Community College of Philadelphia staff schedule strike authorization vote (CBS Philadelphia)

 

Support the Mission of the University of Oregon (United Academics of the University of Oregon)

Tuition has increased faster than inflation. State funding has increased faster than inflation. Administrator salaries have increased faster than inflation. Yet, the administration is demanding that the teachers, librarians, and researchers who drive the university’s educational mission take real wage cuts. 

While everyone acknowledges the financial challenges facing higher education, the UO is receiving more money per student than ever before. If this money isn’t going toward student education and knowledge creation, where is it going?

The Facts:

Quality Education Requires Investment in Faculty

The value of a University of Oregon degree depends on the quality of its professors, instructors, researchers, and librarians. When faculty wages erode due to artificial austerity, neglect, or slow attrition, it affects not only the quality of education and research, but also the long-term value of a UO degree for students and alumni alike.

• UO faculty salaries rank near the bottom among our peer institutions in the American Association of Universities (AAU).
• United Academics has proposed fair wage increases that would merely adjust salaries for inflation and restore them to pre-pandemic budget levels.
• Despite pandemic-related learning loss, the administration is spending less on education per student (adjusted for inflation) than before COVID-19.
• The administration has prioritized administrative growth over academic excellence, while faculty have taken on increased workloads since the pandemic.

Faculty Sacrificed to Protect UO—Now It’s Time for Fair Wages

During the pandemic, faculty agreed to potential pay reductions to help UO weather an uncertain financial future. We made sacrifices to ensure the university could continue to serve students. Now, as we bargain our first post-pandemic contract, the administration refuses to offer wage increases that:

• Cover inflation
• Acknowledge additional faculty labor since the pandemic
• Recognize our unwavering commitment to UO’s educational mission

Our Vision for UO: Excellence in Teaching & Research

The University of Oregon’s mission is clear:

“The University of Oregon is a comprehensive public research university committed to exceptional teaching, discovery, and service. We work at a human scale to generate big ideas. As a community of scholars, we help individuals question critically, think logically, reason effectively, communicate clearly, act creatively, and live ethically.”

Our vision for the University of Oregon is one where the educational and research mission are at the fore; an institution of higher learning where we attract and maintain the best researchers and instructors and provide a world class education for the citizens of Oregon and beyond. Yes, this will take a shift in economic priorities, but only back to those before the pandemic. Our demands are neither extravagant nor frivolous. Our demand is that the fiduciaries of the University of Oregon perform their primary fiduciary duty: support the mission of the University of Oregon.

Why This Matters Now

We are currently in state-mandated mediation, a final step before a potential faculty strike. Striking is a last resort—faculty do not want to disrupt student learning. However, the administration’s arguments for austerity do not align with the university’s financial situation or acknowledge the increased faculty labor and inflated economic reality since the pandemic. If the administration does not relent, we may have no choice but to strike.

We Need Your Support

A strong show of support from the UO community—students, parents, alumni, donors, legislators and citizens of Oregon and beyond—can help pressure the administration to do the right thing. 

Sign our Community Support Letter

HELU's Wall-to-Wall and Coast-to-Coast Report – January 2025

 

