by P.D. Lesko and Augusta Wilson

In the United States, part-time faculty represented within unified union locals (union affiliates that represent and bargain on behalf of both full-time and part-time faculty) frequently come up on the short end of the stick when it comes to negotiated pay raises. In the August 16, 2005 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Washington State adjunct activist Keith Hoeller writes:
“Little data is available on adjunct salaries nationally, and virtually none on adjunct raises. But the issue of raises for adjuncts may be as important as the wage issue itself, for the lack of raises explains in large part how adjunct salaries got so low in the first place, and why they stay so low despite recent gains in many states…..[However], denying raises to part-timers is just one more way for colleges to “save” money by stiffing the adjuncts. On the part of the…faculty unions, it is one more way of denying the part-timers the fair representation that federal law requires in return for the right to be the exclusive bargaining agent.”

The same month that Hoeller published his essay, on the other side of the Atlantic, the UK’s Association of University Teachers (AUT), that country’s largest education union, found itself in the middle of a scrum. A group of associate lecturers (ALs), as part-time lecturers are referred to in the UK, working for the Open University (OU), one of England’s largest universities, in Milton Keynes, UK, charged that the Association of University Teachers had not acted in the best professional interest of ALs when the union negotiated a modernization agreement that sought to reassess the pay schedules of 7,800 ALs at Open University. As a result, the ALs revolted.

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