Recently, the Charlatan has been publishing a series of articles and editorials on the precarious employment of contract instructors and our wages. Some sources have suggested contract instructors receive adequate pay for their work, but they miss the crux of the issue: the treatment and use of contract instructors reflects a disturbing trend in Canadian universities that threatens the quality of education and undermines the value of highly qualified instructors.
Historically, contract instructors represented a fraction of faculty at universities. For example, in 2004, there were 787 permanent faculty and only 367 contract instructors at Carleton.
While enrolment and tuition continues to rise, universities have become glorified temporary employment agencies. Over the last 10 years, enrolment at Carleton has increased by 16 per cent, but permanent faculty have only increased by seven per cent while contract instructors have increased by 88 per cent. In 2014, 690 contract instructors were teaching more than 25 per cent of classes and more than 35 per cent of students. Why has Carleton come to rely on these precarious instructors so much?
Quite frankly, it’s because contract instructors cost a lot less. Despite many of them working on a full-time, continuous basis for many years, the university treats them as part-time, contingent workers with little to no office space, no compensation for course preparation, and wages that are less than both the provincial and Ottawa averages.
The university relies heavily on contract instructors for cheap labour. The average income of a tenured professor is $112,832 a year. Compare this to around $6,500 per half-credit course taught by a contract instructor. It’s plainly obvious there is considerable incentive to off-load teaching duties onto contract instructors.
We’re sure the university believes it pays its workers adequately. For most people, receiving “adequate” wages, means they are able to feed themselves, support their families, and live with dignity.
When the union thinks about an adequate wage, in terms of the work that we do, we do not think of it as being properly adjusted to market forces. Rather than seeking to attain the market optimum, it is our duty to work together in seeking wages and working conditions that enable us to live with dignity.
As a union, we advocate on behalf of members like Andrew Robinson in terms of his right to an adequate standard of living. We advocate for his right under the collective agreement to make a case for wages that reflect his skills.
Through collective bargaining, we work in solidarity in order to better our wages and working conditions. We do better if we support each other in our claims to a decent standard of living.
If we support the teaching assistants and contract faculty currently on strike at the University of Toronto and York University—because $15,000 per year is by no means enough to live on in Toronto—it also improves our own position.
Many university students aspire to be academics someday, but they need to realize that those good jobs they are looking forward to will be rare.
More important to many of our undergrads right now are grad school applications, which often require references from two or three tenured faculty members. At the rate Ontario universities are going, students will have a hard time finding anyone to sign off on those references. Rather, they’ll find a tired, beaten up academic with no pension, no job security, limited benefits, and a meagre wage, who isn’t allowed to sign off on those important forms.
Our contract instructors deserve better for the hours of work they contribute to making an education for our students possible.
The treatment of contract instructors—and the growing reliance on them by universities like Carleton—is a trend that should trouble every member of our university community.