January 2025 HELU Chair’s Message This winter and spring, HELU activists are leading workshops in six states to develop platforms, advance coalitions, and share concrete, tested strategies for winning political change. I hope your union will join these opportunities so we can connect with and fortify each other. At a moment when we could go quiet and dark, we must choose to build up and out.... Read more.   Read more from Mia McIver Solidarity Asks Sign Petition to Save The Bridge Peer Counseling Center at Stanford Support LA Educators Displaced by Fires PSU-AAUP Strike Fund Announced Write a letter in support of Tufts Full-Time Lecturers Union From the HELU Blog: Why should healthcare unions join HELU? Profiteers have taken over our hospitals and put patients’ lives on the line. They are forcing the closure of hospitals that do not make a profit. Insurance companies tell us how and when to treat our patients. The corporatization of both academia and healthcare are ruining the quality of education and health respectively for many of our students and patients. Just as faculty and staff say, “Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions,” healthcare workers say, “Our working conditions are our patients living or dying conditions.”... Read more. United Steelworkers Local 1088 is Newest HELU Member HELU keeps growing thanks to locals like 1088 who agree with our theory of change and also carry it on their workplaces to build a higher education system that works for all. Our strength and coalitional capacity increases thanks to the engagement of members within their locals carrying our strategic vision and program.... Read more.   “Alone our debts are a burden, but together they give us power.” Debt permeates nearly all aspects of today’s neoliberal higher education landscape. Our students accumulate mountains of debt while studying, and faculty labor under unpayable debt burdens which are particularly burdensome for contingent faculty, who often work multiple jobs so they can make student loan payments. The universities we teach and learn in are drowning in billions of dollars of debt owed to Wall Street.... Read more.   The NCSCBHE 2024 Directory: A Boon to Unions, Researchers and Educators The new 2024 Directory of Bargaining Agents and Contracts in Institutions in Higher Education by William A Herbert, Jacob Apkarian, and Joseph van der Naald is an excellent update of the last 2012 comprehensive directory issued by the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining for Higher Education and the Professions... Read more. Upcoming Events Defend the University: Lessons from Brazil & Argentina on Resisting Fascist Attacks on Higher Education Wednesday, January 29 at 8pm ET/7pm CT/6pm MT/5pm PT Universities in the United States are under conservative and neoliberal attack. The Trump administration has promised to intensify the assault on higher education. In this Jubilee School discussion, leading Argentine and Brazilian scholar-activists that have fought to defend their public universities from the Milei and Bolsonaro regimes will share lessons on how to defend higher education against fascist attacks. Register here.   Register for January 29 Coalition for Action in Higher Education: National Day of Action Organizing Call Friday, January 31 at 2pm ET/1pm CT/Noon MT/11am PT On April 17, we will hold a National Day of Action for Higher Education to assert our collective power to organize for higher education and protect the common good. Before April, we’ll be hosting a series of national organizing calls to plan the Day of Action events. Our first call is Friday, January 31, at 2pm ET/1pm CT/Noon MT/11am PT. Register here.   Register for January 31 Winning Healthcare in Minnesota and New Jersey for Contingent Faculty: Lessons from Oregon and California Wednesday, February 12 at 6pm ET/5pm CT/4pm MT/3pm PT On April 17, we will hold a National Day of Action for Higher Education to assert our collective power to organize for higher education and protect the common good. Before April, we’ll be hosting a series of national organizing calls to plan the Day of Action events. Our first call is Friday, January 31, at 2 pm ET/1pm CT/Noon MT/11am PT. Register here.   Register for February 12 Coalition for Action in Higher Education: Antisemitism, False Charges of Antisemitism, and Building Resistance Workshop Thursday, February 20 at 5pm ET/4pm CT/3pm MT/2pm PT Part of building mutual solidarities, resistance, and narratives to fight false accusations of antisemitism is through widespread political education. PARCEO will share its approach and issues it addresses in its curriculum on antisemitism from a framework of collective liberation, as well as challenges that arise. Register here.   Register for February 20 Higher ed labor in the news College athletes were ready to unionize before Trump’s election. What now? – Vox Graduate assistants at Nevada universities call for union recognition amid struggles – KUNR Students, faculty argue Portland State University’s financial sustainability plan does more harm than good – OPB Union: Faculty pay not keeping up with community college enrollment – Daily Hampshire Gazette Unions make waves across Southern California campuses, learning from each other as they go – LAist Virginia higher education workers demand legislative action at Capitol rally – Cavalier Daily Want to support our work? Make a contribution. We invite you to support HELU's work by making a direct financial contribution. While HELU's main source of income is solidarity pledges from member organizations, these funds from individuals help us to grow capacity as we work to align the higher ed labor movement. Contribute to HELU From Helena Worthen and Evan Bowman, Co-Chairs of the HELU Media & Communications Committee.

Guild Education Board Member Johny C. Taylor Jr. Short-Listed for Secretary of Labor

Johny C. Taylor Jr, President of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), has been short-listed for the position of US Secretary of Labor. 

HEI is covering this story because Mr. Taylor is also a board member of Guild, an edtech company we have been covering since 2021. Moving forward, we are also interested in following any decisions he could make affecting labor in higher education. American labor itself is under attack as Amazon and SpaceX are challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board.

According to his bio at SHRM, Johny C. Taylor Jr. has held senior and chief executive roles at IAC/InteractiveCorp, Viacom's Paramount Pictures, Blockbuster Entertainment Group, the McGuireWoods law firm, and Compass Group USA. Most recently, Mr. Taylor was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. He previously served on the White House American Workforce Policy Advisory Board and as chairman of the President's Advisory Board on Historically Black Colleges and Universities during the Trump Administration.

An African American man whose salary at SHRM is greater than $1.3 million a year, Taylor has been a proponent of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the workplace. But as the chief executive of SHRM, he would be an opponent of unions.

Guild, formerly known as Guild Education, works for Fortune 500 companies like Walmart, Disney, JP Morgan Chase, and Chipotle to train and retrain workers as the workforce is systematically reduced through technology. Guild has been in financial decline after being lauded by Forbes and other business media.

If he is selected for the Department of Labor or any other government post, we'll have to see if Mr. Taylor's work at SHRM, Guild, or his other board seats affects management decisions, especially if the organization he manages is forced to downsize.  

2024 DMN Academic Freedom Lecture (Judith P. Butler)

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and formerly the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

Related links:

Protest Stories in the Higher Education Inquirer

Contingent Faculty and the Fight to Remake Higher Education (Higher Education Labor United)

Part one of a two-part virtual discussion about the new book Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History (2024). These sessions are sponsored by Higher Education Labor United (HELU), Center for the Study of Academic Labor (CSAL), and the Contingent & Community College Faculty and Independent Scholars Committee of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA).

