Power Despite Precarity

Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education

Joe Berry, Helena Worthen

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780745345543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Higher education is the site of an ongoing conflict. At the heart of this struggle are the precariously employed faculty 'contingents' who work without basic job security, living wages or benefits. Yet they have the incentive and, if organized, the power to shape the future of higher education.

Power Despite Precarity is part history, part handbook and a wholly indispensable resource in this fight. Joe Berry and Helena Worthen outline the four historical periods that led to major transitions in the worklives of faculty of this sector. They then take a deep dive into the 30-year-long struggle by California State University lecturers to negotiate what is recognized as the best contract for contingents in the US.

The authors ask: what is the role of universities in society? Whose interests should they serve? What are the necessary conditions for the exercise of academic freedom? Providing strategic insight for activists at every organizing level, they also tackle 'troublesome questions' around legality, union politics, academic freedom and how to recognize friends (and foes) in the struggle.

PART I

THE CASE OF THE LECTURERS IN THE CSU SYSTEM

1

Student Strikes and Union Battles

JOHN’S FIRST MEETING

John Hess dated his involvement in the battle to a phone call from someone he didn’t know:

From my point of view, it started in 1978 or 1979. I could figure out the date if I had to. I had just begun teaching as a part-timer at San Francisco State. And this guy called me up on the phone, introduced himself as … Bill … He said, “They’re going to disenfranchise the Lecturers. It’s at four o’clock today in the faculty club. They’re going to disenfranchise the Lecturers!” And I didn’t even know what a Lecturer was. He sort of went on and on about this. He didn’t explain very much. He just sort of emoted. How he got my name and why he called me I don’t know.

John was in fact a Lecturer himself, the term used in the California State University system (CSU) for someone who was hired off the tenure line on a per-class, per-semester basis—that is, a contingent. He was one, but he didn’t know it. He is telling the story of his first contact with his own union, what was then the San Francisco State chapter of the statewide United Professors of California (UPC), affiliated with the California Federation of Teachers and American Federation of Teachers.

John didn’t grasp what “disenfranchise” meant, either. It had to do with what might happen as a result of a law that might soon be passed. People were asking who would be covered by that law. Would Lecturers be covered? Plenty of people did not want Lecturers covered. “Disenfranchised” in this case could mean “not covered” by the law.

This law, if it passed, would be a collective bargaining law that covered public-sector university employees in California. Without such a law, management did not have to bargain with a union. Thus, as far as labor relations in higher education in California went, it was an “eat what you kill” kind of Wild West environment: you got whatever agreements from management that you could force based on your strength on the ground. However, even without a law that required management to bargain, people had formed a faculty union. (Some people might say that a union was even more necessary under these conditions.) It was a meeting of this union that John was called to attend.

At that time there was, of course, the federal collective bargaining law known as the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA), which granted and protected the collective bargaining rights of private-sector workers in all states, but state universities are part of the public sector. So the NLRA did not cover public employees (which meant government at all levels) anywhere. The NLRA also excluded many other workers, such as domestic and agricultural workers. Passing laws to enable collective bargaining in the various levels of the public sector was left up to the states. California was just beginning to pass these laws in the late 1970s.

John mainly understood that there was some kind of emergency that he was being summoned to get in on:

This was my first year of teaching at San Francisco State—my second semester or maybe the first semester of my second year. Bill went on and on, and finally, in order to get him off the phone, I agreed to come. Up until that moment I had wisely surmised that it was a good idea to stay out of other people’s business. Come, teach your class, and leave! Because if you don’t do that, it would inevitably piss somebody off. And given the power imbalance, like job insecurity, it was not a good idea to piss people off. Eventually Bill—Bill Compton, that was his name—he taught math— did piss people off and basically got fired.

But anyway, I went to this meeting and it was packed.

There are several reasons for starting with these quotes. People who work as contingents in higher education will recognize the first: a sense of risk. John figures out that he is being asked to come to a meeting where other people may vote on a proposal to eliminate some of his potential rights. But he knows instinctively that showing up at that meeting to vote against that proposal could mark him as a problem and may cost him his job. Second, it shows that John, who within a few years would become a lead organizer for Lecturers, started out not really even knowing what a Lecturer was. This is common; people can become great organizers even if they start out thinking that they know nothing. And third, he gets involved because someone asks him to. The personal call makes the difference.

