The Sad Death Of An Adjunct Professor Sparks A Labor Debate
npr.org
npr.org
Duquesne officials say there are no immediate plans to
allow adjunct professors to unionize, despite professors'
vote to do so.
It's hardly realistic to expect employers to act with their employees' best interests at heart.
This is a little harsh. Many companies do put their employees first, so that they can keep the best ones. They just have to be in a position to capture some of the value from the added talent. Universities aren't always in a position to do that.
Unions can come with other problems such as reduced flexibility of the work force, which in today's high-change environment for schools could be crippling.
One should ask the deeper question - why are there so many underpaid adjuncts? The oversimplified answer is that we're subsidizing the production of too many Phds with non-transferable skills.
This is a little harsh. Many companies do put their
employees first, so that they can keep the best ones.
I'm all for having a social safety net, but I think it should be a last ditch remedy. People should save up for retirement, have kids who can support them, and only if all that fails should the safety net kick in. I think the government should have done something for her here, but it's not the employer's fault.
Finally, I find the implication that we should care more because she was educated. I'm much more concerned about the uneducated person who works as a day laborer and doesn't have the opportunity to pursue a career that might result in a secure retirement.
Saving up for retirement's not really practical when you're on such a limited wage.
I can't agree with the kids thing either. People should have kids because they want to show them the world - as children they reasonably expect to love and cherish - not as some cynical insurance scheme.
> Why is that the employer's fault? Just because she was old?
It would be the employers fault whether or not she was old, exploiting people in that manner is pretty disgraceful. It's just that as she aged the probability of negative consequences increased.
But if you're looking for pragmatism:
If you don't love them, children seem likely to be a bad investment. Having children isn't free. It's actually one of the more expensive things you can do. Both for yourself and for society. The USDA estimated cost of raising a child to 18 in the US in 2011 as $169,080 (dual parent family, lowest income bracket mentioned)
http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/Publications/CRC/crc2011.pdf
$169,080 (accounting for predicted inflation, actually closer to $212,000) is a quite substantial pension fund, especially if you invest it early. $169,080 is £105,509 - that's enough to buy a flat outright; I mean you wouldn't, you'd buy several flats with partial mortgages and leverage expected rent to expand, but still. $169,080 is a new degree in a better class of work.
It seems probable, if you're coming from a low income family and have been neglected, that you wouldn't even be capable of it financially - poverty is highly correlated across time; poor areas tend to stay poor.
I'm inclined to think it would be better to invest the money that might be spent on those kids over their lifetime (and all the worse for the state if the kids themselves live in poverty from an expense perspective) into a fund to provide a better pension for the potential parents. It's true that working adults provide for people, but the money that creates those working adults can be more efficiently applied. It's better to have a new company funded that provides employment to ten or twenty people and adds value to the economy than it is to have another person for whom work doesn't really exist.
And this is before we get to the motivation of the children themselves:
Because, even from a pragmatic perspective, love is valuable. If your parents don't love you, why would you love them? And if you don't love them, it's hard to see why you'd support them. Living with your parents once you're an adult is very difficult even when you think they're okay people.
These are all crazy assumptions.
What if your children are born with disabilities and can't work and require care for the rest of their lives? You might be able to provide that care, but they might also need expensive professional care. The State might have to step in anyway. What if they move away? They might not be able to move closer even if they wanted due to circumstances, like being in the military for example. What if they can only find work part time, or minimum wage? What if they are lazy or depressed and won't work and don't want to move out of the house? What if they get into drugs? What if they become homeless? What if they simply don't want to help you financially? They actually do have free will. They might be willing, but not able. They might be willing, but upset they you expect them to help you financially. What if they have medical problems also? What if they die young, before you? They might have an accident, and lose their ability to work.
I know of people where all of these things happened. These aren't super rare occurrences. If you think these can't happen, think again.
Having children with the expectation or even assumption they will provide some kind of services (financial or otherwise) to you in your old age is extremely unfair to the children and to yourself.
