by Sarah Jaffe
The coronavirus pandemic, as Katherine Wilson noted, sent universities scrambling. In many cases, the workers wound up pitted against each other as budget cuts loomed, particularly at public institutions. Because, as usual, the crisis did not hit all workers, or all departments, equally. Graduate students worried that their funding would disappear, that the research they could not do from home would be irreparably damaged. Adjuncts, whose contracts are renewed semester by semester, held their breath. But in some cases, the workers took Angela Davis’s advice and tried to unite up and down the university, with tenured faculty standing up for service jobs. At Rutgers in New Jersey, the campus unions joined in a coalition twenty thousand workers strong, fighting to hold onto jobs for temporary faculty and maintenance workers alike, with the best-off volunteering to take furloughs to save the money for the most vulnerable. The coalition, said faculty member and historian Donna Murch, was giving the workers “a way to fight something that often feels abstract, which is this politics of corporatization, privatization, de-unionization, with real people that you know and that you see in regular meetings.”43
Fighting for the university in a moment of crisis would take more than just convincing arguments. Adam Kotsko argued that this moment was an opportunity to reestablish faculty governance and potentially bring back “the last good job in America”—but, he noted, “that can’t happen as long as we allow cost-cutting administrators to divide us into a privileged minority of tenured and tenure-track faculty and a disposable majority of contingent faculty and graduate students.” Fully inclusive unions and coalitions—like the one at Rutgers—were necessary, and a reminder that “the answer is not persuasion, but power.”44
The ideal academic workplace is often one that comes about not by following the rules, but by resisting them. Philosopher Amia Srinivasan found a vision of the university that she wanted to see during a 2019 strike. Part of the University and College Union and a professor at Oxford, Srinivasan was on strike for eight days with colleagues from sixty institutions across the United Kingdom. At issue, she wrote, were “pensions but also pay cuts, casualization, overwork and the gender and racial pay gap.” Claire English, an associate lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, was one of those casualized workers, on a year-by-year contract, and to her, the strike helped break through the shame many of them felt at not having permanent positions. “It’s been an amazing experience to be on the picket line, to find that there are so many other people in the same position as me and all of us being jerked around in terms of our pay, getting paid a month late, not getting our contracts until well after we’ve started teaching,… being told that we’ll have five hours of seminars and then student numbers change and you only get three.” Despite the exhaustion and the constant paring away of hard-won conditions, Srinivasan wrote, academic labor “contains a spirit of vocation and reciprocity” that is why people still aspire to it. Yet, she noted, “when people insist that the university is simply a place of love, and not also a place of work, they offer cover to exploitation—of staff, of students, and of the ideals of the university itself.… Those who insist that striking lecturers do not love their students fail to see that love can still be work, and that the picket can be a classroom.”45
KATHERINE WILSON HAD BEEN AN ACTIVIST ON MANY FRONTS FOR MOST of her life, but labor hadn’t really been one of them. She’d been a feminist and an activist for LGBT rights. She’d been part of Palestine and Latin American solidarity movements, and much of her theater work had been in collectives, where putting in time and sweat equity mattered and the ethos, she said, was “do what needs to be done.” But at CUNY, the union felt distant from her; it included everyone from tenured faculty on down, and she never felt particularly drawn to it. That changed at Fordham, though.
Sitting in her office, she was wearing a maroon sweater to which she’d hand-applied varsity-letterman style letters, reading “FFU” across the back. FFU stands for Fordham Faculty United, the name of the union that includes adjuncts like Wilson as well as non-tenure-track lecturers, who were contingent as well but a step up from the adjuncts—“They get health benefits and they teach four courses a semester, whereas we are capped at two.”
Getting involved in the union at Fordham was very different from the kind of “sitting and talking or screaming in the streets” that had made up her prior activism. She said, “It was fascinating to me. Like, ‘Oh, we can’t just scream our top ideals. We have to actually come in here and think of how this would work.’”
