Teacher Pay Around the World
by Alison Powell
Just a week ago, the New York Times featured an article in their “Economix” blog: “Teacher Pay around the World” (Sept. 9, 2009, http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/teacher-pay-around-the-world/). The article presents a mass of statistics collected by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) about education around the world, focusing on how the United States measures up. As it turns out, “compared to other developed countries, in the United States teachers generally spend more time teaching but apparently without an equivalent advantage in pay.” The study tells us that American teachers in primary, lower secondary education and upper secondary education divisions spend, on average, 1,080 hours teaching each year. For this effort, though internationally the public primary-school teacher earns $43,633, America’s teachers receive an average of $39,007.
This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to those of us in academia. Though we’re teaching as adjuncts or fellows at the college level, we must be especially aware of the plight of teachers at all levels. It seems unnecessary to point out that, as college degrees become more ubiquitous, the expectations and compensation of secondary education teachers and graduate students and adjunct faculty become more and more similar. If our colleagues are being expected to teach classes in schools which are over-attended and under-staffed, and to do so with lower pay and longer hours, the inequities are likely to spread to adjuncts.
As the OECD notes, comparing the compensation of teachers in much less wealthy countries to the lesser compensation of American teachers makes this all the more disconcerting. Here in the United States, a seasoned teacher — someone with fifteen years of experience — makes a salary that is 96 percent of the country’s gross domestic product per capita. Across the board, a teacher with identical experience makes 117 percent of GDP per capita (it turns out that the best place to teach, financially anyhow, is Korea: there, the average teacher makes 221 percent).
At the secondary level and below, more American teachers are women: 69.4 percent compared to 65percent across the OECD (at the post-secondary level the numbers change to 41.6 percent compared to 39 percent). This reminds us that inequity in pay is often a symptom of a larger problem of workplace gender discrimination.
In short, “The demographics of teachers in the United States look similar to those of teachers elsewhere in the developed world.” This should concern us not only as adjuncts, but as citizens.
The Tenuous Faculty
About a year ago, Inside Higher Ed (www.insidehighered.com) published an article titled “For Adjuncts, Progresses and Complexities.” The article quoted a lecturer in anthropology at San Jose University who complained that after teaching four or five courses there a semester since 1987, he was still considered part-time faculty: “Higher education, he said, must confront the ‘glaring disparities and inequities between the tenured faculty and the tenuous faculty.’”
There is potential to languish ambivalently in the adjuncting world; particularly in New York City (ironically, considering the cost of living). Many of us will rush from college to college teaching an ever-changing handful of classes as we muddle through our dissertations. This reality is something for which we must all take responsibility; as graduate students and professionals, it is on us to usher ourselves along the stages of our degree. Still, an individual who is continually re-hired to teach courses, who participates in departmental meetings and has input on curriculum should be treated as more than part-time filler. Unfortunately, there isn’t much in the way of job security for contingent academic labor; so much so, we’re not even quite sure what job security would look like.
The Inside Higher Ed article describes how the University of California lecturers’ union (an American Federation of Teachers affiliate) was able to negotiate a “gold standard” contract for non-tenure track professors. The writing program at UCLA was described by one lecturer “as one in which most decisions are made by a staff composed entirely of lecturers, who evaluate one another, manage the program’s budget, and are given curricular responsibilities based on their expertise.”
Non-tenure track faculty in this category can only be let go for “narrowly specified reasons — criteria the university has yet to use successfully.” Across the board at American universities, adjunct complaints are sloppily handled; the person who made the original complaint is often the same person making the “final decision” about the hiring or firing. The UC grievance system allows for independent decision making, and crucially, “In a provision that responds to the sense that at many campuses a complaining parent or a false rumor on RateMyProfessor.com can ruin an adjunct’s career…lecturers in (the) union cannot be dismissed or punished on the sole basis of student evaluations.” As for job security, if one lectures at the University of California for six years, one has a presumed reappointment.
