Interview: Cynthia Young
by Chris Cumo
Cynthia Young earned a Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University in 1999. While there she became involved in organizing graduate students and participated in the grade strike of 1995, for which she stood trial. In 1997 she joined the SAWSJ Steering committee and in 1998 she became a member of the coordinating committee. In 2000, she served as the national chairwoman of SAWSJ. Under her leadership, SAWSJ drafted a “Fair Labor Practice” University Code of Conduct and began urging universities to adopt it. Young and other SAWSJ leaders have conducted hearings on campuses, where adjuncts, graduate students, dining hall workers and maintenance workers have decried their low wages and poor working conditions. SAWSJ hopes to expand these hearings into a national campaign. Its members are seeking support and funding from the U.S. Departmentof Labor.
TAA: SAWSJ sounds like an eclectic gathering. Who heads the organization? How many members does it have and what common threads bind its members?
Young: SAWSJ developed three years ago out of a series of teach-ins, the first of which was at Columbia University. These teach-ins focused on the relationship between labor and academe. What role could progressive intellectuals play in the resurgence of organized labor? What are our responsibilities and how are we uniquely placed to champion workers’ rights?
Out of those public conversations, SAWSJ emerged as an organization
committed to public advocacy and research in support of labor unions and workers’ rights generally. Some of our most earliest and most active members had ties to the national AFL-CIO, so it has been an ally of ours from the beginning.
SAWSJ is run by a coordinating committee of 8 people and a steering committee of between 40 and 50 people. Although we have a chairperson, this is more a bureaucratic title than anything else. We charge nominal dues and have a loose structure so membership is difficult to estimate. At the beginning of 2000 we had more than 100 members in the New York City area alone, which is the core of our membership. I would guess we have maybe 500 or 600 nationwide, though most of those members are in the Northeast in cities such as Washington, D.C. and Boston.
What binds us together is a shared desire to work in support of labor. SAWSJ has the older generation of New Leftists from the 60s who often connected with the labor organizing of workers outside the university, and we have people in more recent generations, like me, who became union organizers during our graduate school years. Many of us who organized at Yale University or New York University or the University of Michigan or in the University of California system became closely involved with unions while fighting for our rights as workers on university campuses. So we approach labor issues from the vantage-point of the university as a place in need of strong unions and historically hostile to the rights of its workers. Those different orientations have allowed SAWSJ to build alliances with workers
inside and outside of the academy. For example, we supported the striking UPS drivers in 1998, and we have supported the organizing of graduate teacher unions.
TAA: What are SAWSJ’s organizational goals right now?
Young: Right now we’re launching a national campaign to promote a “Fair Labor Practice” University Code of Conduct. On 16 November 2000, we held a hearing at which graduate teachers, adjuncts, health care workers and janitors
testified about the ways in which university administrators violate their rights as workers. The code includes a set of principles–the right to earn a living wage, organize a union, etc.–that should apply not just to universities, but to any workplace.
We want to take organizing to a new level. We want people to know what’s going on at universities. We want people to see the intimidation [of workers] that flies in the face of the democratic rhetoric universities espouse. We want to promote basic rights: the right to a living wage, the right to organize, the right to medical benefits. We want to facilitate networking and organizing among workers because that’s the path to a truly democratic university.
TAA: What makes SAWSJ unique among labor organizations?
Young: We’re trying to facilitate a dialogue among unions, faculty, graduate students, adjuncts, student organizations. This is broad, cross-sector organizing, and it’s not easy. We have a lot of enthusiasm about getting these groups to work together. We want adjuncts to sit down with faculty and
to ask “Why don’t faculty always support us?” This sort of interaction creates dialogue and that’s an important first step.
TAA: To what extent are adjuncts vigorous members of SAWSJ? What do they contribute to its mission?
Young: It’s difficult to say how many of our members are adjuncts. We are aware that some of our members are professors because they are rather prominent in their field, and we have lots of graduate student members. But we don’t explicitly ask our members to identify their occupation so it’s really
impossible to say how many of our members are adjuncts. Perhaps 25 percent are adjuncts, but that’s just a guess. However during the “Unfair Labor Practice” hearing we worked closely with adjunct organizers in the Boston and New York City area.
Adjuncts and their plight are integral to the kind of academic exploitation we’re trying to highlight. The issues facing adjuncts are unique to them and yet they’re generalizable to the academic workforce. We see the same pattern of exploitation arising again and again: the corporatization of the university
in which administrators put the economic bottom line ahead of their workers’ rights. They pit university workers–adjuncts, dining hall workers, janitors–against one another. As people who make the university run, as faculty, graduate teachers, dining hall workers, clerical staff, we need to oppose this
corporate ethos. That’s what the “Unfair Labor Practice” hearing was all about. We wanted to publicize the conditions of university workers and unveil a code of “fair labor practices,” a broad framework of principles which universities should stand behind.
I see the issues of adjuncts as critical to talking about the exploitation and downsizing of the workforce that has become the hallmark of the corporate university. It’s easy to say “It’s too bad for those adjuncts.” It’s much tougher
to do something concrete about the problems they face.
TAA: What in your judgment are the most serious problems confronting adjuncts ?
Young: Obviously the lack of pay and benefits is a crucial problem; adjuncts get pitiful wages for what they do. We all know people or have heard stories of people who are teaching eight courses a term in order to make ends meet,
and this is so commonplace that we forget how tragic it is.