They're really not. Even western society relied on them almost exclusively to support old people until just 60-70 years ago.
The United State's page on the history of Social Security gives us some more information:
http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v66n1/v66n1p1.html
>The Great Depression was clearly a catalyst for the Social Security Act of 1935, and some of its provisions—notably the means-tested programs—were intended to offer immediate relief to families. However, the old-age insurance program—the precursor to today's Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance, or Social Security, program—was not designed specifically to deal with the economic crisis of that era. Indeed, monthly benefit payments, under the original Act, were not scheduled to begin until 1942. In addition, from the beginning, the Social Security program has embodied social insurance principles that were widely discussed even before the onset of the Great Depression.
>Although the Great Depression was a catalyst for the creation of the Social Security program, the idea of social insurance predated the committee's work and the Depression. As early as the 1880s, Germany had built a social insurance program (one requiring contributions from workers) that provided for sickness, maternity, and old-age benefits.1 Some authors have linked Germany's early adoption of social insurance programs to its rapid industrialization in the latter half of the 19th century (Schottland 1963, 15; Schieber and Shoven 1999, 17). A significant period of industrialization and urbanization also preceded the advent of social insurance programs in the United States. In 1880, the populations of farm and nonfarm workers were about equally balanced, but by 1930, workers in farm occupations accounted for only 21 percent of the workforce (Census Bureau 1956, 195).
>As the nation industrialized, increasing numbers of Americans depended on wage income (and less on family-based structures typical of a farm economy). Further, Schieber and Shoven (1999) argue that wage income, even before the Depression, was volatile. From 1905 to 1909, the nonfarm unemployment rate varied widely (ranging from 3.9 percent to 16.4 percent), with a similarly wide range (4.1 percent to 19.5 percent) occurring from 1920 to 1924 (Schieber and Shoven 1999, 19). Older workers, in particular, often bore the brunt of economic downturns.2 Cyclical swings in the economy were not the only concern. Lost wages due to disability, death, or retirement were also seen as problems not adequately dealt with by the structures of an industrial economy. Academic and political interest grew in social insurance plans that would smooth out the volatility of income or, said differently, insure against fluctuations in labor-market income.
Second of all, the life expectancy in 1935 was 61.7. Lots of people work until 61.7.
She felt she was pursuing a career that might result in secure retirement. She was an educated person who was doing what we want educated people to do in our society: teach other people what they know.
>I feel bad for the lady and all.
No, It doesn't really sound like you do.
We apparently don't value teaching French very much, and I can't really argue that we should value it more.
> No, It doesn't really sound like you do.
I certainly do. But what really irks me about this piece is that we're supposed to feel particularly outraged because this woman belonged to our class (educated professional). And that rubs me the wrong way.
I don't understand that statement. Why should we not value teaching more? Anything we, as programmers, do relies on knowledge. It was taught to us at some point, by people who taught us, by people who wrote books, by examples put out on the internet by somebody. By our math teachers who laid the foundation for a logical understanding of code. By the philosophy teachers who taught us logic. Teaching is the most important way of shaping ours and other peoples minds, so why is it hard to argue that we should value teaching higher? Is teaching french less "valuable" than teaching english or C or Fortran or Prolog just because it's french? Is it all of a sudden less work because it's just "french", a pesky natural language that's hardly understood by computers and only spoken by a handful of people that happen to have invented the croissant? Shouldn't be all teaching be paid sufficiently, so that teachers will enlighten your kids or your friends kids, handing off the knowledge of mankind to the next generation?
I, personally have no problem arguing that learning french, just as learning any other language expands your mind, shapes and improves the way you think and thus teaching it is one of the more valuable services that people can provide.
This woman didn't simply choose to be a teacher. She chose to be a very specific kind of teacher, and the kind she chose to be was not a well-compensated kind.
The expectation as I understand it in academia is that you're supposed to move on from adjunct professorship when it becomes clear that you're not getting tenure.
