Kavi Joseph Abraham
I'd love to spend my day finishing my lecture notes or selecting film clips for tomorrow's classes. I'd love to be previewing an in-class writing assignment. But I’m not sure my job will be renewed for next year, and deadlines are approaching for positions at other schools. So instead I'll spend much of today sending out job applications. In the spring, I’ll have to discuss with my family what to do next, maybe ask my partner to sacrifice her career prospects to help support mine or uproot my child from another city. I’ll have to explain to extended family why I may be moving again.
This is the contingency that increasingly defines academic life for more and more faculty. And that alone is why I strongly support the faculty union at Pitt.
My first experience with unions was as an intern with a research firm affiliated with the AFL-CIO. To support unionization efforts at Walmart, I spent the summer reading bankruptcy filings made by current and former workers. In these documents low wages and unbelievable healthcare costs were twin constants, a story I sometimes bring up when discussing labor conditions in the global economy with my students. But with adjunct faculty facing the same conditions, and with universities increasingly relying on contingent workers to deliver education, I can tell stories much closer to home.
Perhaps it's unsurprising that the university is reconstituting itself on the model of a corporation. But then the university must accept that its scholar-teachers are workers whose lives must not be lived on the margins nor in constant uncertainty. A union is the only thing that helps get that message across.
--Kavi Joseph Abraham, Political Science
This is the contingency that increasingly defines academic life for more and more faculty. And that alone is why I strongly support the faculty union at Pitt.
My first experience with unions was as an intern with a research firm affiliated with the AFL-CIO. To support unionization efforts at Walmart, I spent the summer reading bankruptcy filings made by current and former workers. In these documents low wages and unbelievable healthcare costs were twin constants, a story I sometimes bring up when discussing labor conditions in the global economy with my students. But with adjunct faculty facing the same conditions, and with universities increasingly relying on contingent workers to deliver education, I can tell stories much closer to home.
Perhaps it's unsurprising that the university is reconstituting itself on the model of a corporation. But then the university must accept that its scholar-teachers are workers whose lives must not be lived on the margins nor in constant uncertainty. A union is the only thing that helps get that message across.
--Kavi Joseph Abraham, Political Science
