Higher Education is #USWMade!

Steelworkers members work with some of the most amazing material in the world – steel and metals, rubber, paper, oil and the human brain. Higher education is #USWMade! The United Steelworkers union is proud to represent thousands of university professors and workers and Canada, including at the University of Toronto, Queens University and Guelph University. We also are proud to stand with hundreds of adjunct professors in the United States, including approximately 800 adjunct faculty members in the Pittsburgh Metro Area, including Robert Morris, Point Park and Duquesne University. These sisters and brothers are standing up for their rights as workers so that they can provide the best possible education to their students.  After all, faculty working conditions are student learning conditions. Adjunct faculty member Robin Sowards is one of our members fighting for these rights. He shared his story with us:

Like most of my fellow academic workers, I originally went into college teaching out of a commitment to students and a desire to have a stable job in a relatively democratic workplace. From the time that universities were first created in 12th-century Europe by faculty and student guilds (the medieval predecessors of modern labor unions), faculty and students called the shots. But in the last half-century or so, universities have been taken over by corporate managers, who have driven up the costs to students and their families astronomically, while simultaneously attacking the working conditions of faculty, which are the learning conditions of students. The deadliest attack on faculty is the creation of a two-tier employment system.

In 1969, 78% of higher education faculty had job security protected by tenure and had comfortable, though not luxurious, salaries. Now only 24% have those jobs, and the rest of us are precarious workers. Most of us are part-time “adjunct” faculty who are paid below the poverty line, with no benefits, and who are automatically fired (and have to reapply for our own job) at the end of every semester, even if we’ve been teaching there for 30 years. So while students and their families are paying more and more, this two-tier employment system means that they’re getting less and less for it, not because faculty don’t care about students but because they have to scramble between multiple jobs just to make ends meet. The normal full-time workload in higher ed is eight courses per year (or as few as four, if you also have research duties), but I’ve known “adjunct” faculty who teach twenty or more. Meanwhile, a nearby state university spent $800,000 renovating the President’s house (provided for free by the University) to install Italian marble and chandeliers and crystal door knobs—in case you were wondering where all that money is going.

For me, the two-tier system meant that, even with an Ivy League PhD, I couldn’t find anything but “adjunct” faculty work. In the Summer of 2011, I got together with some of my fellow academic workers at Duquesne University who had had enough, and we decided to form a union. We looked around at a variety of affiliation possibilities, but kept coming back to the USW: we wanted a real fighting union, with a strong tradition of rank-and-file democracy and firm roots in this region. And since my great-grandfather was a steel worker (and one of my earliest memories is standing on a picket line with the nurses striking at the hospital where I was born), coming to the USW felt like coming home.

By the summer of 2012, we had won our election overwhelmingly (85% in favor). But Duquesne’s administration refused to recognize our union because, they said, their status as a Catholic university exempts them from the National Labor Relations Act. (Catholic doctrine disagrees: the Church says that unions are “an indispensable element of social life” and that “No one may deny the right to organize without attacking human dignity itself.”) We offered to bargain outside the NLRA framework, just like K-12 Catholic school teachers in Pittsburgh do, but they refused, proving without a doubt that they are more interested in power and money than any religious or moral values.

But, even without recognition, we have been able to put so much pressure on the administration that they have been forced to give us a raise. When we started organizing we were making $2,500 per course, and now we make $3,750 per course, a 50% raise. This is still too low, since we’re not permitted to teach more than 4 courses per year, which yields a maximum salary of $15,000. And it still violates the principle of equal pay for equal work, since tenured faculty earn $16,000 per course to do exactly the same work. But it’s a major step towards closing the gap and abolishing the two-tier system.

More importantly, we’ve built an organization through which our brothers and sisters stand up for one another, and in which we make decisions democratically. And we’ve gone on to organize unorganized “adjunct” faculty all over the city. We won’t stop fighting until the two-tier system is abolished; until the faculty, who actually do the work, are in charge of how that work gets done; until all working people can afford to provide their children with a high-quality, well-rounded education; and until students can graduate without a dark cloud of debt throwing a grim shadow on their future.

If you’re a USW member, tell us about the amazing things you do or what you make by filling out the form below.