BY MIA MCIVER AND
LEVIN KIM SPECIAL TO THE SACRAMENTO BEE
November 16, 2022
Forty-eight thousand academic workers across the University of California system hit the picket lines this week in the largest higher education strike in U.S. history. These graduate student instructors, undergraduate peer tutors and postdoctoral scholars walked out of their classrooms and labs to protest poverty wages, a lack of respect and an employer that repeatedly breaks state labor laws.
Universities across the country rely on low-wage, part-time, temporary workers, often construing student workers and postdocs as trainees or apprentices to justify low-quality employment. But the system these workers are supposedly being apprenticed into is broken. Despite their hard-won expertise, graduate students and postdocs look forward to a market made up mostly of adjunct faculty gigs that don’t provide health benefits or enough pay to cover their student loans. American colleges and universities are failing their workers.
American colleges and universities are failing their workers.
When adjusted for inflation, wages for many higher education employees have remained flat or decreased. Adjunct professors, who make up the majority of the instructional workforce but are hired on temporary contracts, typically get only $3,000 to $5,000 per course.
American higher education today relies on precarious employment and high turnover as a business model, keeping wages low and workers insecure.
This crisis was primarily driven by state and federal divestment from colleges and universities starting in the 1970s. The failure to properly fund higher education as a public good shifted costs and hazards from the state to students, who were reinvented as consumers of education.
You might expect tuition hikes to improve the welfare of college and university staff. Instead, the rising costs of attending college have gone hand in hand with sharp limitations of academic workers’ rights
Divestment is destroying the foundations of the public higher education system. It has led to privatization of public institutions, meteoric tuition growth, rising student debt and a steady destruction of labor rights.
Tenured professors, who enjoy excellent job security, now teach only one-quarter of university classes and conduct only one-eighth of university lab research. Yet tenure protections are under attack across the nation, and most people teaching college-level classes don’t know if they’ll still have a job next semester.
It should come as no surprise that academic workers are fighting back. Just as the Starbucks and Amazon workforces are organizing, employees of colleges and universities — from student dining hall staff to tenured professors — are demanding an end to an unfair and unsustainable system.
Contingent faculty members at the University of California won greater job security through labor actions. Coordinated organizing is part of how we make higher education accessible and affordable. In the UC system, graduate student instructors, postdoctoral scholars and academic researchers built power by aligning bargaining units to negotiate simultaneously with university management.
Isolated actions are not going to solve a systemic problem. Higher education workers of all stripes must unite. Tenured faculty in particular must build solidarity with their more precarious coworkers. Labor justice for campus workers and education justice for students and alumni go hand in hand. The future of our democracy, which depends on an educated citizenry, is at stake.
Levin Kim is a graduate student at the University of Washington and the vice president of United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 4121. Mia McIver is a contingent faculty member at UCLA and a member of UC-American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 1474.