Adjuncts are a permanent academic underclass, in just about every sense of the word. (The one glimmer of hope, for adjuncts who have an MA but not a PhD, is to finish their PhD and then get an associate professorship afterwards. If you're a PhD and an adjunct, your career as an academic is functionally over.)
Please tell me you aren't serious. That's not a good reason to have children...
Never mind that they have this huge megaphone, that they choose which stories to run or not, and that it's in their best interests to have as many people as possible arguing about it in public as possible while linking to their article -- the faux storyline is that some other people think some issue is important.
I think education in the U.S. is in bad enough shape already. The last thing it needs is more vested interests with political agendas involved.
http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/education/duquesne-...
I can't see how the school is responsible for her horrible career and long term financial planning.
If you're making $10,000/year is the US, while having an education, it's your own damn fault.
At her age she shouldn't even be working. What has she been doing for over 60 years? Where is her social security, 401k/IRA, savings?
That is a bold and broad generalisation.
Probably married with a husband earning the wage, the default mode of living in a marriage for the generation born in 1930.
She deserved some compassion. By any reasonable point of view this was well-liked competent teacher who gave 25 years of service to her employer. She happened to fall through the social safety net.
Sadly, the way things are going, such miserable endings are going to become far more common when our generation becomes elderly.
Even a complete moron with no education can make more money doing cleaning, washing dishes, delivery, etc.
And that lady was not a complete moron, she was teaching.
The academia pays alright, you just have to do the hours. She didn't.
Then, there's a couple of other factors that come into play: The university only hands out part time contracts, so they're in a position to keep the wages low: Demand too much, no problem, we'll take another teacher for your course next year. I dispute your notion that academia in general pays enough. The given university pays an average of 20 - 25k to 75% of it's teachers. That's about half of the average wage in the USA. Even if they're working part-time that's still way too low for a job that requires university grade education. That's the people you entrust your childrens education to, not your dishwasher.
I assume that most of those 75% would love to have a full time job at the faculty, but the faculty obviously doesn't let them. So they either have a second/third job or live on scraps. Neither of those options is even remotely beneficial to the students education.
This is not true at all for dish washers and retail workers. The trend over time has been to schedule those workers at the maximum possible amount without them qualifying as a full time employee, which may entitle them to some kinds of benefits.
Considering she worked very relaxing hours, she could spend 10 hours a week searching for new clients.
If she was living in Western Europe she'd probably be retired 23 years already, have a pension and free healthcare.
Living in the US without health insurance is a ticking financial and health bomb. Even I, as an immigrant, knew that. That's why I paid through my nose to have insurance for me and my family when I was an independent contractor.
She lived day-to-day, didn't bother to plan even short term future, it's completely her fault.
She should have planned for it long before 83. I started planning my finances for retirement at 25.
She should've been eligible for Medicare, but I guess she didn't pay medicare taxes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)#Eligib...
It's great that you're fortunate enough to have enough income to be able to plan for retirement at 25.
Nobody should have to go without healthcare just because they didn't plan ahead or didn't do the right set of steps. Health care should be available for anyone without putting the burden of being eligible for that care on individual people.
But it does highlight the fact that working in academia can be a worse career than working in retail.
> But it does highlight the fact that working in academia can be a worse career than working in retail.
Working part time in either without paying for private health insurance will end up the same.
And yes, being a teacher doesn't pay much, but she didn't bother to advance her career over what, 60 years? She basically did the same thing she liked day after day, and expected the society/country to take care of her needs.
I agree that it would be nice to have a single payer healthcare system in the US, but that's not how it is.
I agree; it is exploitative.
But why do people keep showing up to do it? For every person who quits finally there are another dozen lined up to take the job. Perhaps that may be a little exaggeration, and no doubt it varies by region and subject matter, but people doing adjunct work must be getting compensation that is not salary or else why are they doing it? (Maybe I should say that I work in higher ed; I've often been puzzled by people's motivations about this.)
Social status. Nobody gets looked down upon when they say that they're an adjunct professor at a university.
And of course it's rewarding and stimulating work.