“Unpaid work won’t fly.” That slogan captured the demand by flight attendants in the Air Canada Component of the Canadian Union of Public Employees to be paid for all hours worked. Their campaign resonated widely, even among those whose August travel was disrupted when CUPE defied the federal government’s back-to-work order.
How could it not? Expecting flight attendants to donate hours of their lives to the employer before takeoff and after landing is so obviously wrong.
How many Canadians know that many academics are in a similar position? Contract academic staff (CAS) on part-time and limited-term contracts often work to get courses off the ground before their pay starts and again after it ends, when they remain vital mentors to students. They may perform service and conduct research that benefits their post-secondary institution and society more widely, but unless that work is included in the terms of their contract, it too goes unpaid.
Meanwhile, insecure employment reduces academic freedom, removing the procedural protections of tenure or other forms of permanency. Contrary to neoliberal wisdom, security, not precarity, supports the risk-taking needed for innovation and creativity.
In gig-work style, employers may expect CAS to supply the resources needed to do their work, often not allocating even a campus office. CAS who piece together part-time jobs at multiple institutions, sometimes in different cities, give additional hours to commuting between them, while uncertainty about future employment complicates important life decisions.
In short, insecure conditions transfer costs from employers to workers. They are at odds with the characteristics of decent work, as defined by the International Labour Organization (ILO):
Decent work sums up the aspirations of people in their working lives. It involves opportunities for work that is productive and delivers a fair income, security in the workplace and social protection for all, better prospects for personal development and social integration, freedom for people to express their concerns, organize and participate in the decisions that affect their lives and equality of opportunity and treatment for all women and men.
Above all, contingent employment externalizes risk, allowing corporatized post-secondary institutions to add and remove workers “nimbly,” without the hassle of formal layoffs. But as the Law Commission of Canada asked in Is Work Working? back in 2004, why would we think vulnerable workers are positioned to bear the costs that employers and the state are unwilling to assume?
These costs are sharpest, of course, for those immediately affected. They don’t stop there though. On the organizing front, employers will always try to exploit differences between workers, using them to weaken solidarity within and between unions. On our campuses, students lose when the professor who inspired them is no longer teaching in their program or is unable to supervise their thesis. Permanent academic staff lose when their CAS colleagues’ strengths and specialties cannot be built into curriculum planning and program building. An increasing reliance on part-time and fixed-term contracts leaves a shrinking pool of permanent academic staff to carry the growing workload of running programs. And the whole of society loses when academics are not supported to conduct the research and scholarship for which they trained.
Committed to fighting these losses and inequities, CAUT member associations have made improvements for CAS a bargaining priority. This work must continue in the current retrenchment.
But in an austerity context, we’re not going to win this fight at the bargaining table alone. It will require sustained political organization aimed at restoring stable funding for public post-secondary education, combined with a remaking of our colleges and universities away from the corporate model and for the common good.
Though I write in October, Fair Employment Week, when CAUT members draw attention to precarity in our sector, will be well over by the time this column appears. Perhaps that’s fitting. In 1944, the ILO reaffirmed its fundamental founding principles in the Declaration of Philadelphia. These start with “labour is not a commodity,” followed by “freedom of expression and association are essential to sustained progress.” Third is “poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere.”
Let’s stretch the last to include “insecurity for any threatens the security of all,” and commit to fighting it every week of the year.
