no more tiers—or, how i learned to abolish bad jobs by making them better

Vaughn

16 WorkingWorkingWorkingWorkingWorkingUSAUSAUSAUSAUSA—Spring 2003

WorkingUSA, vol. 6, no. 4, Spring 2003, pp. 16–22.© 2003 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.

ISSN 1089–7011 / 2003 $9.50 + 0.00.

WILLIAM VAUGHN directs the program in first-year composition at Central Missouri StateUniversity in Warrensburg. A founding member of the Graduate Employees’ Organization, IFT-AFT/AFL-CIO, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, he has written widely on suchtopics as academic labor, earlier American literature, and the sublime.

No More Tiers—or, How ILearned to Abolish Bad Jobsby Making Them BetterWilliam Vaughn

Those who would organize across or within academictiers must not be deterred by the legal challenges. Inaddition, we must resist the urge to address problemsindividually by always working toward that next job;acknowledge our common cause; recognize that ourtalents in listening, learning, teaching, andpersuading already prepare us to be organizers;reassert faculty governance through active organizing;and thereby model professional responsibility for peersand the students who would become our peers.

IT IS INDEED A CHALLENGE ORGANIZING MULTIPLE TIERS OF ACADEMICS—that is, building unions across the boundaries dividing graduateassistants, instructors or adjuncts, and tenure-line employees. I

have never organized two tiers simultaneously, but I have occupiedand organized each of the tiers at some point, most prominently as afounder of the Graduate Employees’ Organization, IFT-AFT/AFL-CIO,

Making Bad Jobs Better

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at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I write as someonewith five years’ experience in that campaign; with informal involve-ment in a related effort to mobilize instructors at the same institu-tion; and with some interest in sparking labor activism in my currenthome state of Missouri, where I occupy my first top-tier job, teachingEnglish and directing the program in first-year composition at Cen-tral Missouri State University.

Two-Tier Organizing in Illinois and Missouri

My advice to those who would approach two-tier organizing entailsattending to the same issues that all academic labor organizers shouldunderstand. Know the legal constraints, how they affect potentialunions, and how to respond to these laws. Recognize how porous thetiers are—and perhaps always were—and why we have them. Under-stand the best arguments and strategies for mobilizing academic work-ers. And appreciate the bases for optimism in such campaigns.

In the two states where I have worked, academic organizing is in-deed thwarted by legal constraints. Illinois has a statute that had beenread to deny employee status—and thereby the right to belong to arecognized bargaining unit—to anyone whose work identity dependsupon some academic one. Until recently, graduate assistants did notcount as employees for the purposes of labor law because their workroles—as teachers, researchers, and office staff—are contingent upontheir educational relationship with the employer. Thus, when thegraduate employee union at Illinois first petitioned for an election, ittriggered a legal dispute that culminated, five years later, in a victorygranting that union representation rights. It did not, however, sus-pend its campaign during those five years.

Smart unions know that even winning an election does not meanyou stop organizing. By the same token, hostile labor law should notkeep you from starting a campaign. There is a lot to be won on theway to recognition, and graduates at Illinois garnered pay raises, aswell as better and more health care options, even as the university’sboard of trustees refused to recognize their bargaining unit.

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In Missouri, the relevant antilabor statute prohibits “all teachers ofall Missouri schools, colleges, and universities” from forming unionsor bargaining collectively. (The only other employees similarly ex-cluded are “police, deputy sheriffs, Missouri state highway patrol-men, [and the] Missouri national guard.” I’ve always liked to believemy work was essential for maintaining public order—now I have theproof!) It should come as no surprise that this statute has dampenedenthusiasm for organizing. My experience at Illinois, though, sug-gests there is much to be gained from simply ignoring the law. TheIllinois statute dates from the mid-1980s and originated ambiguouslyas part of the governor’s amendatory veto; the original authors of theact of which it is a part never intended to bar graduate assistants fromunionizing. The Missouri statute is similarly shrouded in mysteryand dates from the 1920s—hardly an era when workers of any kindwere being actively encouraged to form unions. One should not re-frain from acting because an employer is able to cite outdated or ill-designed statutes.

Faculty Instability and Organizing

If I seem blithe in translating my Illinois experience to a new state, itis because even while I was at Illinois, I saw colleagues make similartranslations. One fellow early member of the graduate union is nowheading up the campaign to organize academic professionals at thesame institution. Additional founders and members are organizingteachers, nurses, and other workers elsewhere. At the same time, badmanagement translates at least as effectively as activism—thereby ne-cessitating an activist response.

My current status as a tenure-line professor at a teaching-intensiveinstitution—we teach four courses a semester, as opposed to the twothat would be common at a research school—in many ways approxi-mates the conditions of the contingent work I once did. I still do nothave a real contract with my employer, and indeed, within a year ofstarting my job, the board of regents unilaterally rescinded ourinstitution’s salary schedule, replacing it with some vague plan for



“market-” and “merit-based” compensation. This move is simplythe most egregious instance of a top-down management style thatrepeatedly flouts faculty desires, and gives the lie to any pretensethat those of us on the top tier are in any better control of our workcircumstances.

This is not to deny real differences between my current tier andthe one I originally occupied. Before universities became educationalmanagement organizations, tiers were justified in terms of the inher-ently hierarchical knowledge foundation of the academy itself. Thereasoning is casuistic, but it would seem to go like this: Just as weaccept subordinate roles relative to our professors as we acquire thesocial capital of education, so, too, ought we to tolerate degradedwork circumstances as we prove our ability to secure the better jobsour improved minds deserve. That old hierarchy is now reinforced bynewer imperatives. Today, management justifies tiers as a means offlexibility. Indeed, at one point, certain bottom-tier workers in theEnglish department were known as “emergency” hires. (My favoritevariation on this terminology comes from my adviser, who, whenoriginally hired as the partner of a tenure-line person, was known—along with other such employees—as an “emergency wife”!) Of course,the emergency has lasted now for thirty years, and it is disingenuousto be arguing for flexibility when the need for English teachers is sorigidly predictable.

