Lynn Arner
Greetings from Canada, where almost all universities are unionized.
For three years (2004-2007), I taught at the University of Pittsburgh in a full-time contingent post in the Department of English. Although I adored the students and benefited professionally from Pitt’s prestige, I quickly learned that prestige couldn’t pay my bills. I accepted a tenure-track, unionized position at Brock University near Toronto, where the structural terms of my employment improved dramatically. Fortunately for me, my union requires that salaries be based on years of teaching experience rather than on previous annual earnings. My annual raises both take into account cost-of-living increases and reward each year of continued employment at Brock. Today as an associate professor, I earn nearly double the salary of my spouse, who is a tenured professor of English at Pitt, and I get a sabbatical to support my research every three years--or six semesters--of teaching an annual 2/2 load. At Pitt, tenure-stream English professors have sabbaticals only after every six years of teaching.
Canadian faculty unions have been able to push back against some of the corporatization that has decimated American academe. For example, my union’s collective agreement mandates that only 18% of our courses can be taught by instructors outside the tenure stream. My union (BUFA) also conducts confidential salary inquiries to ensure pay equity between male and female faculty members in comparable disciplines. My union protects workers during the tenure process to ensure that candidates are judged not according to capricious standards of popularity or collegiality but according to their records of publication, teaching, and service.
I highly recommend faculty unions for preserving workers’ rights and for facilitating intellectual freedom and rigorous standards of teaching and research. Because of my union, I no longer struggle financially.
--Lynn Arner, Associate Professor of English, Brock University, Canada
For three years (2004-2007), I taught at the University of Pittsburgh in a full-time contingent post in the Department of English. Although I adored the students and benefited professionally from Pitt’s prestige, I quickly learned that prestige couldn’t pay my bills. I accepted a tenure-track, unionized position at Brock University near Toronto, where the structural terms of my employment improved dramatically. Fortunately for me, my union requires that salaries be based on years of teaching experience rather than on previous annual earnings. My annual raises both take into account cost-of-living increases and reward each year of continued employment at Brock. Today as an associate professor, I earn nearly double the salary of my spouse, who is a tenured professor of English at Pitt, and I get a sabbatical to support my research every three years--or six semesters--of teaching an annual 2/2 load. At Pitt, tenure-stream English professors have sabbaticals only after every six years of teaching.
Canadian faculty unions have been able to push back against some of the corporatization that has decimated American academe. For example, my union’s collective agreement mandates that only 18% of our courses can be taught by instructors outside the tenure stream. My union (BUFA) also conducts confidential salary inquiries to ensure pay equity between male and female faculty members in comparable disciplines. My union protects workers during the tenure process to ensure that candidates are judged not according to capricious standards of popularity or collegiality but according to their records of publication, teaching, and service.
I highly recommend faculty unions for preserving workers’ rights and for facilitating intellectual freedom and rigorous standards of teaching and research. Because of my union, I no longer struggle financially.
--Lynn Arner, Associate Professor of English, Brock University, Canada