“I don’t know how he got my name,” John says. He only knew this person by reputation as a troublemaker, but the call got his attention and he went. This is the beginning of John becoming an activist and organizer on his own behalf. Previous experience had already led him to activism on behalf of others, for social justice generally, and even socialism. He had interviewed film-makers in Cuba and East Germany and had gone to El Salvador and Nicaragua on solidarity trips. But this was the start of his becoming an organizer for himself in the place where he could be most effective (and would be most at risk): his own job.

BACKGROUND: THE SAN FRANCISCO STATE STRIKE, TEN YEARS EARLIER (1968–69)

The fact that this meeting took place in the 1970s at San Francisco State University is important, but appreciating its significance requires some historical background.

Under the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education, tuition in the CSU was free, as it was in the community colleges and the University of California system. (There are three higher ed systems in California: the community colleges, the CSUs, and the University of California system.) Students neither paid money nor went into debt to take classes in any of these, though they still had to pay for living expenses and books. The student demographic was therefore beginning to include many people whose parents and grandparents had never attended college, especially women and minorities.

Higher education up until the late 1960s had always been predominantly a middle- and upper-class white male domain. Everything from curriculum to student services reflected that fact. A major transition would be necessary to make it a place where this new demographic could get their education. This transition would not be easy. The San Francisco State strike (1968–69), the biggest and longest of many such student strikes during that period, against racism, the Vietnam War, and for students’ rights and other issues of decision making at the level of institutional governance, is an example of how hard it was.¹

What some historians now call “disturbances on campuses” were taking place all over the US, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa during that decade, making the year 1968 synonymous around the world with student and popular uprisings. The strike at SF State was led by the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), a coalition of ethnic student groups: Black, Chinese, Latino, Pacific Islander and Filipino, supported by the mainly white chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and later, by AFT (American Federation of Teachers) Local 1352, which included many of the college’s faculty members, including Lecturers. As we noted above, at this time there was no formal bargaining and therefore no formal bargaining unit. But like the TWLF and SDS, the AFT local was led by conscious leftists who sought radical university reform and internal university democracy with a “serve-the-people” ethic toward the surrounding communities.

So at SF State in the late 1970s, when John got this phone call, the 1968–69 strike was still a recent memory and a point of pride. Novelist and poet Kay Boyle described her experience teaching at San Francisco State during the strike in her 1970 book, The Long Walk at San Francisco State.² These disturbances, involving the arrests of hundreds of students and faculty, had been going on for over two months by the time she wrote the following in her diary:

Today, students and police clashed in the most violent campus battle since Columbia [University in New York where students occupied buildings]. The students had called a rally at the speakers’ platform, and the police poured onto the campus, broke ranks, and like madmen rushed the students again and again, clubbing them to the ground. (Boyle 1970, p. 50)

The president of San Francisco State, Robert Smith, resigned. S.I. Hayakawa, famous for wearing a jaunty powder-blue beret, replaced him. Photos abound that show the famous moment when Hayakawa climbed onto the strikers’ sound truck and tore out the wires. The impact of both that action and the picture redounded to his benefit with Governor Reagan and the right wing, such that he was later elected to the US Senate as a Republican. It also became a symbol of the extent to which administrators would go to repress the movement.

Hayakawa stood on the roof of the Administration Building and shouted through a public address system: “If you want trouble, stay right there, and you’ll get it!” Boyle continued:

The students were enraged by the unprovoked attack and more than 2,000 refused to go. They fought the police with everything they could lay their hands on; chairs from the cafeteria, table legs, rocks, garbage cans. By evening, the entire leadership of the black community—moderates, liberals, radicals—had broadcast their shock and anger and announced they would be on campus to defend their children from police brutality. (Ibid., p. 51)

The student strike lasted five months, ending in March 1969. AFT Local 1352 and the trustees of the university also agreed to a settlement, which included many of the students’ strike demands.

