Casualization of Academic Labour at York University: A Discussion Paper
Casualization of Academic Labour at York University: A Discussion Paper
Prepared for the York University Faculty Association (YUFA) Membership by the YUFA Subcommittee on Casualization
Members: Nicola Short, Hira Singh, Justin Podur, and Ray Rogers
5/12/2009
This discussion paper comes out of a motion passed at YUFA's 3 March Special General Meeting:
That YUFA Executive act as soon as possible to strike a subcommittee to produce a discussion paper that places recent labour negotiations and YUFA's upcoming negotiations within the broader context of cuts to the funding of post-secondary education, a significant reduction in hiring for tenure-stream jobs, an increasing reliance on contingent labour, equity issues, increasing class sizes, and expanding workloads, all of which contribute to a general erosion of the quality of education. The subcommittee will call upon leading scholars in the field at York, as well as the ongoing work of existing YUFA committees. The discussion paper will be distributed to members on YUFA-M for discussion and subsequently considered for distribution to the media. Carried.
The motion reflects the recognition that academic institutions have undergone a great deal of relatively rapid reorganization in recent years, which has affected the working conditions and traditional structures of faculty governance in the university. Such changes demand new perspectives and analysis among faculty and their union representation.
University faculty have a role to play in promoting rigorous and meaningful scholarship and pedagogy, and, as a result, in analyzing the performance and governance of the university to ensure that the space to pursue these endeavours is maintained and adequately supported.
It should be noted that despite the striking of this subcommittee by a SGM of YUFA, it is clear that YUFA has only belatedly come to grips with the issue of casualization as it develops bargaining positions. We hope that our discussion paper plays a role in catalyzing both the executive and the membership in taking these issues seriously.
To read the complete paper, click on the attached Paper on Casualization.
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After the CUPE 3903 strike, the YUFA subcommittee discussion paper, and the CAUT Conference on Contract Faculty, the casualization of academic labour has been put on the agenda. Let us now work together to make sure it stays on the agenda going into YUFA collective bargaining negotiations because we expect alienation, resistance, or hostility. As the CUPE 3903 strike demonstrated, some YUFA members may join the employer in resisting any attempt to improve the lot of contract faculty in this "difficult budgetary situation" (Shoukri). This is one definition of "solidarity." The danger is that the employer will use the rhetoric of recession to further restructure the neoliberal university and reinforce tierification and precaritization. As far as I know, government transfer payments to universities have not been reduced; the employer can do more than two conversion appointments each year over the next three years of the new CUPE collective agreement. In a university with a reputation for social justice, full academic freedom cannot be exercised without some responsibility for facing up to the challenge of contingent inequity. In the past, health and safety issues have been addressed by a caucus representing all unions prior to collective bargaining. The casualization of labour could also be addressed by a YUFA and CUPE Unit 2 caucus prior to collective bargaining. Making the casualization of academic labour a collective bargaining priority would show solidarity with the CAUT, which has made the exploitation of contingent faculty the #1 issue going forward. By developing and passing appropriate motions, YUFA members would affirm that this issue significantly concerns all faculty who care about academic freedom and faculty governance. If, on the other hand, YUFA members are unwilling to risk anything, there will be no incremental bargaining gains in this area of academic employee relations. To sum up, the way must be tried to put the casualization of labour at the top of the YUFA collective bargaining agenda. To redefine the possible, the stigmatization of contract faculty--as not 'real'faculty or only 'part-time'--will have to be resisted.
There seems to be a bundling of "casualization" with conversion of longstanding CUPE members. I see these as two separate issues.
Many of us are concerned about the increasing reliance on contractual hires, whether course-by-course (CUPE) or contractually limited appointments (YUFA). The recent CUPE3903 strike is a symptom of this administrative strategy, one that will only increase if the administration continues on its present course of hiring freezes and discontinuing CLAs. We need to point out to the the administration that, whatever the short-term economic benefits of reliance on contractual hires, it is detrimental to the long-term viability and quality of York University. As a union, our effort should be to ensure that the university continues to be committed to tenure-track hires.
Having said that, I also believe that we need to maintain our commitment to open competition in hiring into tenure-track positions. Our first priority in hiring should be excellence, not seniority. Tenure-track faculty positions have rather different criteria from course directorships. I'm sure that many longstanding CUPE members are excellent teachers and researchers who would be successful in such competitions. By hiring through open competition, we can continue and build upon York's reputation in teaching and research.
On page 2:
"... We characterise this model of funding and organization as 'neoliberal', for the following reasons:
[...] The neo-liberal agenda undermines working..."
This sets out to inform on a choice of epithets by use of the same epithet, just as if I were to explain the use of 'digital' in describing a computer with 'A digital television set gives sharper pictures'.
This logic indeed pre-supposes an understanding of what is neoliberal in purporting to explain the use of the term. Not very edifying, unless perhaps labelling things as 'neoliberal' is part of one's job.
On page 2 once again:
"Over the last ten years, the number of part-time instructors teaching undergraduate courses has increased 100% as undergraduate enrolment at York has increased 51%. (Tenured or tenure-stream teaching undergraduate courses has increased 27%.) (Matthew King, Dept. of Philosophy,
York U)"
Are these increases university-wide? Or just in Philosphy? Certainly not in my department. This is just unclear.
The percentages are alarming but might have been reported to deliberately alarm. Percentages can indeed be misleading: if part-time staff grew from 1 to 2 while full-time numbers grew from 1000 to 1270, these same percentages would apply but no one would bat an eyelash, yet their misuse make this situation look disproportionately fearsome.
Who is this Matthew King, anyway, and where are the data published? This document doesn't even come with a bibliography!
