In the spring of 2011, the faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago took a bold step. Bucking historical precedent and a national trend, the esteemed professors and their teaching colleagues voted to unionize.
“Stand up, sit down, Chicago is a union town” was the refrain.
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The backdrop for this is the transformation American higher education has undergone over the last couple of decades. While tuition (and student debt) has skyrocketed, the percentage of teaching done by tenured or tenure-track faculty—ostensibly what tuition is paying for—has taken a nosedive. Nationally, more than 75 percent of those teaching at the college level are now nontenured. These instructors, adjuncts, and lecturers, with six to eight years or more of higher education themselves, are typically part-time contract workers making less than a living wage, with no job security, no chance to move up, and no benefits. Exploited and expendable, they’re the migrant labor of the increasingly corporate higher-education industry.
At a school searching for ways to retain first-year students, Michaels said, “you’d think the first thing they would have thought of would be to pay the teachers who teach those first-year students a living wage.”
But Persky maintains that major issues haven’t been addressed. Most pressing is the situation of those non-tenure-track lecturers. The union wants multiple-year contracts for them (instead of the last-minute, single-year contracts they get now), a career track that would allow for promotion (some 20-year employees are still making $30,000), and a bump up to a living wage in their base pay.
