Chris Williams

Physics Professor, Pace University, New Jersey

Chris Williams

"I would starve to death if I had to rely on my wages from Pace. I'd be homeless," says Chris Williams, who teaches introductory physics at Pace University in the New York City area. There and at most other schools, "adjunct faculty" is an elegant term for teachers with second-class status, few rights, no job security (they live from one short-term contract to another), no health insurance or pension and poverty-level wages.

"We have very low pay for adjuncts at Pace, even compared to industry standards," he adds. "The average pay for an adjunct for a three-credit course is just $2,500 for a 15-week course"—so while a tenured professor might be earning $100,000 per year, an adjunct faculty member in the next classroom with the same qualifications would earn subsistence pay of only $15,000 for the equivalent of a full-time workload.

Williams sees adjunct faculty trying to patch together as many as four part-time teaching jobs just to get by, constantly traveling from one to another. The only way he survives is by teaching physics at a private, religious high school in Manhattan.

It's no wonder that Williams and hundreds of other adjunct faculty at Pace decided to organize into the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT/AFT), which is part of AFT. In December 2003, a majority signed authorization cards declaring they wanted to be represented by the union. But it soon became clear that Pace University's administration would go to enormous lengths to block them from winning recognition and a contract.

First, the university tried to delay a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election for the adjunct faculty members to vote on a union. Then, after the election was held in spring 2004 anyway and they voted overwhelmingly for the union, the university came up with a bizarre legal argument that hundreds of adjunct faculty members should be excluded from the bargaining unit. It actually refused to include them in negotiations with the union. The director of NLRB's Region 2 swatted down the university's arguments, finding the disputed adjunct faculty members were part of the bargaining unit, and the five-member NLRB in Washington, D.C., rejected a request by the university to have the region's decision overturned—but even now, Pace is appealing the decision to the federal appeals court. That postpones the adjunct faculty's rights even longer.

"We're still negotiating," Williams says, "but I don't think Pace has been very forthcoming. They're going out of their way to slow the process down."

So a staggering two-and-a-half years of negotiations have passed and the adjunct faculty still has no contract. That's why Williams, who sees firsthand the flaws in the current system, supports the Employee Free Choice Act, which provides for mediation and then arbitration if managements and unions can't work out a contract in 90 days.

"Anything that can speed that process has to be good for workers," he observes. "It's clear that people need someone to represent them collectively. At the moment, the balance of power is almost completely with the employers. It's long overdue that workers shift the power a little bit in our favor."

Williams, a union member in the Agriculture Ministry and later in a pacifier factory in his native Britain, became interested in teaching because "I'd seen very poor teaching and fantastic teaching, and the fantastic teaching changed my life." A union contract for Pace's adjunct faculty wouldn't only mean higher wages. It would "give me the freedom to try new things, to be innovative, to take initiative without fear of losing my job." But because labor law is so toothless, his wait for that contract is far from over.