Permanent Austerity

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The adjuncts tend to teach core classes at Duquesne, and Cech noted the adjuncts’ lack job security because if their classes do not fill up, they are not guaranteed employment. Adjunct faculty members make up 40 percent of the liberal arts instructors and can earn up to no more than $10,224 in yearly salaries while full-time assistant professors within the liberal arts make a yearly salary of $65,300.

“Part-Timers At Duquesne Unionize With the United Steelworkers“

I’m always thinking that I sound crabby if not permanently angry so I go in search of good news. This piece, from Adjunct Nation, is in fact very good news insofar as it reports on six schools in the Pittsburgh area that are unionizing in affiliation with the United Steel Workers. It’s good news for a lot of reasons. I don’t think we’ll make any real progress until we have  a national labor movement,  and for that we need Card Check, but six schools in a city can at least begin to make a difference. Labor markets are very regional.

I like the idea of primary and secondary industry labor– the people who brought  us the weekend, ended child labor, created the minimum wage– working directly with tertiary industry people, especially education.   Solidarity is important, of course, and the traditional unions have a lot of expertise that we can all use. Even more importantly, we need a broadly representative labor movement that recognizes the necessity of a diverse economy.  Any economy overly focused on the so-called service industry is by definition a weak economy.

I also believe that these sorts of coalitions will eventually get us to the next important stage in the labor movement, which is a push to a shorter work week.  (Occupy Wall Street, are you listening?) It’s great that technology makes us more and more productive but if we don’t cut the labor week down to size this sort of progress will only lead to more unemployment. In the long run, the only real way to ensure some degree of equity will be to cut down the work week. If 20 hours were considered full-time, we’d really be on to something…

On the other hand it’s not all rainbows and unicorns…  The contrast between full-time and adjunct work at Duquesne and elsewhere illustrates a permanent state of austerity endemic in U.S. universities and growing worse each year.  These employment and salary disparities need to be widely known and ought to alarm everyone; if the austerity folks have their way our future is  an economy in which fewer and fewer workers have full-time positions while  more and more are under-employed and, of course, under-paid and over-worked.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Uncategorized, Writing

Show Me The (Public) Money!

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Ordinarily, when people speak of income disparity they are talking about individuals or about classes of individuals. The statistics are amazing: the U.S. hasn’t had this wide of a disparity in at least 8 decades.   The disparity is often even more shocking when you compare institutions.  I found two stories in this vein today. On the one hand, the Sacramento, California Public Library system is planning to cut hours in an attempt to prevent lay offs of employees.

In the richest state in the richest country in the world the most basic of public services, the library, has to cut hours (“Sacramento Public Library closures scheduled due to staff furloughs“).  You can just hear the austerity folks chanting their song: “We have made unsustainable promises for so long, and now it’s time to pay the piper.  The recession has been over for a while but the economy is only growing slowly, etc. There’s not enough money.”

Only, that’s not true; there’s a lot of money but it’s elsewhere: “MIT and Harvard pour $60M into “edX” online courses.”  I like the idea of free online courses but I can’t help but wonder why two private institutions have access to huge pools of money for this sort of program while, on the other side of the country, indeed in most of the country, public institutions are struggling to survive.  I suspect the answer is public policy not accident.

The French election of a socialist government, led by Francios Hollande, isn’t a simplistic “rejection of austerity.” It is also a recognition that we, the Western Democracies, do have the money, but it lies elsewhere. Here in the U.S., we’ve essentially disarmed ourselves, dismantling labor unions and filling legislative houses with Republicans servants of the status qua.   In Europe that hasn’t happened and there’s a chance priorities can be changed.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

Corporate Greed? There’s a App for That

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“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

“How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work,” Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, New York Times

[Apple]… paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent. (Apple does not disclose what portion of those payments was in the United States, or what portion is assigned to previous or future years.)

By comparison, Wal-Mart last year paid worldwide cash taxes of $5.9 billion on its booked profits of $24.4 billion, a tax rate of 24 percent, which is about average for non-tech companies.

“How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes,” Charles Duhigg and David Kocientewski, New York Times

I might have missed these articles if it weren’t for the New Faculty Majority blog, which pointed me to the “Remaking the University” blog, a site focused on California Education…  I’ve been  thinking about the links among consumerism, technology, and education for some time but this is a slightly different angle that I had not considered in any depth.  That is, there’s a direct link between contemporary consumerism and the economic destruction of higher education.

I think that using technology in the classroom is a good idea but I suspect that the push for technology is also fed by simple consumerism.  In some cases, pedagogy seems to get lost in the ongoing push for the newest sexy consumer electronics. Sherry Turkle (caution, the  video plays automatically) has famously argued, for example, that technology can inhibit the sociability and the self-refection necessary for learning. Call it Facebook alienation.

I have never been seduced by Apple’s closed-system. I was one of those people willing to put up with a computer that broke now and again rather than use a computer whose workings were hidden. Aesthetically, Apple has always seemed like one of those creepy, upper-middle class families I run into now and again, insular and self-satisfied.  Standing in line for the next Apple bauble is to me a symbol of the worst sort of  meaningless U.S. conformity.

Apple’s “progressive” image, particularly its support of higher education, is in fact more assumed than real. Apple is a corporation that, like most other corporations, has taken full advantage of tax loopholes to maximize profits. Ironically, then, as Apple was busily promoting its products as harbingers of  “the next chapter in learning,” it was busily using  the ““Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” to strip mine government budgets for its shareholders.

Posted in: Writing