BTW, are adjuncts organized anywhere in the US? If so, how? (Yoshie)
Lots, mostly as part of regular faculty unions (AFT, NEA, and now also UE, UAW, SEIU) and whatnot (it's because it's harder to mobilize adjuncts and to sustain that mobilization). (Dennis Redmond)
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Yoshie,
Contact Doug Henwood, off-list and get him to send you the e-mail addresses of the folks in Berkeley. Their names are Analeen, Charlie, and Steve--and also Jonathan S who was at UI, Champagne-Urbana. I am not on the Bad list anymore and don't have their e-mail addresses. They were part of the unionizing effort for grad TA's at UC Berkeley. I realize TA's are not the same as adjuncts, but they might have suggestions, stories, methods, people to contact.
Doug should also know of other unionizing efforts in academia since this topic has come up on this list several times. Somebody should put up a website with a contact list for all these efforts, since unionizing academia has come up here, on the Bad list, the ANE and Classics lists long ago--basically all over the place.
The following story is probably not relevant but it might give you ideas.
I unionized a small shop (non-academic staff) at UCB through AFSCME(?) in the late Seventies. It took about three years (very short). When I was poking around the UC bureaucracy looking for help I found it in of all places, the Labor Relations Dept! It turned out one guy there was a mole--a former union organizer who got a real job in the very heart of the beast.
Anyway the first step we went through was to get the personnel manual and learn every piece of it. The point is to know the regulations better than anybody you meet with. I found that most bureaucrats personally don't give a shit--its just a job to them--you do give a shit, and that is an big advantage. Because they don't care, they make mistakes of judgment and procedure, and those are exploitable. (It was a lot like fighting with the draft board, ten years earlier.)
With this Personnel Dept info, the first step I did was to re-write the job descriptions (I was theoretically a unit manager--big laugh) to conform to better job tracts at the same pay/benefit rates and then push them through Personnel on the pretext that the formal job description proceedure had never been followed correctly in the first place. In our case the real point was to start the shop on a built-in pay raise system (that I promised wouldn't be followed--I lied) and that had been avoided when the project first started. Getting everyone at the shop level through this took about a year. Meanwhile, the union guy in Labor Relations met with each person and helped them through these meetings with UC Personnel as their personal representative. People were allowed to take a personal representative with them to meetings with the Personnel dept. See, we never would have known that, if we hadn't read the personnel manual.
The UC system in a move to out flank unions in the first place, installed various personnel rules for their advantage that sounded like union rules but were not. So, this 'personal representative' was one of these--it should have read, 'union' representative. The more usual meaning was that Personnel appointed a 'personal representative' for you. Fuck that, we brought our own--which was a partly hidden option.
Anyway, once everyone was re-classified, we started in on joining the union. Since everybody had been personally supported the year before, they were much more receptive to formal unionization with dues and appointing a shop steward, and occasionally attending meetings after work.
As a first step I would get the freaking personnel manual and figure out the structure for academic staff. It will have a plan and inner logic of some sort to it--that is one tool to use against the assholes. You use this logic as part of the means to lead them where you want to go. In our case, we were very lucky. It turned out that the best job description tracks at our level were all created in the late Forties to correspond to a build-up of engineering facilities and machine shops to produce proto-type nuclear weapons--before there was a formal separation of the UC system from the Federal Lab systems. These job descriptions fit our shop to a T, but hadn't been used in years. It was a miracle they were still in the manual.
These were very localized and specific pieces of luck. But, be creative when you read the manual and regs that apply to your situation. And if there isn't such a manual or such regulations, then I think that might be a violation of some law or other--maybe a starting point for threatening a law suit.
The larger point is to start acting like you already are a union and just do what real unions are supposed to do--pick fights with Personnel over job descriptions, pay, benefits, hours, duties, and so on. Any mistakes on pay checks or other paperwork are a great excuse to go over to Personnel to meet and straighten 'this' problem out. You get to meet and know and case-out the slimy little snakes in their dark little holes. Except I think they call it 'Human Resources' nowadays. After some of these minor meetings and battles, your people should start to feel organized because they were supported--they were not alone to face the monster. Also, chasing down minor employment problems teaches you how the enemy is organized, what the channels are, who is really a possible friend and who the real jerks are and where they hide in the system.
Good luck.
Chuck Grimes