Adjunct Librarians and counselors in Arizona’s largest community college district get pay slashed in the name of “internal pay equity”
from JMH, Arizona community college worker
As a white working-class woman who grew up in Arizona (AZ) and has worked here since I was 15 (as a retail worker, barista, server, grocery bagger, etc.), it’s not often that I find myself shocked when it comes to what people think is right and wrong when it comes to labor. AZ is notorious for paying workers far less than a living wage, for at will employment that allows employers to fire workers at any time for any or no reason, and, of course, for the “right to work” scam which undermines union power by allowing workers to opt out of paying union dues, even when those workers remain represented and supported by their union. Workers’ rights to 15 minute or even lunch breaks are up for debate in this Sunbelt state.
But sometimes it’s the little things that hurt the most. I did find myself shocked when I learned recently that the community college I teach for, one of the largest community college districts in the U.S., accepted a 20-37% pay cut for some of our adjunct faculty. And they did this in the name of “pay equity.”
The people whose wages are getting cut are our service faculty, our librarians and counselors, people who, in my role as a former adjunct and now as a tenure track faculty member, I rely on constantly to ensure that my students are well served. Just as my working conditions are my students’ learning conditions, the same goes for the working conditions of these people. I turn to these fellow workers for student research support, and when they face emotional challenges. If these service faculty’s working conditions are not secure, mine certainly are not, nor are my student’s needs being well met.
You can read the details of the outrageous pay cut in an article in Inside Higher Ed linked here, but to get right to the point: the irony is that this pay cut was made in the name of “increasing equity.” Apparently some faculty pointed out that there was an inequality in that some service faculty adjuncts were paid $53 p/h, while others were only paid $35 p/h. Workers should clearly be paid equally, for equal work– yes! Sounds good, right? Yet, rather than arguing that the instructional adjunct pay be brought up to the $53 p/h, our “representative” bodies advocated to cut service faculty wages to the lower $35 p/h rate. In the above article, they quote that, “This proposal really allows for internal pay equity, and the changes impact less than 2 percent of the faculty population,” and that, of the remaining roughly 4,000 adjunct faculty in the Maricopa district, most had no “strong opinions.” In a stunning move, pay inequality was “solved” by ensuring that all workers were equally paid, and treated, like garbage.1
Alternative proposals were made by those faculty who fought back, acting in solidarity and across labor categories, proposing various forms of pay increases or smaller cuts. The suggestion that only a small percentage of faculty were impacted, and the vast majority of adjuncts had “no strong opinions,” implies that the district is out of touch with how interdependent all workers are on our community college campuses. At best this is simply ignorance. At worst, it’s complete disregard for human dignity. Making things even worse, 80% of service faculty adjuncts are women, and thus this pay cut enlarges a significant gender pay gap and attempts to disempower a feminized labor force. Indeed, these cuts position higher ed workers as dispensable.
Consider yourself for example, how would your life change if you suddenly faced a nearly 40% pay cut? Or even a 20% pay cut? What bills would you have to decide between paying? How would your grocery budget change? Your leisure time? How much additional debt would you incur, from a sudden and significant reduction in your wages? And how would all of this affect your ability and motivation to do your job supporting instructional faculty and students?
Working conditions are learning conditions
These are real life scenarios our fellow workers are facing, and they should not be downplayed as if they don’t matter simply because there are so few of these workers. Indeed, the pay cuts they face matter very much to them, and for some, these pay cuts will and have meant leaving the district, or career, because they simply are not given what they need to survive, let alone support their students. As they leave, I begin to lose the option to request library faculty come to my classrooms to teach research skills. I and my students lose access to people who are experts in information literacy, an essential skill in our era of massive misinformation, not to mention fewer resources for student’s emotional well being. Our student’s learning conditions matter, our working conditions matter, and those cannot be served if the livelihoods of our fellow service faculty, and actually all workers, are treated as if they do not.
Further! Stating that 4,000 other adjuncts had no strong opinions about their colleagues experiencing such catastrophic pay cuts suggests that the vast majority of adjuncts are selfish, and it works to pit instructional faculty against their fellow service faculty workers, a classic divide and conquer tactic–one that our bosses use all the time, but that our unions should be devoted to resisting. It also represents a strong disconnect from the lived experiences of our adjunct faculty at large. Indeed, in my experience as a former adjunct, and in my ongoing conversations with my adjunct colleagues, many of us have had to, and continue to, work 2-3 additional jobs to stay afloat, or have lived out of their cars just to save money on the ever increasing cost of housing.
As I said at the beginning, I was born and raised in Arizona and I’ve worked a lot of low-wage, low-status jobs, including being an adjunct. Compared to the women librarians and counselors who are trying to rebuild their lives after finding out about this pay cut, I feel lucky. But I also have to say that I recognize the anti-labor, anti-working class mindset that’s operating here. Want things equal? Here’s equal for you! Equally exploited, equally insecure, equally disempowered. Higher Ed Administrations have created conditions of worker precarity, rarely out of financial ‘necessity,’ but as part of a long term strategy to reduce both workers’ and students’ sense of security, particularly the security to organize for a broader imagining of what higher education could be.
But the fundamental fact remains: Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions, and it is through forging solidarity around struggles that are too often separated, that we can build the collective power necessary to not only retake our institutions, but also to rebuild them so that education itself is a tool for liberation. Workers and students of the world, unite!
- We should note too, that this impacts full time service faculty as well, whose overload rate, basically the equivalent of working overtime, was also lowered to the $35 p/hour rate. When those of us with the least power are not safe, neither are those with more institutional privilege. Labor contingency makes us all a contingent workforce whose rights and lives are at the whim of those invested in making business decisions about education, rather than decisions that root education as a public good with inherent social value. ↩︎