I feel obligated, though, to suggest that employees themselves mayfacilitate their own flexibility. Too many of us succumb to what I callthe “next job” syndrome. We are advised as graduate students thatour own educations are more important than the teaching we do topay for those degrees. We make similar arguments when we acceptadjunct positions to remain viable for tenure-line jobs. And peoplewith jobs like my own are often more focused on the better job downthe road. Were it possible, I suspect that most of those in my profes-sion would hope to attain endowed chairs at schools in the Bay areaor New York City. In the meantime, though, we work in places likeWarrensburg, Missouri. We can’t eliminate tiers immediately, but wecan resist our own tendencies to tolerate them, by spending our en-

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ergy where we are and making those jobs better, rather than by onlyimproving our own profiles so we can escape such jobs.

Start where you are, and start where your colleagues are, too. AtIllinois, we never organized around money, for all that we took creditwhen stipends increased. The issues then and now were respect andrecognition, and in graduating from that first tier to my current one,I find that such concerns endure for my profession, at least in west-central Missouri. Unions are a way of securing genuine governance,such that the employer cannot arbitrarily alter work rules.

Student government was a feckless response when I was in graduateschool, and faculty senates can make all the noise they want, but ifyour employer has no reason—legal or voluntary—to respond to yourdemands, you are just wasting your time participating in a systemthat is rigged against you. Most academics want to be treated likeprofessionals, and they want to believe they are at least partners ingovernance. Once you exhaust the alternatives, you realize that unionsare the professionally responsible rejoinder to campaigns thatcorporatize universities. Money matters, but most of us became aca-demics because we believed in the kind of service the academy offers,not because we thought we would get rich. When we allow our workto be degraded by those whose main imperatives are monetary, weowe it to ourselves and our profession to organize and protect ourway of life.

Yet even those who recognize the necessity of such a response of-ten feel inhibited. What do academics know about unionizing? Of-ten more than they realize. Organizing can be understood to combinefour skills: listening, learning, teaching, and persuading. You need tohear what members and potential members are saying, both to repre-sent them better and to respond to their needs. You need to know theterrain: the differences and similarities between various departmentsand colleges, how one stage of a campaign or negotiation differs fromanother. You need to stay current and be able to impart the mostrelevant information. You need to know what to say when. If youhave ever been a student, or a teacher, or a scholar, you know how todo these things.



Organizing and the Future of Higher-EducationFaculty

The best organizers may have the strongest sensibilities for the work,but any of us who survive the academy’s own rigors know how to payattention, and acquire new ideas, and transmit and defend them. Thoseof us who have been paying attention to what has been happeningto the academy lately are learning a lot, and we ought to want todefend our way of life, which will only happen if we transmit thatcommitment to colleagues and successors who will similarly want todefend it.

In the end, I choose to remain optimistic, irrespective of tiers, stat-utes, next jobs, or other barriers. I have seen the way individual aca-demics have inspired others to activism. Such mentoring was acommon index among those activists I have interviewed about thebases of their labor work. I also saw it happen in my own department,and when, at Illinois, I agreed to take part in an illegal occupation ofthe offices of the board of trustees, I did so even though, as an ad-junct, I was no longer being represented by the union staging theevent. (Our purpose was to provoke an arrest, so as to be able to say,“You’d rather arrest us than negotiate with us.” The administrationwisely opted not to take that bait.) Nevertheless, I felt responsible tomy current students who were part of that union, and I was proud tosee them participating in other facets of the event, just as I was proudto hear of former students who later played key roles in a walkout atIllinois three semesters later. When we train professionals, we mustalso model for them a sense of professional responsibility.

That same responsibility, expressed among peers, becomes the ba-sis of real solidarity. (Indeed, such solidarity is precisely the goal oftrue mentoring: we model responsibility for our students so that ourstudents may become peers.) When I have interviewed unionists, they

In the end, I choose to remain optimistic, irrespective of tiers,statutes, next jobs, or other barriers.

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often point to their first large meeting as the turning point for theiractivism. Seeing other people as upset and concerned as themselvesmade them realize both that they were not alone in the struggle, andthat, together, they could make a difference. In my own career, I havebeen struck by the number of job interviews I experienced whereprospective colleagues expressed a real interest in having an orga-nizer join their department.

Knowing all this, it was with a real sense of obligation that I spokeup two years ago at the academic forum where we discussed thechanges in our compensation policy. From the front of the room, Iturned my back to the provost and addressed my colleagues. I pointedout how we were calling this an “academic” forum, when, really, wewere all there to discuss an employment concern—specifically, whathappens when an employer unilaterally changes the terms of em-ployment. In other circumstances, I pointed out, the proper responseto such a gesture would be to organize a union, in which case wewould deal with such matters not by way of a forum but throughcollective bargaining. As an assistant professor, I lacked even themodest protection of tenure that my tier might have afforded. In itsplace, though, I possessed a sense of professional responsibility, plantedby mentors, honed by experience, and justified by results. The onlyway we will ever transform the two-tier workplace—the only way wewill ever transform either tier—is by starting from where we are, tak-ing responsibility for our circumstances, and abolishing bad jobs bymaking them better.

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no more tiers—or, how i learned to abolish bad jobs by making them better

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