New Hampshire Supreme Court Rules Adjuncts Aren’t Temps.

by Chris Cumo

Anyone who teaches part-time knows the
restless, transient quality of the work.
One is a cerebral version of George
Milton and Lennie Small, Steinbeck’s ar-
chetypes of men forever on the go, never rooted to the soil or a job. Adjuncts are the temporary laborers in the academic vineyard. But Jacqueline May, adjunct professor of English at San Antonio College and Austin Community College in Texas, scoffs at the notion that she is temporary, insisting that no college or university could exist without adjuncts and that this dependence makes them a permanent feature of the academic landscape.

“We are not temporary, we are the lifeblood of a campus today,” she said. “Without us at our ridiculously low pay the college couldn’t function.”

May now has an ally in the New Hampshire Supreme Court, which recently ruled that part-time faculty at Keene State College are not temporary employees and so may unionize.

“We were, of course, very pleased with the outcome,” said James Allmendinger, the lead attorney for the National Education Association representing part-time faculty at Keene State.

His pleasure is understandable. The ruling confirms that adjuncts, at least at this college, have a regular connection with the workplace, a crucial point. It is one that puts them within a tradition of labor law which allows only employees with such a connection to be part of a bargaining unit, says Steven Strong, a Washington attorney who has won adjuncts in that state a $12-million settlement. The decision clears the way for part-time faculty to organize at all public colleges and universities in New Hampshire, a state that had previously barred them from unions on the pretext that they were casual workers analogous to Christmas help, notes Ellen Moynihan, President of the Adjuncts’ Association of Keene State.

Stan Bond, attorney at the AAUP chapter of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, expects the ruling to galvanize unions across the country. The decision should bolster their efforts in recruiting not only adjuncts but graduate students and other marginalized groups. Bond thinks the legal climate is right for part-time faculty to assert their case for greater pay and perks, one they may now be able to win state by state.

Joseph Laiacona, president of the Columbia College Part Time Faculty Union in Chicago, Illinois is even more optimistic. He believes the victory in New Hampshire will help unions win adjuncts pay on the level of what full-time faculty earn. They won’t win these concessions overnight, he concedes, but he is patient.

“Little by little we will grow more militant,” says Laiacona. “We will win the argument [that adjuncts be paid on a par with full-time faculty], and if we don’t win we won’t teach.”

His vision sees New Hampshire as part of a larger trend. The Vermont and Pennsylvania Supreme Courts have already ruled that adjuncts are not temporary workers and so may unionize, notes attorney James Allmendinger.

The Eastern Illinois University chapter of University Professionals of Illinois jettisoned the label “temporary faculty” in favor of “annually-contracted faculty” because many of them had taught for more than a decade at the university, says chapter president David Radavich. The union has won adjuncts the right to accumulate 75 sick days, though it has yet to bring their pay and benefits on par with those of full-time faculty, one of Radavich’s goals. The goal of pro-rata pay for adjunct faculty is closer to fruition in California, where the California Part-Time Faculty Association persuaded the legislature to appropriate $57 million last year to close the pay gap between full and part-time faculty at the state’s public colleges and universities, says legislative analyst Chris Storer. Two or three more such increases would raise adjuncts to parity.

But this optimism is tempered by the fact that the ruling leaves unclear who counts as non-temporary faculty. Lawyer Steven Strong believes it is absurd to label an adjunct with 20 years of work experience at a college as temporary. But what about those with only a year or two, or who teach intermittently? In answer to these questions the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruling is no help, for it rejected the state Labor Relations Board’s decision that adjuncts who were currently teaching, and had taught two of the past three semesters, could join the union at Keene State. Neither does the National Labor Relations Board clarify the matter of intermittent employment and the right to unionize. Although the NLRB has ruled that adjuncts are not temporary employees and so may unionize, the decision applies only to private colleges and universities. This means that individual state labor relations boards and courts, the only agents that have jurisdiction over part-time faculty at public colleges and universities, must pursue legal remedies on behalf of part-time faculty at those institutions, notes AAUP Associate Counsel Ann Springer.

This leads to a patchwork of practices:

In 1987, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that part-time faculty were not temporary only if they had a contract for the next semester.

At William Paterson University in New Jersey, adjuncts are not temporary if they have taught two of the previous four semesters.

The hard truth may be that the New Hampshire decision applies only to adjuncts at Keene College in New Hampshire.

“I don’t think this ruling is going to sweep the states or country,” says Dee Wood, Vice President of the College of the Desert Adjunct Association in California.

Kathryn Wiss, president of the Western Connecticut State University AAUP chapter does not see what difference the semantic distinction between temporary and non-temporary faculty will mean in Connecticut.

Even in other states where the courts have recognized part-time faculty as non-tempoirary, workers adjuncts still face obstacles. Thomas Vann, Vice President of the University of Louisville AAUP chapter in Kentucky, has tried to organize part-time faculty, but they are afraid to join lest administrators brand them as troublemakers.
Adjuncts who have organized in Washington, even those in the same unit as full-time faculty, don’t always reap rewards because they often are less active in the union than their full-time counterparts, notes Washington attorney Steven Strong. He also admits that the right to unionize is worth little if part-time faculty don’t exercise this right.

Nor will the New Hampshire decision sway courts that define adjuncts as intermittent employees. Such courts have been reluctant to validate the argument that adjuncts deserve pay and benefits equal to those of full-time faculty, says Strong. Even where courts are sympathetic, part-time faculty may face institutional barriers.

Joseph Beckham, an expert on higher education law, and who teaches at Florida State University thinks many regular faculty will oppose the inclusion of adjuncts in their unions, thus forcing the part-timers into a separate bargaining units where they may have less clout.

“Part-time and adjunct faculty still have a long way to go to achieve the same level of benefits at the bargaining table as those enjoyed by full-time faculty,” notes Beckham. The lack of consensus on the part of union officials and legal experts about what the New Hampshire decision means for adjuncts outside of the tiny New England state may tempt one to shrug one’s shoulders in apathy. After all, on the surface it appears that the ruling affects little more than 150 adjuncts at one college. However, this insular view misses an important point: Keene State College is no aberration. The increase in the number of its adjuncts parallels the growing use of part-time faculty nationwide.

Temporary faculty are here to stay, and this permanence overrides the semantic contortions that would try to preserve the fiction that they are just temporary labor. If they aren’t temporary at Keene State, can they be temporary elsewhere? At a rhetorical level, the New Hampshire decision validates Texas adjunct Jacqueline May’s insistence that part-time faculty are “the lifeblood of a campus,” and as such they may be entitled to be paid on a par with full-time faculty, to have medical coverage, and to be vested in a retirement plan. These concrete actions are at the core of what part-time faculty have wanted for decades and what, thanks to the New Hampshire Supreme Court, may be closer to reality. The decision opens the door for adjuncts everywhere to insist on their centrality within universities. It gives labor unions and higher education associations, such as the Modern Language Association, as well as other organizations fresh opportunity to reassert their commitment to the betterment of pay and working conditions for all faculty.

Perhaps, at a deeper level, the New Hampshire court decision questions the division of faculty into full- and part-time laborers. One might argue that it is this simple fact which represents the true significance of what Keene State College’s 150 adjuncts accomplished.

Read the Supreme Court’s Decision: http://www.state.nh.us/courts/supreme/opinions/0204/unive038.htm