On page 2 still:
"The introduction of narrow, quantitative measures of the productivity of research THAT exclude qualitative and theoretical scholarship THAT undermines opportunities for basic research THAT does not have an obvious market application" (my emphasis)
This sounds like there exists theoretical scholarship that undermines opportunities, or is it the research productivity that does it? Bad construction.
Still on page 2, toward the bottom, first circle bullet:
"As Theresa Shanahan has argued, ..."
Where? Oh wait, later on page 3, third circle bullet, we read
'(Theresa Shanahan, "Accountabillty initiatives in higher education")'
That's hardly a complete citation either. What is this? A paper? A book? A blog?
I'm not finished with this bullet:
"As Theresa Shanahan has argued, accountability and quality assurance mechanisms rely on performance indicators that have economic utility, pressuring academics to define quality in terms of the labour market and economic principles, which narrows space for critical reflection,
creativity, and democratic ideals."
So, what is it that 'narrows space' again? The labour market? The definition of quality? Economic utility? Accountability? This is totally unclear.
[As an aside, there are two things wrong with this statement, and I don't know why this assertion is even used here. Firstly, the linkage between 'critical reflection, creativity, and democratic ideals', especially 'democratic ideals', and any of the foregoing is totally non-obvious. Secondly, it is difficult to see 'economic utility' in 'performance indicators'. This was probably simply bad writing. In any case, the connection between research indicators and the casualization of teaching labour is distant at best. The same comment applies to the next bullet ("Furthermore, research indicators ..."). More focus would have been welcome. ]
On page 3:
"Along with that is a concern that such policies have pursued without meaningful involvement of the faculty, ..."
There's a word missing here. Been?
Later on page 3:
"That though such policies have been pursued ostensibly in the name of greater efficiency under conditions of precarious funding, budgetary matters remain un-transparent and it appears that the fiscal discipline imposed on some parts of the university functions to generate subsidies for those dimensions of the university designed or perceived to be more income generating"
What does 'That though' mean? And it should be 'Income-generating', surely. There are a number of other cases of missing hyphens throughout the document.
The word "un-transparent" seems to have been pulled out of the aether, but should not be hyphenated in any event. What are 'dimensions of the university'? Breadth? width? height? Finally, this entire sentence is un-transparent, murky: I can read 'functions' as a noun, in which case the 'it appears that...' phrase is taken in as '... imposed on some university function parts to generate subsidies ...', which then is nonsense because it lacks a verb. Clarity, please.
Again, the relevance of all this to the casualization of labour is getting awfully stretched.
Page 4:
"Student dissatisfaction in has been manifest globally: in 2008 and early 2009, there were of university strikes and occupations against the neoliberal turn in education in Canada, Finland, the US, France, Italy,
Greece, and India. (Tyler Shipley, 'Demanding the Impossible: Struggles for the Future of Post-Secondary Education', The Bullet (Socialist Project: E-Bulletin No. 215, May 10, 2009)" [no second closing bracket]
'Student dissatisfaction in has been...'? 'there were of university strikes'? Is this Mr. Shipley's bad writing?
I could go on.
Appendix A: This is a motion. Congratulations. Did it pass? Where is the original source? Who authored it, anyway? Can I make one up too?
The more important criticism I have is that there is much here that is not part of the subcommittee's mandate, from the bottom of page 4 onward with the sections titled "Principles that should inform YUFA bargaiting" and "Specific recommendations". The YUFA motion (passed) calling on a subcommittee to produce this document does not ask for recommendations. This document brands itself as a discussion paper but these sections make it a position paper. And an over-reaching and sloppily written one at that. I don't need a subcommittee to tell me what I should think. I need a subcommittee to present the facts on which I can base my own opinion. There's very little of that here.
It needs a re-write.
I can answer the question "who is this Matthew King, anyway?" I'm him. I'm a CUPE 3903 Unit 2 member who teaches in the philosophy department. The numbers attributed to me are from some calculations I posted to a York union mailing list. The calculations are based on documents available on York's website, and they apply to the university as a whole. However, I did not intend my calculations to be made public. I would not have wanted them to be made public because a) the numbers they are based on may not be completely reliable due to possible inconsistencies in categorization, and b) my calculations were done in haste, to try to begin quantifying shifts in teaching and enrollment. I would want to be more careful before drawing public conclusions (although I am cautiously confident that the calculations are reliable in at least a general way) and I would not want to present the calculations without citing the sources of the raw numbers.
At one point I was asked privately for my permission to cite my calculations in another report, and I declined, saying that the York documents themselves should be cited.
Nicola Short
As a contributor to the discussion paper on casualization, I have been concerned to learn that some have attributed the logic of the Appendix U proposal to our group. Nothing could be further from the truth. As a group, we interpreted our remit to involve exploring precisely the false trade-offs (e.g., as in this case, workload vs. salary) that neoliberal restructuring of the university attempts to construct. Though formally a subcommittee of the Executive, most of our group are not members of the Executive and we were not as a group included in what was happening in that body while our paper was being written. I am not sure where the misconception that we had anything to do with, much less endorsed, Appendix U comes from, but I hope everyone will work in good faith to set the record straight.
Eve Haque
YUFA’s Discussion Paper on the Casualization of Academic Labour at York University states that “Funding a reasonable faculty complement through reductions in salary is another problematic tradeoff that ought to be resisted” (page 6, in the section entitled 'Principles that Should Inform YUFA Bargaining').
On the other hand, Appendix U of the bargaining proposals suggests that faculty forgo a 4% salary increase (across the board irrespective of salary level or year of hire) in order to fund an increase in faculty complement for the employer. Therefore, it seems to me that YUFA’s own discussion paper is clearly advising against the bargaining strategy for increasing faculty complement that is being suggested in Appendix U of the bargaining proposals.