The Class War in the Air
An up-and-coming pilot with a commuter airline, Rebecka Shaw was paying her dues.
The 24-year-old old lived with her parents near Seattle, Wash., and worked at a coffee shop there on her days off. When the time came for her to fly, she commuted to work at Virginia-based Colgan Air.
As a copilot, she was paid $21 an hour, but only for flying time – not for layovers, typically in the New York area, or her cross-continent commute. She grossed $16,254 in her first year of work.
“I had gone back to visit with her, and she actually shared what she was making. ‘Well, it’s … $1,000 a month, Mom,’ ” said her mother Lynn Morris, in an interview with a Washington news station yesterday. She had visited her daughter during a layover.
Life in the cockpit ‘a recipe for an accident’, JOSH WINGROVE, May 14, 2009
The right wing and their fellow travelers love to accuse working people in unions of being selfish. They are just out for themselves, the logic goes, and if they are allowed to win better benefits and wages we will all suffer. Not surprisingly unions rightfully see this as simplistic nonsense. A better paid teacher, or an auto worker with a good health care, or a nurse with job security, is good, for all of us.
The recent revelations about about Continental’s treatment of Rebecka Shaw is a case in point. In the current political environment corporations have a almost completely free hand in how they treat workers. If you are an executive, you can pay yourself millions of dollars and arrange for a generous severance package if you are fired. You can also risk all of our lives by creating a new cadre of part time pilots.
An MLA Agenda: Too Little Too Late
In many places, laudable efforts to professionalize institutional policies and practices for faculty members off the tenure track have established an intermediate tier consisting of full-time contingent faculty members who hold renewable multiyear contracts. While these faculty members have more job security than part-time or short-term instructors, they are still far more vulnerable to cutbacks than colleagues on the tenure track, typically have heavier teaching loads than their tenure-track counterparts, and usually play limited roles in student advising and curriculum planning. Compared with the opportunities for professional development and institutional advancement of tenure-track faculty members, theirs are scant; their lot is to live with the frustration and resentment inherent in second-class academic citizenship.
MLA Newsletter, Summer 2009, “An Agenda for These Times,” Catherine Porter
I have to say my profession, especially my professional organizations, drive me a little batty. Everything seems laced with a bit of irritating class bias. I love the people who love technology and who incorporate it into their classrooms, but they are also too often uncritically consumerist. I enjoy the conventions (well, mostly) but they seem utterly disconnected from economic reality. Everything is priced for the tenured-expense-account-professors.
Notwithstanding the fantasies of the hard-right, academia is shockingly conservative, loath to accept even the most minor change. Porter calls tenured faculty “a discomfited elite, caught up in awkward relationships with their less-privileged colleagues.” That’s great to hear but it would have been even better to hear it a decade ago, when graduate students (yours truly among them) first began to sound the alarm.
A cynic might see the establishment of the Academic Workforce Advocacy Kit as a kind of sudden realization on the part of this elite that they may well have killed the goose that laid the golden egg of their discomfited privileges. Honestly, I am not sure how to judge it, although there must surely be some goose killing paranoia in the mix somewhere. Maybe, though, we might see this as the long-slumbering beast slowly awakening.
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Get my book at Southern Illinois University Press, Amazon, or Powell's Books.
The C.C.C.C webpage, A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies includes a short podcast interview with me along with links to these reviews:
... by Victor Villanueva in CCC 62.4 (June 2011)
... by Chanon Adsanatham in Teaching English in the Two-Year College 38.3 (March 2011)
... by Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Education (17 Feb 2010)Note: you need to be a member of NCTE, and a subscriber to the relevant journal, to read the reviews by Villanueva and Adsanatham; the review by McLemee is available to the general public.