Labor/Workers movements thread

BarcaDeac said:

was just coming in to post this. very sad. the AV Club has been my go-to pop culture site for years and years. G/O Media has ruined yet another fantastic publication. What a dumpster fire of a company. Private equity ownership should be banned.

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TenaciousKory said:

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The job posting for an assistant adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, set high expectations for candidates: A Ph.D. in chemistry or biochemistry, a strong teaching record at the college level, and three to five letters of recommendation.

But there was a catch: The job would be on a “without salary basis,” as the posting phrased it. Just to be clear, it hammered home the point: “Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position.”

The posting last month caused an immediate uproar among academics across the country, who accused the university of exploiting already undervalued adjunct professors, and suggested this would never happen in other occupations. Under pressure, U.C.L.A. apologized and withdrew the posting.

But the unspoken secret had been fleetingly exposed: Free labor is a fact of academic life…



… The union representing contingent faculty at the University of California has been fighting the uncompensated positions for years, said Mia McIver, the president of the union, which represents about 7,000 members. “The fact that it is common does not excuse it,” she said.

The union suspects that the number of uncompensated teachers at the university is increasing, said Dr. McIver, who is also a lecturer in the U.C.L.A writing program. “As of March 2019, we had identified 26 faculty members at U.C.L.A. alone,” she said.

In the California system, the trend seemed to have begun with the financial crisis of 2008, Dr. McIver said. By 2010, she said, “We became aware of people who had been laid off and who were teaching for free in the hopes, without any commitment from the university, that if the work came back they would be hired back to teach for pay.”

The union won a settlement with the administration in 2016 requiring compensation for lecturers, who are mostly part-time and make up a majority of contingent faculty, Dr. McIver said. But while lecturers are now unionized, adjuncts are not, allowing the university to have adjunct positions known as “zero percent appointments,” meaning that they are unpaid.…



… Harvard confirmed that Dr. DeAngelis had an unpaid lectureship in the fall of 2018.

Linn Cary Mehta is a longtime lecturer at Barnard and says she has seen a devaluation, even though adjuncts often have similar credentials to tenured professors. “When I first started we were called instructor and then lecturer,” she said. “The title changed to adjunct instructor, adjunct lecturer, almost aggressively, as if trying to put us in our place.”

Dr. Mehta, who has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Columbia, has spent a career as a part-time worker because she needed the flexibility to care for her husband. She said that unionization at Barnard had provided increased job security through multiyear contracts, and higher salaries per course.

Of the U.C.L.A. job posting, she said, “It’s insulting.”

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BiffTannen said:

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TenaciousKory said:

looks like they fired her for recording a disciplinary conversation

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BiffTannen said:

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