The right time to reflect on precarious employment

The University of Winnipeg has a dirty secret the administration doesn’t want you to know: in any given term, half of the university’s students are taught by poorly paid contract academic staff with no benefits and no job security. These professors are fully qualified and experienced, with doctorates, graduate degrees and terminal degrees who also write, research and publish, yet we have to apply for each of our courses every year, and often every term.

This week is Fair Employment Week, giving us the opportunity to recognize the valuable contribution contract staff at universities and colleges all across Canada, who are among the worst-paid employees. Let me be clear: I love teaching, and for 13 years, I’ve taught a full schedule of courses at the University of Winnipeg, often teaching 10 classes per year to make a living wage (which ironically leaves little time to live).

The University of Winnipeg is not alone, and sessional instructors at the University of Manitoba also teach a large percentage of the courses and students and are poorly paid and have no access to benefits or job security. Other universities — such as the University of Calgary — not only offer contract staff benefits and job security, but also access to research and travel funds.

If you’re wondering who teaches the rest of the students at the University of Winnipeg, many are taught by professors known as regular academic staff, who — in exchange for teaching several courses, advising, and being on committees — receive excellent salaries, full pensions, a full suite of benefits, access to university research funding, tenure (job security) and a full suite of leaves available, from academic to maternity, and much more.

Regular academic staff can also take a paid term off every three years or a full year off every six years, while contract staff may unceremoniously apply for unpaid leave at any time. Regular staff also have a budget for computers and office supplies, and a well-appointed office assigned to them. Contract staff have no budget or access to university computers — even if they are teaching online courses — and it’s not unusual for six contract staffers to share a single communal office.

These communal offices are an embarrassment, and a systemic issue at The University of Winnipeg, across nearly all departments. They are where old office furniture, printers and computers go to die; we’ve had a faculty member store all his office belongings in our communal office while on leave, and just the other day, one contract staffer joked to me that the communal office is where he goes to die.

Most members of the university community empathize with and support contract staff, but most students are unaware of the disparity. Some contract staff have to deal with uncaring department chairs who play games with their job applications and teaching evaluations, and who schedule contract staff out of courses they’ve earned the right to teach. We have deans and administrators cancelling courses of popular contract staff in attempts to fill less popular, highly paid regular academic staff courses.

The fact is: contract staff often don’t know if and what they’re teaching until a month or less before a term begins. This creates immense anxiety every term for most contract staff.

When facing budget cuts, most companies in the private sector, and many universities, look at reducing the number of highly paid, low-contributing employees, but the University of Winnipeg instead picks the pockets of its most needful students (teaching assistants and international students) and its most precarious employees contract academic staff. Last year, the administration cancelled and/or reduced all TA marking hours — seriously affecting students and contract staff — and in a grand move of solidarity, they also cancelled all department lunches.

This year, contract staff budgets have been slashed and contract courses cancelled to cover the university’s financial woes, blaming it in part on the federal government, but contract staff are paying for the financial mismanagement of the university and its reliance on over-charging international students — effectively monetizing them. Having been an international student myself, I’ve lived through the money-grab, paying five times what my fellow students paid for tuition.

I agree with the Canadian Association of University Teachers’ assessment that this was never a financially sustainable model, and seeing international students “simply as revenue streams to make up for stagnating and falling public funding” is a major problem, not a solution.

This Fair Employment Week, please take a moment to consider contract staff, sessional instructors, adjunct faculty and all precarious employees like us: those without financial and job security, who often have to borrow to make ends meet. We’re not asking for the world, just some fairness within it.

James Scoles is a contract academic staff representative on the University of Winnipeg Faculty Association (Union) Council. He teaches creative writing and literature courses.