The Power of Recognizing Higher Ed Faculty as Working-Class (Helena Worthen)

Just over 20 years ago, Michael Zweig published The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret. At that year’s How Class Works conference at SUNY Stony Brook, academics from history, political science, labor and industrial relations, and other fields debated Zweig’s use of the term “working class.” Some thought it was a throwback to the 1930s or a tip-off that someone was a Marxist. But even at a conference attended by many academics from working-class backgrounds, no one pointed out that academics are working class. Twenty years ago, academia still seemed like a middle-class or even an upper-class job, even though that had started to change in the mid 1970s.Young academics expected that if they did “all the right things,” they would get tenure and live happily ever after.

That expectation was wrong in 2002, and it’s even worse now, as this grim report shows. Nearly 75% of faculty in higher education are precarious workers, more like restaurant and hospitality workers, gig performers, contract healthcare workers, and delivery drivers than the tenured professor. They are hired on a per-class, per-semester basis. They do not control the conditions of their work. They often lack access to offices, professional development, research funds, and opportunities to collaborate with peers or vote in faculty meetings. They may be asked to take on a new course with a week or less warning. Many are told what textbooks to use and what tests to give. They are likely to have to apply for a new campus parking permit or library card every semester. But they also don’t get personal respect. They are vulnerable to management whim, favoritism, harassment, and simple forgetfulness, not to mention a complaint from a single disgruntled student who wanted a better grade.

Many contingent faculty are shocked to realize that college teaching is a working-class job. But recognizing that can be liberating. Thinking about ourselves as “working class” clarifies our understanding of our contingency by helping us identify with the 99% instead of the 1%. It can also inspire us to build alliances to improve our conditions and our industry.

First of all, it helps us appreciate and identify with our students, who are increasingly working class, and like us, probably working more than one job to make ends meet. We see their problems as our problems and become open to talking about common solutions. In turn they can see more accurately what it takes to be an academic and live the paradox of “love the work, hate the job.”

Second, it helps us understand and appreciate graduate student’s efforts to win the right to be recognized as employees (not “apprentices” on a stipend) who rely on their jobs for living. Graduate student organizing is one of the hottest areas in the campus labor movement – and possibly in the labor movement overall — these days, with wins coming in from unions like USW at the University of Pittsburgh, UE at University of Iowa, UAW at Harvard and the University of California and SEIU at Duke, Northwestern, Saint Louis University, and American University, just to name a few.

Third, thinking of ourselves as workers can help us understand the value of building campus labor coalitions, organizations that include not just academics but also clerical workers, the trades, transportation, custodial, food service, and technical workers. Such coalitions create power through the interdependency of all the workforces in a college or university.

Fourth, concerns about the working conditions of contingents can form a basis for solidarity with the privileged 25% who are tenured and tenure-line faculty. They usually resist this idea, but the reality of how their work has changed provides a strong argument. Over the worklives of senior faculty, colleges and universities tightened their belts, drained resources from the classroom, built arenas instead of libraries, created freestanding “foundations” that were outside faculty control, and engaged in a series of internet-based shocks like contracting out administrative functions like payroll to IT companies, putting journals on line, shifting classes to Blackboard and Moodle, experimenting with MOOCs, and much more. At the same time, requirements for tenure-track hiring and promotion were raised, contingent faculty became the majority, and administrative and advising work for tenure-line faculty increased. Some schools hired CEOs to run institutions like businesses. With all this, tenure-line faculty were progressively cut out of the full exercise of shared governance. All this degraded the institution of higher education, and not just for the contingent majority. These changes affect students, tenure line and contingent faculty, and staff alike.

The good news is that some are organizing for change. Higher Education Labor United (HELU), a new organization that came out of the organizing around College for All, has been endorsed by 117 locals from eight national unions and organizations. HELU uses the term “labor” broadly: its membership includes unions representing clerical, staff, and other workforces as well as faculty. The leadership team comes from colleges and universities in 29 states. HELU aims to establish a national strategy for higher education, something that the traditional faculty unions, AAUP, NEA and AFT, were never able to cooperate to achieve.

To get this rolling, HELU is convening a free Winter Summit, February 23-27, on Zoom. The conference will feature four afternoons of workshops and several keynote presentations, all focused on three goals: coordinate the surge of higher education worker organizing across the country, develop federal policy proposals to reverse the trends that have damaged higher education over the last several decades, and support politicians who will advance a program of democratizing higher education. Members of endorsing organizations will have opportunities to participate in decision-making.

The vision guiding the young leaders of HELU is broad working-class mobilizing to address the crisis in higher education. To accomplish that, it’s time for faculty see themselves as members of the working class and stand together to fight for change.

Helena Worthen, University of Illinois

This essay first appeared in Working-Class Perspectives. Thank you Helena Worthen, Sherry Linkon, and John Russo for permitting us to reprint this important article. 

Helena Worthen is the co-author, with Joe Berry of Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Majority in Higher Education (Pluto, 2021). She has worked and taught as a labor educator and teacher unionist in California, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.

 

Related link: Working-Class Perspectives