By Bob Seidel
At McDaniel College in Westminster, MD, adjunct faculty outnumber full-time faculty by more than two to one. We teach the great majority of graduate courses and about 20 percent of undergraduate courses. And we haven’t had a pay raise in ten years.
In 2014, we began to organize with support from Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 500 (Coalition of Academic Labor). In 2016, we won a representation election and began bargaining with the McDaniel administration. In 2018, we signed our first contract. It includes a three percent raise for all adjuncts, and an additional three percent raise in the second year of the contract for adjuncts who have taught for more than five years.
But those of us who led the organizing and bargaining are not satisfied with the contract. A three percent raise has limited significance because our pay was low to begin with. We know that, to win what we need and deserve, we need to continue organizing.
And we can’t limit our organizing to adjuncts. Like other bosses, a college administration will attempt to play off different groups of employees against each other and play off consumers (students and their families) against employees. A couple of years ago, when food service workers at McDaniel organized their union, the administration blamed them for an increase in room and board charges. But tuition, room, and board charges go up every year with or without workers organizing.
While we were doing our initial organizing, some of us met with students organized in the Progressive Student Union on campus. They were beginning to organize students against the annual tuition, room and board cost increases and the lack of transparency in the college’s budget process. Learning that adjunct faculty received very little to provide courses and hadn’t received an increase in years added to their list of reasons for wanting to know details about the college budget.
Adjuncts ourselves wanted the same information and a change in the attitude of the administration to us. We wanted them to make us feel like full members of the college community and that they valued our teaching as much as that of full-time faculty. Adjuncts and students both wanted to know where the tuition is going and that the administration fully valued all teaching.
So adjunct organizers and student organizers worked together. Students helped us to identify adjuncts they knew who would likely be receptive to joining the union. We supported the students on organizing strategies around tuition, room and board. And we worked together on convening a campus community “town hall” about budget transparency led by the students. They put together a panel including a student, an adjunct, a food service worker, and a groundskeeper. Hundreds of people including students, full-time faculty, adjuncts, and administrative and other staff attended.
Students who had jobs in food service also supported the other workers there when they were organizing their union.
Have we achieved full budget transparency and other reasonable demands? No. But we’ve come a long way. And our organizing has been stronger by joining with other campus constituencies who have clearly related issues.
Read the rest of Issue 1 here.
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