Archive for February, 2007

– Janina Ciezadlo

Dear Ms. Ehrenreich and Draut:

This might be my twenty-fifth year of teaching. I am still making an entry-level salary, and I receive no benefits. I was happy to see your article in the Nation–I copied and distributed it to friends. I applaud your idea to create an organization that can bring together people who have been cut loose from the comforts of salaries and health care.

I hope your organization will be interested in working with the contingent academic workers who make up about 49% nationwide (about 80% in our region according to AAUP figures) of college teachers. My work with our part-time faculty union has made it clear to me that larger affiliations are necessary. My experience with the sink of identity politics which has benefited only a very few has likewise convinced me that work is a key point of affiliation, even in this post-work entrepreneurial, read downsized, environment.

Many people cannot understand my lack of ability to accept the degradation of the professorate (tied, of course, to the abandonment of public education in general) or my commitment to education. The people I work with seem to think or at least treat this situation as natural, most especially the people who have made themselves comfortable by studying the workings of hegemony. But, because I am not given to abstraction, and I am given to reading Bordieu and David Harvey, oh and Ehrenreich, I can see that this is a situation that has been carefully produced. And that my esteemed and reasonably remunerated colleagues’ collusion is just what is wanted, no, required of them.

In the early nineties when I came to Chicago and started working part-time, I was a founder and still work with, right now I am the outgoing President, of a part-time faculty union, which although it is hampered by things as they are, has at least provided us with some basic gains in salary and seniority and some important lessons in collective action. However, it is crushing to work with colleagues on a day-to-day basis who have been economically and psychologically battered by the casualization of academic labor, and exploitation of the arts, all the more so, while we remain working side-by-side, doing exactly the same work as others who prosper.

Colleagues greeted with accolades and advancements rather than averted eyes, who dismiss us as inferior while they profit from our marginalization. Our situation is not as dire as some, granted, but arguing from the worst case, that is comparing us with the bottom, reminding us that we are more fortunate than people who are destitute, if that shaming fails, giving us ideologically-laden advice on how to maintain a happy frame of mind which is what many of my friends do when I talk about my situation as a way of shutting me up–especially my friends (male and female) who have successful spouses and have no insight into what it means to be your own breadwinner.

Others, who have been hit by the changes in the workplace and economy understand, but we are usually at loss to find solutions. Your organization can provide a place, virtual or otherwise where we can discuss the binds we find ourselves in, and perhaps see them as political, not personal, so that we look for productive solutions. In Chicago we have an organization called COCAL, Chicago Coalition of Contingent academic labor which is now trilateral: Their meetings include people from all over the US and Mexico and Canada.

The IEA/NEA adjunct unions meet in a city-wide caucus every couple of months and everything we have learned as a group about health care, leads us to look toward a single payer plan as the best option. Even the designation: “contingent” raises a flag to the insurers and casts us, not as stable working people, (which we are, it’s the system that is unstable,) but as transients, uncatagorizable, bad risks, as if our precarious status was the result of our own bad choices, the same way poverty is cast as the result of behaviors, rather than injustice or real estate practices and globalization.

Of course, our betters in the academic world see our situation this way, and now a new group of privileged young people are judging us. Working with the union makes the decisions that administrators make very clear. The corporatization of academe has made labor, the raison d’ etre, of schools and the central teacher-student relationship into a cheap commodity. Market forces have winnowed humanism away from a liberal, humanist education. For those of us who had the chance to make choices that led us into the arts or even certain kinds of journalism, exclusion has always been part of the deal.

What I see in Chicago is a terrible cleavage between the haves and the have-nots in these creative and educational fields. This double world of the arts is exacerbated by the comodification of the art school experience, and larger forces like the lack of a market in the Midwest, and the demise of the National Endowment. I make $250.00 an article for the Chicago Reader, so I have to keep teaching. And as you know: there is so much to write!

I have skills to offer your organization in addition to the thirty six dollars: I am a writer, and I have organizing skills: I began the association that became the first part-time union in a private school and I continue to work with my local and the IEA/NEA. The IEA/NEA, as important as it has been for us, is primarily a union for K-12 so there are some disconnects when it comes to understudying the kind of commitment and investment in the non-teaching aspects of our professions.

The current drift, as far as I can tell, is to refuse to recognize, because recognition would throw the inequities into relief, our professional attainments from the institution of higher education, so we are getting it from both sides. Unions have trouble recognizing intellectual work or “cultural practice” as they used to say in the 80s.

One other note: I designed and taught several classes at another highly, but not the most highly, esteemed institution in Chicago, on representations of work in the arts and in film. I have been thinking about what work is, how we think about it, and the rest of these questions for quite some time.

Please contact me to contribute if you need a voice, or as they say, a warm body. I have already copied your article to distribute to the local adjunct labor crowd. I am attracted by the idea that more and more people can be mobilized around their working identities and use their power to address problems in working conditions, and importantly to work for a single payer plan. Sign me up, in the parallel universe with the shadow people. Thanks for reading my screed! Thanks for taking action.

– Anonymous

12 years in banking. Minority banker, through hard work rose to VP level. Bank failed in early ‘87 due to the savings and loan debacle. Myself and a few of my colleagues were held responsible by the FDIC in violation of our fiduciary responsibilities.

Unfortunately, I was the only one to be charged in 1998 for the neglect. I vigorously fought the charges but lost in a court of law; was incarcerated for 22 months. Upon my return, I opened a small retail outfit selling cell phones and that failed because of competition from well-equiped companies–Sprint, Verizon etc.

