CUNY Adjuncts Don Turkey Costumes to Protest Treatment
On the same day The New York Times printed an article with national scope about the decline of tenured professors in colleges across America, the union that represents CUNY employees staged a second installment of their “Campaign of Outrage” regarding the short changing of adjunct professor pay.
Complete with turkey costumes and turkey whistles, they attempted to deliver a Thanksgiving turkey to Baruch President Kathleen Waldron, who was not available to accept it.
“Adjuncts” can hold various positions within a university, but the key piece of information is that they are part-time contracted employees. They are hired for a specific period of time – in the case of lecturers, usually a semester. They do not enjoy any assurance of continuous employment; there is no seniority for adjuncts.
Because their employment is not secured by tenure, no adjunct would speak on the record for this article.
The “Campaign of Outrage” concerns a policy whereby Baruch and four other CUNY schools pay 2/3 of the normal weekly salary to adjunct professors for the 15th week of class, finals week.
Baruch’s position is that a final exam lasts two hours, so instead of paying for a standard week of three credit hours, the salary is reduced by 1/3 to represent the “actual” number of hours the adjunct professor works.
For the first fourteen weeks of the semester, adjuncts are paid for three hours per week per class, but in the 15th week, they are paid for two.
Professor Glenn Petersen, chair of the department of sociology and anthropology, stated, “As a department chair I hire a great many adjunct faculty and I’m deeply aware of how this obliges me to exploit them. I am disturbed by Baruch’s and CUNY’s heavy reliance on this unfair labor practice, and it’s appalling to see Baruch refuse to give adjuncts even the few dollars they deserve for finals week.”
The adjuncts I spoke with say that the logic regarding finals week really collapses when you consider what the academic hour represents. The academic hour is fifty minutes on, 10 minutes off. For three credit classes, that means the class meets for 150 minutes per week (3 hours x 50 minutes = 150). So, for teaching for 150 minutes each week, the adjuncts receive three hours of pay. However, during the two hour final, the adjunct must be proctoring the exam for 120 minutes, which represents 80 percent of the usual 150 minutes, yet they are only paid for 67 percent of the usual 150 minutes.
There is more to the picture, though. When an adjunct that teaches two courses at the same college, they normally receive an extra “professional” hour, thus teaching for six hours and receiving pay for seven. During finals week, since they are only paid two hours for each exam, they receive four hours pay instead of seven, for a total shortchange of three hours, for that last week of work. At no time do adjuncts receive any compensation for time spent outside the classroom for office hours, preparing coursework or grading exams.
This matter has gone to arbitration, and the union’s grievance was denied on what is generally considered by those affected to be a technicality. The arbitrator felt since there was no expressed differentiation for finals week (as compared to other weeks) written into the labor contract, schools should individually do what they have always done. The schools that did pay for the full week should continue to do so and the schools that do not pay for the full week did not have to start. Since one contract exists for all CUNY colleges, the adjuncts I spoke with said they found it hard to believe that it could be interpreted three different ways at different colleges within CUNY.
The loss in pay ranges from $58.68 to $69.17 for an adjunct teaching one class to a range of $176.04 to $207.51 for an adjunct teaching two classes at Baruch. A Baruch employee estimates that it would take $40,000 to pay the adjuncts the third hour at Baruch; that number could not be confirmed by press time. Adjuncts were quick to point out that number is miniscule when one considers that Baruch President Kathleen Waldron’s last raise of $10,735, to bring her annual salary to $249,285. More than one adjunct I spoke with used the phrase, “nickel and dimed.”
The adjuncts I spoke with felt badly that President Waldron has not stepped in to resolve the problem. They believe that if no other source of funds were available, that any CUNY college president would have available discretionary funds to pay the third hour of service to the adjunct faculty.