The organizing process began at Fordham with a handful of adjuncts, but initially they had a hard time getting a union to work with them. Wilson wasn’t involved early on, but after the group connected with the Service Employees International Union’s new Faculty Forward campaign, focusing on precisely their kind of precarious faculty, she was drawn in. Eventually, through a combination of public pressure from students and tenure-track faculty and actions by the adjuncts, they got the university to agree to allow a union election. The instructors voted 16 to 1 to unionize with SEIU Local 200.46
It was 2018 when bargaining began, and Wilson found the process engrossing. Their union representative held open negotiating sessions, so anyone could come and watch bargaining unfold. “I felt that I learned from every single session I attended,” she said. “Every now and then we might say something, but it was mainly observing. But [our representative] would consult us and occasionally we would vote on something, like, ‘Would we be willing to strike?’ or ‘Did we want to fight for health insurance or higher pre-course wages?’” Only later did she realize that the speed and success of the Fordham process had been inspirational to other schools. The contract they won included wage raises from 67 percent to 90 percent for adjuncts over its three-year duration; that would bring most of them to between $7,000 and $8,000 per class by the contract’s end. Full-time lecturers would reach a minimum salary of $64,000 by the third year of the contract, an increase of roughly $14,000 a year for the lowest paid. They won just-cause protections, meaning they couldn’t be fired without a reason given, as well as some professional development funding and paid professional leave for full-timers.47
When they held their first election for union officers, Wilson found herself recruited to be cochair alongside French lecturer Josh Jordan, and they went on to work closely together on both big-picture and day-to-day issues. The process had taught her a lot about the campus: adjuncts tended to be isolated from one another as well as from other tiers of faculty in the stratified system. “I had to learn who my brothers and sisters were, so to speak,” she said. That involved getting to know the different campuses and schools, and learning that the social-work adjuncts “were paid a pittance” compared to her and others in the humanities, even though the adjuncts in the humanities were in turn paid little compared to those at the business school. Fordham had wanted to have the adjuncts and the lecturers in different bargaining units, but the contingent faculty stuck together, Wilson said, and made sure that while the contracts had different details, they “tied them together”: “We hinged the calculus that determines our salaries so that if one goes up, the other one goes up. You are not going to divide and conquer.”
Professional development funds were huge for Wilson. “Since 2002, I have been presenting at conferences, [and] I have never gotten a dime from a school for that,” she said. “CUNY has it, but it is stringent about who qualifies for it.” Of course, she laughed, now that she’s a union officer, that takes up a lot of her time outside the classroom and she has less time for conferences. But the prospect of funding means a recognition that adjuncts and lecturers, too, are scholars doing research as well as teaching. They also won a level of security against last-minute canceled classes: the university has to tell them by a certain time whether they’ll be teaching, and if they cancel a class, they still get paid a fraction of the salary. (The scheduling fights are reminiscent of those among retail and service workers, and were no doubt aided by SEIU’s experience orga
nizing other parts of the service sector.) Finally, they have the right to union representation at every step of their process. “That forces them to recognize us, that we are working people, that we have pasts and futures,” said Wilson.
Implementing the contract has taught her about what needs to be improved next time. From the limitations on professional development funds to the impossibility of office hours without office space, she’s realized more and more what it would actually take to make adjuncts equal to the rest of the faculty. In their first year on the job, she said, she and Jordan were expected to be the “pretty face” of the union, to do things like going to Central Labor Council meetings, meeting with administrators, and connecting with other unionists across the city. But instead they’ve been involved in the nuts and bolts of implementation. “I just said last week to Josh, ‘Our real work starts now. A year and a half in, this is when we are finally turning to our real work.’”
Academia, she noted, often draws people who bought into the ideal of the lone intellectual: “We worked solo. We did a dissertation solo. We did the loneliest five years, eight years, whatever.… And now, you are throwing us together and saying, ‘Oh, yeah, you will work together fine.’” She was one of the few involved in the union’s leadership with activist experience, and even then, she hadn’t been involved with many formal organizations. Within the contingent faculty, she noted, titles didn’t determine rank, but there were in practice differences in whether one got involved with the union. Many universities justify hiring part-time adjuncts by arguing that they are working professionals in their field who supplement that work with teaching, and sometimes that’s even true. The “moonlighters,” Wilson said, were harder to sign up and get interested in the union than those like her and her cochair, who had gone through the PhD process and had looked forward to traditional academic careers.
Although there are union stewards on each campus, it can still be a challenge to get faculty involvement. Old-style union tips for organizing, Wilson noted, don’t work for contingent faculty. There is little shared space, and schedules vary wildly. “We don’t have a clique. We don’t have anything. We have to invent the watercooler,” she said. “That is about the structure of what they do with us and spatially… we sometimes don’t share anything. The fact that you have to invent it is very, very different from what [happens in] a factory or hospital, where the organization already wants them to be a well-oiled cadre, and now if you can bend that cadre toward a union, you have terrific strength. Science is not solitary, but science doesn’t get very involved. For those of us in humanities and social sciences, the nature of our work is very, very isolated.”
The way the university has changed shaped Wilson’s experience beyond just the nature of her own job, she said. She had let go of the desire for that window office with the bookshelves, the dedicated workspace. But what still got to her was how the students came in anxious and stressed, and how that led to less risk-taking, less learning, and more playing it safe to get the grade that would get them the credential. “It is chores you do to get the grade. I find it so alienated from working with knowledge and working with literature and working with writing,” she said. “Also, arts are about adding—I don’t mean beauty in the sense of pretty flowers, but about adding a kind of beauty and recognizing pleasure. That is quantified and that is commodified and commercialized, but in my mind—obviously—is not about price.”
