By Charles Loiacono     

A Sweat Shop in Academe

             The administration at NCC has conjured up a new angle and brought new meaning to the word exploitation. Who would have thought that with the ongoing exploitation of the adjunct faculty a more effective approach was needed?

            The adjunct faculty teaches more that half the courses at NCC and represents about 11% of the budget. Every time an adjunct teaches a course, the college makes a huge profit.     Yet, that did not stop the administration from quietly moving ESL courses out of the jurisdiction of the AFA to the continuing education budget where they paid instructors a fraction of the salary negotiated by the AFA and forced them to work longer hours.

            That little maneuver saved the administration a bundle of money. Twenty-one individuals did the job of 61 adjuncts. In one illegal move they were able to create an academic sweat shop where individuals were forced to work with no protection, no seniority, no job security, no sick pay, no severance pay, and no representation. They worked at the Fanelli/Ostling factory.

            More than the money they piled up in savings, it was the control they had over the lives of these workers that appealed to this administration. The ELI instructors worked a clock hour instead of a contact hour for about one-third the salary they should have received. Ironically, Jack Ostling bragged that some of them made more money than members of the AFA—a testimony to the fact that instructors worked five times as many hours as the contract permits. Such is the administration’s spin on exploitation.

How the administration accomplished this was as unsavory as their rationale. I won’t deal with the reasons they have used to create the sweat shop, because those reasons are nothing more than excuses that have the stench of dishonesty. I will, however, deal with how they did it, because that says something about their character.

            At a college where full-time salaries are in the top percentile in the nation and the adjunct faculty has an iron-clad contract, how do you find someone willing to work longer hours for a substandard salary without any union protection?  You find the vulnerable—that’s how. Who would be qualified to teach and yet vulnerable enough to accept substandard pay and substandard working conditions? Those who are out of work and unrepresented, those picking up time at several colleges, those paying their own health insurance, those who need work badly and will take it any way they can get it, those are the ones vulnerable enough to work in an academic sweat shop.

            They, of course, are not to blame. It is not the exploited; it is the exploiter that is to blame. We all have to support ourselves and our families. If you are on your own without representation and find yourself out of work, you will respond even to a shape-up and dive for the chit when it is thrown.

            But there is no excuse for the exploiter. What this administration has done is reduce the dignity and professionalism of the entire college community by equating sweat shop standards with the high standards that come from the terms and conditions negotiated at a bargaining table.