UMass Continuing Education instructors denied union recognition by UMass: supporters stage sit-in at UMass President Bulger's office at 1 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts. Continuing Ed instuctors went on to win a collective bargaining agreement with UMass Amherst.
UMass by JOHN BUTELL AMHERST, Mass.--Some 75 University of Massachusetts-Amherst graduate students picketed the schools Division of Continuing Education July 18 to protest administrators refusal to recognize their union. Since the beginning of an organizing drive 18 months ago, more than 80 percent of graduate instructors for the division have signed cards to join the Graduate Employee Organization (GEO)/United Auto Workers Local 2322. But the university has refused to recognize the union or negotiate. The instructors get about half the pay and none of the benefits for teaching Continuing Education courses as they get for teaching the same classes in their departments. Theyre also the only Division of Continuing Education employees on the Amherst campus not represented by a union. The GEO campaign has included informational pickets and a 7-hour sit-in in UMass President William Bulgers office.
Night School Teachers Vote to Join Union By David Abel, Globe Staff, 7/13/2001 http://www.codaa.org/victories/umass.htm
Tired of low pay, lack of job security, and their status as "the deepest bottom of the barrel" in academia, instructors in the continuing education division of the University of Massachusetts yesterday joined a snowballing movement in higher education by voting to join a labor union.
The vote could boost wages and provide benefits for as many as 580 instructors at UMass-Boston, union leaders say.
"This is a very big day," said Gary Zabel, a philosophy professor at UMass-Boston who helped lead the drive to join the campus's affiliate of the Massachusetts Teachers Association. "Instructors who didn't have a contract before, now will have one - and we hope it eventually creates parity with other instructors on campus."
A long way from the privileged perch of tenured professors, continuing-ed instructors like Jonathan Cooper-Wiele earn significantly less than another low-paid group of academics on campus, the adjunct professors who teach regular classes.
In 1998, after more than a year of picketing and despite being union members for years, UMass-Boston's adjunct professors finally won a pay raise and the right to buy into the university's health plan.
Yet Cooper-Wiele and his colleagues in the university's continuing education division say they work the same hours, teach the same classes, and often grade the same full-time students as adjunct professors - but earn far less and enjoy no benefits.
"There's no doubt we're the bottom of the barrel," said Cooper-Wiele, who has been teaching philosophy in UMass-Boston's continuing education division for the past decade.
University officials, however, say there is a good reason for the disparity - and that differences in pay and benefits are unlikely to change. The state, they say, subsidizes normal university classes but not continuing education.
"As I understand it, they're different universes," said UMass spokesman Robert Connolly. "In continuing education, it's pay as you go. Because there aren't state dollars in the continuing-ed world, you're operating in a more modest economic framework."
But Zabel and other professors say the continuing-ed professors are a part of the college system. Although most of their students are adults and other non - traditional students, the lack of available sections at UMass often requires regularly enrolled students to join their classes.
Zabel said the university receives more than enough money from the continuing education program to improve the lives of its instructors, many of whom have been teaching for years at UMass and often teach as many classes as possible to beef up their incomes.
"Continuing ed is a cash cow and money is periodically rebated to different departments," Zabel said. "There's definitely a surplus. I have no doubts that the university has room to pay more."
At the state college level, continuing-ed instructors are eligible to join the same unions as other faculty. At UMass that has not been the case.
Meanwhile, as the university accepts the new union members in Boston, administrators are rejecting a similar effort by hundreds of graduate students at the Amherst campus.
On Wednesday, after more than a year of legal battles that have included hearings before the Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission, dozens of union supporters protested in front of the university's headquarters in downtown Boston, chanting "union busting is disgusting" and "UMass wages are outrageous."
Nine UMass-Amherst graduate students spent the afternoon refusing to leave the lobby in front of President William M. Bulger's office, demanding recognition as a bargaining unit. Several students and their lawyers yesterday met with university labor negotiators, but the administration officials told them their situation is not comparable to the union campaign on the Boston campus.
"They are qualitatively different pools," Connolly said. "At Boston, they teach longer and have a much longer relationship with the university. In Amherst, they are students and they don't have the same longevity and they move on."