That’s the good news; here’s the less good news. The union in this case made these gains over twenty-five years of slow, plodding progress. The article quotes Robert Samuels, president of the University of California lecturers’ union, as saying: “A lot of union organizers or academics want all or nothing — the same job security or nothing”; but, the article continues: “.…his union’s success wouldn’t have happened that way. ‘You can’t get everything right off the bat,’ he said. But you can come back, with more ambition, time after time.”
Other non-tenure-track professors who were part of progressive universities agreed with the California lecturers on a few main issues. An organizer in British Columbia warned of the importance of “striking while the iron is hot,” and being together enough to act when a union-friendly government is in power.
A president of the non-tenure-track faculty union at Southern Illinois University, Alan Shiller,
described a “process his National Education Association-affiliated union won for adjuncts to be given the status of ‘established’ after teaching thirty-six credit hours. Such faculty members get the rights, among other things, to have seniority on course assignments, and the ‘right of first refusal’ on courses they have taught in the past. He also said that the adjuncts are protected from ‘the power of the department secretary.’ He said that until the union raised the issue, course assignments were routinely being made by secretaries, who if they couldn’t reach someone after one call, just went to someone else. He said that tackling these issues created ‘real job security for members.”
It seems the message of this meeting was three-fold: be creative, be patient, and be organized.
First Things First: Getting Paid
The similarities between American teachers at all levels — what’s required of them and how they’re paid, along with problems with job security — are important to understand on a global level, literally and metaphorically. On one hand, our compensation is revealed as even more paltry when compared to that of other, less wealthy nations (not to mention the fact that shoddier education standards, and more frazzled teachers, is not going to help the United States compete in a global marketplace). On the other hand, these concerns are systemic, structural, multi-faceted; they exist in the context of labor inequities nationally.
And what about CUNY? First things first: this week, a number of recently appointed or reappointed Grad A, B, or C Assistants failed to receive their first paycheck. It seems to have been an organizational or clerical error, but a consequential number of CUNY’s adjuncts, who had attended orientations and dutifully signed the stacks of paper required to get “in the system” are now scrambling to pay their rents. This is a problem, obviously, and if this has happened to you, the Adjunct Project advises you to take the following steps:
1. Go to Human Resources (do not call — go) on the 8th floor of the Graduate Center, and explain to them that you were not paid. Have your appointment letter and any other potentially relevant paperwork. When they tell you that you won’t be paid, calmly ask for a 50 percent advance on your salary.
2. Write an email to the Associate Provost of your division (Dr. Louise Lennihan for the Social Sciences and Humanities, llenni@gc.cuny.edu and Dr. Ann Henderson for the Sciences, ahender@gc.cuny.edu.) Explain who you spoke to in payroll, what they told you, and the date you signed your appointment letter.
3. Let the Adjunct Project know. We’ve already notified the PSC of this problem but would like to know the number of people this has impacted.
The main message we’d like to send from the Adjunct Project is: you must contact the Associate Provost. It’s imperative that they understand concretely how this issue is impacting adjuncts. Even if you are able to secure an advance, keep in mind this is a problem that is symptomatic of larger issues. It was only last year that our adjuncts were finally able to secure basic health care; now we are fighting to get paid on time!
It’s worth noting that it’s unclear why this problem occurred, and what part of the system failed us. CUNY staff, in Human Resources and elsewhere, are spread too thinly as it is. As adjuncts, we should keep this in mind as we discuss it with the Provost’s Office and elsewhere. We need more staff and better funding at all institutional levels, so that this kind of thing never happens again.
Upcoming Events
The Adjunct Project holds office hours both in the GC Mina Rees Library on Tuesdays from 2:00 – 4:00 and for the month of September, on Wednesdays from 4:00 – 5:30, this month (September) in the Art history lounge, 3rd floor. Come see us to discuss any issue you have relating to your adjunct position, including compensation, healthcare, and human resources issues.
Come to the Adjunct Project’s Health Insurance Party on October 15th, room 5414 at 8 p.m. Refreshments will be provided, as will door prizes! You must present either your NYSHIP card, a union card or a filled out NYSHIP application as your invitation. We look forward to seeing you there.
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