by Keith Hoeller

Since the 1970s, America�s colleges and universities have been increasing their use of low-wage, low benefit adjunct professors who teach without any job security. Nearly 500,000 now serve as apprentices to nowhere, without any hope of ever becoming masters in the guild of tenured professors. Yet despite the recent push to organize and represent adjuncts, there is little evidence that collective bargaining has made significant gains for them in the United States. Equality for adjuncts remains elusive, and even unionized adjuncts have contracts that are entirely separate�but unequal�to their full-time counterparts. In Unionization in the Academy: Visions and Realities (2003), Clark University philosophy professor Judith Wagner DeCew summarizes the conclusions of a study conducted by Gary Rhoades (Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor, 1998) in the following way:

�Rhoades concluded from his analysis of 183 faculty union contracts that these documents do not often protect, but actually further marginalize, part-time faculty�.Rhoades concludes that while the professional strategy of unionized faculty appears to be to contain the use of part-time faculty, the strategy backfires because the contracts ultimately encourage more use of part-time faculty members rather than less. Consequently, the national unions may claim to be advocating for part-time faculty, but the contracts do not show that they have made much progress� (p. 85).

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