From the perspective of ten years later, when John started teaching at San Francisco State, that settlement was considered a win, and is still considered so today. The agreement led to the creation of the first and only School of Ethnic Studies in the United States, including a Black Studies Department, many hires of minority faculty, and increased admissions and support for minority applicants as students. By 2020, this School of Ethnic Studies had become a college awarding BA and MA degrees, and had just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a remembrance of the strike. Its creation, and the support given to the struggle by the faculty and AFT 1352, also gave a great boost to the movement for faculty organizing.

But from close up, writing in 1969/70, Kay Boyle concluded, “We could not win. For we were opposing a force that goes far beyond the limits of one college president, one campus, one state. We were opposing a nation’s fear” (ibid., p. 63).

She was right about the scale and intensity of the opposition, but that’s not the same as losing. As long as the fight continued, the war had not been lost. In fact, the struggle, and the partial victory that was won, was a major factor in pushing forward the student movement and the faculty movement nationally as the new decade began. All this was still alive in the consciousness of people who taught at San Francisco State in the late 1970s.

“ONE BIG UNION”: WHAT DID THAT MEAN?

John said: “I went to this meeting and it was packed, wall-to-wall professors arguing about “One Big Union.”

“One Big Union” is a phrase coined by the Wobblies—the IWW or Industrial Workers of the World—who believed that all workers should be organized into One Big Union. This is a concept that will resonate with contingents everywhere. In this case, it was about who would be included in the potential bargaining unit or even in the proposed law at all. Would Lecturers be in it, or would they be “disenfranchised”—left out?

The 1978 meeting at San Francisco State to which John had been invited reflected the rising awareness among faculty of this new bill being promoted by higher education unions in the state legislature, that would allow collective bargaining in the CSU system. The year before, a different law had already been passed that allowed collective bargaining in the two-year community colleges and the public schools. That law mandated that public employers bargain with the democratically selected representatives of workers; it forced employers to come to the table. Faculty knew that a similar law to authorize collective bargaining in four-year colleges and universities was being worked on, so union activity was starting to bubble up.

Lecturers had a high stake in what kind of representation they might get under this law. Under the concept of “exclusive representation,” there could only be one union representing “the same kinds of workers.”³ So, were Lecturers and tenure-line professors the “same kinds of workers” with “a community of interest,” which is the legal term? This was like asking if tenure-line faculty and contingent faculty are both faculty, a question most of us have debated at one time or another. If they had a “community of interest” with tenure-line professors, they could be together in a single bargaining unit. If a contingent worker was defined as a different kind of worker, and were split off into a separate bargaining unit, then what about librarians, counselors, coaches, and other academic workers? Would they be considered faculty and included in that bargaining unit, or would they also be separated and have to bargain separately?

The argument at the union meeting about “One Big Union” revolved around this issue, which was really about what kind of union should United Professors of California (UPC) be. For the Wobblies, One Big Union meant organizing longshore workers, farmers, lumberjacks and factory workers all together.⁴ Should UPC be something like that: organizing all the workers in the higher ed industry together? Or should it be something less than that?

The statute itself, once passed, ultimately affirmed the right of Lecturers to be recognized as faculty and to bargain, but debates about the “same kind of workers” and the “community of interest” are always heated enough to deserve another look. Another way to express the heart of this debate is to compare it with how craft unions are set up. The building trades unions— electricians, plumbers, carpenters—are craft unions, divided up depending on what craft they perform.⁵ Each craft bargains for itself. Were Lecturers a different craft within higher ed? Given that everyone in the debate had a claim to faculty status, how was the craft different if you were a Lecturer rather than tenure-l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Photographs
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Introduction
• PART I: THE CASE OF THE LECTURERS IN THE CSU SYSTEM
• PART II: HIGHER ED WAS NEVER A LEVEL TERRAIN OF STRUGGLE
• PART III: WHAT WE WANT AND WHAT THE CFA GOT
• PART IV: THE DIFFICULTY OF THINKING STRATEGICALLY
• PART V: SEVEN TROUBLESOME QUESTIONS
• PART VI: USING THE POWER WE HAVE
• Essential Terms
• John Hess: A Life in the Movement
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index