About 300 graduate students per year teach in the continuing education division in Amherst, earning on average $2,500 to teach a course they would be paid $6,000 for in the regular curriculum, they say. They consider it unfair that the university is treating them differently because they are graduate students.
"This is pure hypocrisy," said James Shaw, a sociology teaching assistant and president of the local affiliate of the United Auto Workers. "It's very frustrating and totally invalid that they suggest we don't have a significant relationship with the university."
The votes counted yesterday in Boston were 35-5 in favor of joining a union. Only about 80 instructors were eligible to vote.
David Abel can be reached by e-mail at dabel@globe.com
Union Victory at UMass Boston!
by Gary Zabel
12 July 2001
Faculty members (overwhelmingly part-timers) who teach in UMass Boston's Continuing Education Division voted by a margin of 87% to unionize with the Faculty Staff Union / Massachusetts Teachers Association / NEA. This represents a tremendous victory for a union drive that was opposed for months by the UMass Boston administration. The new bargaining unit has approximately 400 members. In separate negotiations last month, the FSU won the right to represent 180 faculty members in Continuing Ed bargaining who also teach in the "regular" university. In all, 580 people have now been unionized.
The first act of the UMass-Boston union organizers following the election was to demand that the university administration immediately grant a union election to the UMass-Amherst Continuing Education instructors organized by the Graduate Employee Organization/UAW Local 2322 (GEO). Although at UMass-Boston most Continuing Ed instructors are part-time faculty members, at UMass-Amherst most instructors are graduate students. The university administration continues to oppose an election at Amherst even though 80% of Continuing Ed teachers have already signed union cards.
This is an especially important political development, since it represents the first time (that I am aware of) that part-time faculty and Grad TAs have entered into a working alliance. Activists in the UMass Boston Continuing Ed drive helped GEO representatives organize a successful rally and sit-in at UMass president Billy Bulger's downtown office yesterday. GEO has been similarly supportive of the UMass Boston union drive.
The victory at UMass Boston is particularly sweet for the Boston Chapter of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL), since the chapter originated in a successful campaign on that campus in 1998 for full health and pension benefits for part-time faculty. Many of the founders of Boston COCAL were active in the Continuing Ed drive. Over the course of the past year, COCAL has also spearheaded successful union drives among grad TAs at UMass Boston and part-faculty members at Emerson College. The result has been the unionization of more than 1200 contingent academic workers in Boston.
Gary Zabel is Co-Chair of Boston COCAL and Member of the Executive Committee of the FSU/MTA/NEA http://cas.umkc.edu/aaup/newsfl1.htm
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Reviewer:skamunist - - March 28, 2005 Subject: Direct Action Gets the Goods! In recent years changes in universities, especially in North America, show that we have entered a new era in higher education, one which is rapidly drawing the halls of academe into the age of automation. Automation - the distribution of digitized course material online, without the participation of professors who develop such material - is often justified as an inevitable part of the new "knowledge-based" society. It is assumed to improve learning and increase wider access. In practice, however, such automation is often coercive in nature - being forced upon professors as well as students - with commercial interests in mind. This paper argues that the trend towards automation of higher education as implemented in North American universities today is a battle between students and professors on one side, and university administrations and companies with "educational products" to sell on the other. It is not a progressive trend towards a new era at all, but a regressive trend, towards the rather old era of mass-production, standardization and purely commercial interests.
Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education by David F. Noble
Reviewer:skamunist - - March 28, 2005 Subject: Direct Action Gets the Goods! In recent years changes in universities, especially in North America, show that we have entered a new era in higher education, one which is rapidly drawing the halls of academe into the age of automation. Automation - the distribution of digitized course material online, without the participation of professors who develop such material - is often justified as an inevitable part of the new "knowledge-based" society. It is assumed to improve learning and increase wider access. In practice, however, such automation is often coercive in nature - being forced upon professors as well as students - with commercial interests in mind. This paper argues that the trend towards automation of higher education as implemented in North American universities today is a battle between students and professors on one side, and university administrations and companies with "educational products" to sell on the other. It is not a progressive trend towards a new era at all, but a regressive trend, towards the rather old era of mass-production, standardization and purely commercial interests.
Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education by David F. Noble
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