One remarkable dimension of the story making the rounds about CUNY failing to pay some of its adjuncts is that these faculty are represented by a union. Approximately 400 faculty missed one paycheck, and 100 more than one. None of these faculty have yet been given their full back pay, nor will they until the end of the term. And their union representatives have, at very least, proven incapable of forcing the university to treat the adjuncts in a fairer and more reasonable manner.
It's worth dwelling on this for a moment. If ever there was a clear cut case for a strong union push, including for a union supported walkout, this is surely it. And yet, nothing. Not even an effective demand that the university absorb whatever supplemental costs may be involved in paying some of their most economically precarious faculty what they are owed in a timely fashion.
This situation is evocative of some of the ways that existing unions have failed adjunct faculty, and it raises some questions about how—or whether—things might improve in this regard.
The CUNY union is not new, and it does not specifically represent the adjunct faculty (h/t Karen Gregory). In this regard, it is like many unions that represent adjuncts--including some that I have been involved with. And as the CUNY Adjunt Project Twitter account remarked when I asked about the union's history, "adjunct concerns seem to occupy a small unit of the union's attention, despite our overall numbers." This is, again, consistent with my own experience—and, I suspect, that of many others. Indeed, much of the impetus for the formation of the New Faculty Majority initiative was the overall failure of existing unions to effectively advocate for the interests of adjunct faculty. All of which would suggest that adjuncts would do better to form their own unions.
However, adjunct faculty alone are very difficult to organize and universities have a lot of tools at their disposal to challenge such attempts--including the at will nature of the employment of the organizers. I have, for example, seen organizing efforts fail when universities refuse to provide a list of adjuncts to organizers, and then succssfully challenge a sufficient number of the signatures that are obtained (on grounds that those people were no longer employed as part of the proposed unit) to defeat the effort.
The choice, then, seems to be between frequently poor or indifferent representation and the liklihood of having no representation at all.
Is this correct? Are there better ways of working within larger unions or better, widely reproducable models of adjunct organizing? Are there good options that fall outside of this dilemma? It seems, if nothing else, that we need to be having this discussion with some urgency.
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