Adjunct Professors Take A Stand

A union is a group of workers who come together to have a voice in their workplace. There are many reasons why employees join a union, including fairness in the work place, higher pay and better benefits. In 2015, 16.4 million wage and salary workers were represented by a union, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among the highest unionization rates were occupations in education, which consisted of 35.5 percent. But those rates did not include adjunct professors. Adjuncts are not paid as well or treated nearly as well as tenure-track instructors because of their inability to be represented by a union.

With the growth of the adjuncts growing to about 40 percent of university staff nation wide, unionizing has become a more talked about subject, and adjuncts across the nation are speaking out. February 25, 2015, became National Adjunct Walkout day when adjunct instructors across the country came together to insist on fair wages and better working benefits. The Pacific Standard wrote an article called “Are Adjunct Professors the New Fast-Food Workers?” which received a lot of attention and led them to write a follow up special issue document.

Duquesne University has become a leading example of adjunct neglect after the death of Margaret Mary Vojtko, who was an adjunct professor at Duquesne University for 25 years. Vojtko was released from her job with out any retirement funds or health insurance and at 83, she was battling cancer and suffered a cardiac arrest. She died soon after.

Hoping to show how little universities are providing for the teachers they depend on and help prevent other adjunct professors from spending their life like Vojtko did, her lawyer, Daniel Kovalik wrote an article called “The Death of an Adjunct”. His article unfolded a debate on Twitter and other social media platforms.

After Kovalik’s article hit the media, the adjuncts at Duquesne University won a vote to organize as a collective bargaining unit. Despite the professors’ vote, Duquesne officials said there are no immediate plans to allow adjunct professors to unionize.

Duquesne’s attempt to fight the adjuncts unionization is not unique to the university. The theme of universities not accepting Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers’ contracts has happened at many other universities, including Washington University and Robert Morris University.

James Talerico, an adjunct professor of English at Robert Morris, said “We voted on the union last Spring, now a year has already gone by and we’re still in negotiation with them, so they are not making it easy.”

Adjuncts are continuing to become more talked about, but there is still a sense of silence around the topic. Universities have no reason to draw attention to the instructors they rely on, and the adjuncts face putting their jobs at risk by drawing attention to themselves.

“There’s a lot of emotional distress that goes with the job,” Talerico said. “You feel inferior and you feel hopeless.”