Adjucnt Action
November 18th, 2014
A new SEIU/Adjunct Action report released today called Crisis at the Boiling Point tells an important story of what’s happening in academic labor by documenting and analyzing just how much work part-time faculty are doing, when they are doing it for free and how federal employment laws often fail to protect the contingent workforce. This report also offers recommendations and actions that faculty, students and concerned members of the community can take to begin to reclaim our higher education system.
Faculty from 238 colleges and universities completed the national survey. Respondents include faculty teaching at every type of degree-granting institution: non-profit, state universities, community colleges and for-profit colleges and universities, both faculty teaching on physical campuses and at on-line institutions. Faculty responded to the national survey from 32 states with the highest percentages coming from Massachusetts (20 percent), New York (14 percent), and California (14 percent). In addition, to date, over 40 in-depth interviews have been completed with faculty to gather detailed data on working conditions.
Institutions of higher education can and do take advantage of contingent faculty’s precarious status under current employment laws and dedication to their profession to get long hours of teaching work for little—and at times delayed—payment in return.