Another problem is that it’s very difficult to organize adjuncts. They’re fragmented by nature. They teach on multiple campuses; they’re a diverse group; they’re isolated in every possible way. University administrations too often intimidate adjuncts and accentuate their vulnerability. Our task is to get adjuncts to see themselves as part of a larger network of university workers. They need to see that they do have the power to leverage changes, that other segments of the university community are willing to make common cause with them. Too often adjuncts have been made to feel that nobody cares about their plight. Those of us who are not adjuncts need to join forces with adjuncts, we need to realize that a university’s treatment of adjuncts is indicative of how a university treats all of its workers.
TAA: One of the debates in academe is whether graduate schools should limit the production of Ph.D.s to bring supply in line with demand. Where does SAWSJ come down on this question?
Young: We have no official position. If you asked 10 different members, you would get 10 different answers. Speaking as an individual, I think that it’s unethical for universities to maintain large doctorate programs at the same
time as they increasingly rely upon adjunct teachers instead of full-time, tenure-track faculty. It’s exploitative and wrong to ask doctoral students to incur enormous debt with absolutely no hope of permanent employment with benefits.
TAA: Social justice is at the core of your organization’s mission. The language of social justice is often couched in Utopian terms. How would you define social justice as it applies to adjuncts in concrete terms?
Young: For many, social justice seems to be abstract, but I see it as extremely concrete. At the “Unfair Labor Practice” hearing, we heard testimony from university workers who are fighting for a living wage, we heard about a mother who didn’t have medical insurance and didn’t earn
enough to pay her child’s medical bills. We heard from graduate teachers in New York who can’t afford housing on their wages. These are concrete needs that universities consciously refuse to meet. Social justice is not about abstract principles; it’s about earning a living wage, about a workplace that is
nondiscriminatory, about a safe work environment.
When you ask people “Do you believe in social justice?” they all say “yes.” But when you get specific, when you ask faculty whether they favor a graduate student union or graduate teachers whether they support a living wage for janitors then you get different answers.
An “Unfair Labor Practice” Code challenges people on campuses to see social justice in concrete terms, to see the link between social justice and the exploitation that occurs in their own backyard. We want academics to understand that they have the responsibility and the ability to do something.
Social justice is defined in practice, not in abstract language.
TAA: How does SAWSJ plan to move beyond rhetoric to achieve tangible improvements for adjuncts?
Young: Through our “Unfair Labor Practice” code. We’d like people to hold hearings on every campus. We want adjuncts to testify about unfair labor practices. We want to accelerate organizing among adjuncts, graduate students, dining hall workers, clerical staff, and students. We want to involve more and more people on campus in the decision-making process about university policy. We want people to understand that there is nothing immutable about how a university operates, nothing that is fated. The university is made by people, and it can be changed and improved by us.
TAA: George Will and other conservatives have written about the decline of labor activism in America. Given this fact, what are the organization’s long-term goals for its members and constituency?
Young: I disagree with George Will. Labor activism is on the rise on campuses nationwide. This is actually an incredible moment of labor’s resurgence. Students are organizing against sweatshop labor. At Wesleyan University last spring, for example, students and maintenance workers worked together to earn janitors a living wage and pressure the administration to respect a code of conduct. There’s lots of room on campus
for cross-sector organizing. Students are beginning to get the fact that corporations have twisted the university experience, and they don’t like it.
TAA: SAWSJ has stressed the importance of academic freedom and criticized universities for falling under corporate influence. Why go where the AAUP, AFT and NEA have already gone? Why not break some new ground?
Young: That’s like asking “Why be against the death penalty when others are already against it? Or why oppose racism? Why join the chorus?” Why? Because it’s a principle that is still not routinely violated. The real question is
“Why do we still have to talk about academic freedom?” “Why is it so poorly protected?” As long as there’s a problem, we need to keep talking about it. This is not just about academic freedom. It’s about academic freedom within
a constellation of other concerns.
TAA: The move toward distance education has resulted in universities relying more heavily on adjuncts than they do now. Does SAWSJ have a policy statement on the use of adjuncts to teach on-line courses?
Young: No we don’t have any policy. We want there to be more full-time secure jobs, period.
TAA: SAWSJ has warned against the declining role of faculty at universities. How will this decline affect adjuncts?
Young: The more people who are marginalized in the academic community, the less all workers have a voice. People should ask “Who controls the university?” It’s not the faculty. At Yale the faculty had very little power. This
didn’t bother some people. They were content to go about their business amid the ruins of academe. The real power at the university rests with the 10 or so corporate donors. They are transforming the university into a corporation, and faculty have done little to stop them.
The marginalization of faculty helps support the marginalization of everyone else. Adjuncts need the faculty to be strong advocates of quality teaching and fair working conditions. Too often administrations have successfully pitted faculty against adjuncts, appealing to their [the full-timers’] sense of superiority. Too often faculty have taken for granted that adjuncts are just part of the landscape, or that it’s their own fault for being adjuncts. In reality, faculty should understand what adjuncts do and how hard their work is and make common cause with them. After all, if faculty don’t fight for more tenure-track jobs, then they will continue to train their graduate students
to become permanent adjuncts. Faculty empowerment can be a way of empowering adjuncts, if faculty see the links between their labor and that of adjuncts.
At NYU, for example, the administration tried to stop graduate students from organizing by circulating a letter that claimed that faculty opposed the union drive. But the administration had never even consulted the faculty.
This caused a backlash and more than 100 faculty members signed a letter asking the administration to remain neutral and allow graduate students to decide whether they wanted to be represented by a union. The administration’s arrogance prompted the faculty to ask “How can the university presume to speak in our name without consulting us?” So the decline of faculty power is not an abstraction. It’s an issue that bears directly on the quality of working conditions for adjuncts and everyone else.