That kind of pricelessness, she said, connects to the dignity that adjuncts are fighting for. “It is not just about the pay. I don’t put poetry on par with housing and food, but it is not far behind,” she said. “Bare existence, bare subsistence, bare life, that is not our vision of humanity, and particularly for academics, we’ve immersed ourselves in the fruits of human creation and civilization. It is a painful oxymoron that then our daily lives and subsistence had become close to abject.”
The union itself served to break up their isolation and provide something beyond that bare life. “We have monthly happy hours down the avenue. The social is a little slower, but we are trying to start to build those,” Wilson said. “I would like to organize—in Fordham—adjuncts who straddle schools and start to build that.” But it takes work to build a union that isn’t just seen by most of the faculty as a service provider. “We get members approaching us like, ‘Do this for me,’ or ‘Provide me this service.’” Contingent faculty still hang on to the hope that their gig will be short term; even if they want the protections of the union, Wilson said, they don’t want to invest too deeply in it. There was still a sense of shame that made the adjuncts less inclined to identify with their role; no one, Wilson noted, said with a sense of pride that they were an adjunct. They had this in common with other parts of the precarious workforce: a need to break through the disappointment and decide that the way to change things was to improve the adjunct job, not just to keep hope-laboring toward escape from it.
She understood this feeling. “I did give up looking,” she said. “After this contract it will be, ‘So, do I continue this or don’t I?’ I don’t know. Is this happy or content or how miserable and undignified is this?” Fifty-seven, she noted, would be a difficult age at which to be considering another change from work she trained for and is good at, but it is also the reality she faced.
“There is no question that the only time I have felt dignified working in a university was the activist work in the union here. That is the most dignified relationship I have had. My own work as an adjunct, I can’t think of a semester or a month where I would say, ‘That felt dignified,’” she said. “That is what most political struggles have been fighting for, in addition to the material gains and substantial rights.” The five, ten, sometimes twenty hours a week of unpaid work for the union was the thing that mattered most to her. “People say, ‘Why do you do it?’ That is my answer. This is where the dignity comes from.”
CHAPTER 9
PLAYBOR OF LOVE
Technology
VIDEO-GAME PROGRAMMERS LEARN TO CELEBRATE “CRUNCH” FROM THE get-go. Like many of his peers, Kevin Agwaze went to a specialized school that taught coding for games, rather than a traditional university. Such schools normalize a brutal workweek, treating high dropout rates as a badge of honor, and instilling the idea that the games industry is a shark tank where only the strong survive. While in his native Germany, he noted, “Uni is free,” the program he attended, a two-year course, costs around €25,000 (about US$29,000). Such programs can cost even more in the United States, where a specialized education might run $100,000.
The schools, Agwaze and other programmers explained to me in a London pub, pump out “eight gazillion” games developer grads, for whom there are not necessarily enough good jobs. By the time they graduate, programmers expect to work long hours to prove themselves, and for those hours to stretch even longer when deadlines loom. To Agwaze, it seemed to be worth it to work in a field about which he was passionate. “I knew it was going to be bad for me,” he said with a lopsided grin. “I thought, ‘I am young, my body is going to be fine. I can do it for a while. I can handle bad conditions.’”
He wanted to work in what they call triple-A games—the video-game equivalent of a blockbuster film, with a big budget and production teams that span multiple countries and studios. He applied for jobs all over and wound up in the United Kingdom at a company called Studio Gobo. The company, which bills itself as “a family of graphics geeks and artistic misfits,” offers “AAA console game development services for a global client base.” What that means, Agwaze explained, is that they work on specific parts of bigger properties for major studios. “We have all the creative freedom but none of the risk, like if Ubisoft [a French video-game company] is going to cancel [a] game, they will still pay us,” he said. He’s pretty happy at his job, all things considered.1
His day-to-day work schedule depends to a degree on other programmers working in offices that might be several time zones away. There’s no time clock to punch, no overtim
e pay; he comes in to work around 10:00 a.m., he said, and leaves most days around 7:00 or even 8:00 p.m. The late evenings are in part, he explained, because he’s working with developers in Montreal, who don’t arrive at work until after he’s had his lunch. “I come into the office, read all the emails about stuff that happened after I left, when they were still working,” he said. There is, he joked, a 50/50 chance that the thing he’s supposed to be working on will be broken in some way when he arrives and he’ll have to wait for Montreal to be online to fix it; if it isn’t broken, he can do some work before they’re up.
The seemingly inefficient process is common across the industry, he explained. In part, that’s because so many different people work on different parts of big games that it would be impossible to have them all in one office, or even, it seems, one company. There is also the desire for what he called “acculturation” benefits—making sure that games are accessible and interesting to audiences in a variety of locations rather than being so culturally specific to one that players in a different market won’t want it. “If you have people with different backgrounds working on a game,” he said, rather than employing “the same Bay Area American people” each time, “it might just end up being a better game.”