I have been unemployed for about a year and essentially struggle to make ends meet. Any advice or help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks

– Anonymous

I got my Ph.D. from Syracuse University, began teaching full time and got ambushed by the rest of the faculty mobbing against me. They conspired among themselves to reject my contract renewal, even forcing the vote of people not interested in mobbing a colleague.

I was the only older, Latina female and had developed links with other institutions that my colleagues resented. I could not find a full time job in my area after that, and had to accept a teaching job in New England, where I was more isolated and lonely than ever.

Not easy to try to belong in academia, being a foreigner!

– Anonymous

The day I was scheduled to defend my dissertation I was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 39 (1995). The dissertation was a study on quality of work life factors (compensation, job design, work environment and participation) related to public personal policies and practice.

Unfortunately, I have not had a professional level job since then and have had another diagnosis since then. And, most of the public sector professionals I have interfaced with related to employment have been real rude or insincere.

I had left my primary work location to manage elder care issues and returned to where my parents lived to assist them. The consequence of this is that I have had to stay poor in order to keep my Medicaid eligibility. Unfortunately, for someone who devoted her professional life to making opportunities for others to have some employment satisfaction, fair compensation and the betterment of governmental services and operations, this has resulted in chronic depression and a tremendous sense of shame.

Shame not only for being diagnosed with cancer twice but because I was never able to go back to the work I loved and had invested a lot into; the latter being the most problematic. I have also had to deal with the burden of a federal school loan that is not forgivable and now has doubled because of service fees and interest. This was the most stressful component in dealing with my depression induced by this long-term unemployment and underemployment.

The underemployment was more socially problematic to me than the unemployment. When I was trying to get by and took temp jobs, I experienced everything from toxic fumes to someone itching their groin while I was talking to him. Sure these are questionable legal issues but there are no low income legal services for American-born Americans these day either so this adds to the depression and feelings of shame.

I have other examples of legal issues that I got into and not resolved because of lack of access to legal resources because I am poor. Thank you for the opportunity to share these few facts and feelings.

– Anonymous

I am an experienced Sr manufacturing engineer with an MBA, with extensive, diversified manufacturing experience. My job ended a year and a half ago due to downsizing and outsourcing.

In spite of an extensive skill set, I have been unable to find a job, so my financial security and middle-class standing are becoming increasingly at risk.

– Jeanne Smith

My husband was laid off as a programmer in July of 2003. He’d never been laid off in his career.

In September of that year I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I ended up having three surgeries and going to radiation. Every surgery was made more difficult because I wondered what effect I was having on my family. I was a millstone.

My husband was doing contract work. I went into surgeries without him there because if he didn’t work he wasn’t being paid and we needed the money. We spent all of the severence pay on COBRA and my radiation treatment.

We are still trying to get back on our feet … and I feel fortunate.

– Daniel Crawford

I am fully self-employed but see the writing on the wall for many Americans of all ages. The time has come for us to help ourselves in the middle, whether or not we happen to currently be downsized or making a good living. The appeal, like AARP, is to become a constituency that has a strong voice AND STRONG ADVOCACY SKILLS.

– Ed Morley

Years of training and experience; looking for work in Michigan’s over-saturated employment environment; moving forward with hope and positive energy.

– Anonymous

I have a master’s in journalism, and I worked as an editor in management consulting firms and medical publishing for 25 years. In 2001, I was outsourced abruptly from a small company where I’d worked for 14 years, despite my (allegedly) being a valued employee; the firm wanted to become “more corporate” and to trim any “excess” (the longer tenured the employee, the higher the pay).

Despite a grueling, ongoing job search in my “field” that lasted five years, I was able to find work only as a half-time administrative assistant, until several months ago, when I received and accepted an offer of a full-time job as a proofreader/copy editor. The job does not seem especially stable; I believe all job stability is a phenomenon of the past and that anyone working in the U.S. other than the top CEOs can be expected to be discarded at whim, only to have to recommence the futile, demoralizing cycle of searching/not finding/having to settle for whatever might come along.

This is not the way that people in a highly industrialized country should have to live. The extremes of wealth–the professional athletes and entertainers with the multimillion-dollar contracts–and the ridiculously rich top 1% (or whatever the correct miniscule percentage is) add another disquieting dimension to the scenario.

– Anonymous

In my final year of college, I picked up a paid internship with a local steel company in their IT group. After college, they hired me on full-time. They even paid for me to go back to school and get a Master’s Degree. I worked at that company for almost 15 years. I had risen to the level of UNIX System Administrator.

Then, a merger, followed by downsizing. My layoff came in November, 2003. I was not worried, as I had a great deal of experience, and a pretty good skill set. I did not seriously start my job search until after the first of the year (2004). I did not have employment again until January of 2005. I ended up picking up work at a financial institution (for a three-month project) through a contracting agency. Luckily, the agency found me a second contract position at another financial firm.

The pay for both of these contract gigs was low, but not ridiculously low, and at least I had benefits. Anyway, after working a year-and-a-half on that second contract gig (where the customer kept extending the contract month after month), the financial institution hired me on, full time, with a salary close to what I had at my first company.

It truly amazed me what the unemployed are put through. It really seems to me that organizations who claim that they have jobs are really “just kidding,” and never seem to hire anybody. I went through unemployment, savings, and then credit cards. I’m staying afloat, but I am still digging out of debt. It can be really frustrating. Oh yeah, and that financial institution where I finally got hired? They have initiated a merger with another financial institution. Here we go, again.