I trust them. But they are still my bosses (some of them read my blog! Hi there!). There's nothing wrong with having a boss, but we need to remember that there is a power dynamic here. And once you bring power into the equation, well, we're back to the labor movement.

I finish today's piece with the following:

We need to recognize that what’s happening to our universities is happening across the North American labor market (and beyond), and that we’re not special. Other highly-trained, specialized industries have turned to contingency work. Higher ed is no different. In fact, we could learn from the industries that increasingly argue that one must treat contingent workers as full members of the community.

Why not embrace the pressures that are falling on the university? Be proud of being laborers, identify with your fellow workers, and organize across the tenure-adjunct divide. Ultimately, it’s the only thing that’s going to improve the situation.

Best of all, it’s the right thing to do.

It really is the right thing to do.

A Higher Education May Day Hymn

There is power in a factory, power in the land

Power in the hands of a worker

But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand

There is power in a Union.

Just in the last few weeks, the rhetoric of the adjunct crisis in American Higher Education has shifted, intensifying around the language of  work, labor, and unionization.

Now the lessons of the past were all learned with workers' blood

The mistakes of the bosses we must pay for

From the cities and the farmlands to trenches full of mud

War has always been the bosses' way, sir.

Academics, even adjuncts, resist thinking of themselves as labor, as workers, as their occupations as work. We call ourselves artists or artisans even as the industrialized neoliberal forces bear down on us to turn us into dehumanized cogs.

The Union forever, defending our rights

Down with the blackleg, all workers unite

With our brothers and out sisters from many far off lands

There is power in a Union.

And sure, academic work is not coal mining. But look where the unions remain strong today - in highly skilled labor for the most part, rather than the blue collar factory work. This is a tragedy for the American people, but it's not a tragedy we can easily fix. One thing we can do is to embrace the power of unions in our own profession and to demonstrate that unionization need not be a disaster for the bottom line of cash-strapped educational institutions. No, what unionization does is give the scattered contingent workers a voice at the table, a look at the books, and the chance for procedure to replace arbitrary hirings and firings.

Now I long for the morning that they realise

Brutality and unjust laws can not defeat us

But who'll defend the workers who cannot organise

When the bosses send their lackies out to cheat us?

Teaching is work. Programming is work. Scholarship is work. Science is work. Grading is work. Committee service is work. This is not to embrace the business-speak model of the academy; no, that model seeks to de-value your labor. Labor - valuing your work as work - is the antidote to business-speak.

Money speaks for money, the Devil for his own

Who comes to speak for the skin and the bone

What a comfort to the widow, a light to the child

There is power in a Union.

This is easy for me to say. I have tenure. I was lucky. It's hard for me to just say it's luck because I worked so hard to get here, struggling with low wages and the brutal job market. But here I am and I can say that there is no meritocracy even though I do have merit. So do we all. I can't blame the frightened tenured professor for clinging to the myths of merit. I can't blame the adjunct for just thinking that if they keep their heads down, work hard, publish more, maybe break into something new and exciting like digital humanities, then the dream tenure-stream job will be waiting.  Maybe it is, but if not, organize. Change the conditions for the great majority.

The Union forever defending our rights

Down with the blackleg, all workers unite

With our brothers and out sisters from many far off lands

There is power in a Union.

All I can be, for now, is a cheerleader to your movements. But I am cheering. I am also talking to my peers so that when you have a picket line, we will be on it. We need to see our work as work too. All labor movements happened this way - with the disadvantaged in charge but the lucky advantaged in support, eroding the false perceptions of class difference. Belief in the meritocracy is a tool of the bosses. 

In the end, to change these conditions, you are going to have to exercise the power that comes from any movement. Organization. Pickets. Work stoppages. Propaganda to convince your peers and people like me that this is a fundamental labor issue. Academia is special, but we're not that special. Work is work. And ...

There is power in a Union.

Adjuncts are Labor. Professors are Labor. Graduate Students are Labor.

Adjuncts are Labor. Professors are Labor. Graduate Students are Labor.  Staff are Labor. Administrators, well, that's more complicated. What's a "Chair" anyway? More on that later (and in the meantime follow that link for a good piece on definitions).

I am going to be writing regular columns for the Chronicle and Chronicle Vitae over the next few months (and hopefully indefinitely, but I've got about 15 columns planned at this point on various topics, though organized around language and how it shapes the decisions we make).

I wanted to start with a few pieces nominally about adjuncts, but in many ways really about the rest of us and our response to adjuncts. Here's the first column - Sharecroppers. Migrant Workers. Adjuncts? - and some thoughts on it.

Resources: Adjuncts as slaves. Contingency in the modern workforce.

My opening anecdote is true. A friend, just about to finish his PhD and finishing a great 1-year, offered me a lift to JFK from Fordham's Lincoln-Center campus. I paid for parking and tolls, glad to skip the taxi or the train. In the car, he asked me what I thought about adjunct rights as civil rights. I gave him a response then and this essay is the longer form version once I actually read the work to which he was alluding.

Over the past few years, an increasing number of voices have argued that adjunctification is best understood as something especially terrible rather than an all-too-typical example of the rise of contingency across the North American workforce. Why do advocates need to go to such rhetorical lengths to gain our sympathy? 

In the piece, which I hope you will read and share (thus increasing my chances of having more columns published there),  I do two things. One, I argue that adjuncts are not slaves, migrant workers, or sharecroppers. Two, I argue that people use this language because we're not listening, or if we are listening, we don't act.

The issue here is not that writers are loosely deploying hyperbolic metaphors. The real problem is that adjuncts and their advocates believe the rest of us aren’t on their side.\

We tut-tut and say it’s too bad, but then throw up our hands, blame the budgets, and let the system continue. Civil rights, slavery, sharecropping, migrant laborers—these are terms that evoke sympathy and demand action within the neoliberal world of higher education in ways that just calling adjuncts “temps” does not.

The solution is not to see adjuncts as labor - the solution is to see yourself as labor.

 More to come.