{"id":2591,"date":"2017-04-14T17:04:36","date_gmt":"2017-04-14T22:04:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/?p=2591"},"modified":"2017-04-14T17:05:18","modified_gmt":"2017-04-14T22:05:18","slug":"the-life-of-an-adjunct","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/2017\/04\/14\/the-life-of-an-adjunct\/","title":{"rendered":"The Life of an Adjunct"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest post by Donna Kalinowsky<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dear Community College President,<\/p>\n

Perhaps you do not know what life is like for an adjunct. When I started here in 1992 or so, I\u00a0made about $9000 per year. Even then, that was not much. I was eligible for Section 8 housing, food\u00a0stamps, fuel assistance, Medicaid, head start for my kids, access to local food pantries, Christmas Elf\u00a0programs for children\u2019s gifts, and the Earned Income credit. Thanks to these things, I was able to raise 4\u00a0children, ages 29, 27, 14 and 9.Thanks to the union, my income has gradually risen, but it has always been less than $30,000\u00a0per year, even when enrollment was high. I used to be able to count on teaching 4 courses per\u00a0semester. Then it was 3 courses. This semester my 3 courses were reduced to two – one course was\u00a0canceled even though it was fully enrolled with 12 students. My Dean transferred my students to a full-time instructor\u2019s class. So, I have had to survive on less than $8000 for the period from January through\u00a0May. For the fall, I was again only assigned 2 courses, one of which has a high probability of being\u00a0cancelled. So, I may have to live on $4000 from September to December. The summer is a wild card \u2013 I\u00a0am scheduled to teach 2 courses, but whether both will run is an open question.<\/p>\n

So, under the very best circumstances I can expect to make $24,000 this year. A more likely\u00a0scenario is that my total yearly income will be less than $20,000. That is under the poverty level.\u00a0The only bright spot is that I will again be eligible for food stamps (my income last year was barely\u00a0above the cutoff).<\/p>\n

Can you understand why adjuncts are frustrated? It\u2019s not just me and it\u2019s not just this college It\u2019s\u00a0all across the commonwealth and all across the country. It\u2019s been a long, long time since adjunct were\u00a0experts only hired for specialized courses. The new hires in the math department have no skills that\u00a0other math department adjuncts do not have. We are now used as a cheap source of labor. Now maybe\u00a0you can understand why the union is asking for large increases in adjunct pay. We would like to be able\u00a0to support ourselves at a living wage. Even minimum wage workers earn $20,800 per year.<\/p>\n

You may not be aware of this, but here is how the current adjunct retirement system works. A\u00a0certain percentage of our pay is put into an OBRA account. The state of Massachusetts pays nothing. It is\u00a0not really a retirement plan \u2013 it is just a forced savings account with no guaranteed payout like Social\u00a0Security. In fact, we are forbidden from contributing to Social Security, even if we pay the full 12.6%\u00a0ourselves (I considered doing that once). Not only that, if we have ever contributed to Social Security at\u00a0a previous job and have somehow managed to get enough credits to qualify for Social Security, our\u00a0benefits are significantly reduced because of the OBRA \u201csavings account\u201d!<\/p>\n

So, what could you do to help? Lots. First, put a moratorium on hiring additional adjuncts. That\u00a0just makes the situation worse when there are not enough courses to go around as it is. Second,\u00a0support the union\u2019s efforts to either allow adjuncts to be in the Social Security system, the state\u00a0retirement system, or make the state contribute something to OBRA, even if it\u2019s just .5%\u00a0(Massachusetts is the only state that contributes nothing to adjunct retirement). Third, support efforts\u00a0by the union to require colleges to hire fulltime from among current adjuncts before going outside. If\u00a0we are qualified to teach as adjuncts, why would we not be qualified to teach full time? We have the\u00a0same qualifications and teach almost all the same courses as full timers. The old arguments about\u00a0specialized courses taught by experts no longer apply. Fourth, support prorated pay and benefits for\u00a0adjuncts. I think if you search your conscience you know that that is the only fair solution. The pay\u00a0disparity between part time and full time is far, far larger than between men and women or between\u00a0whites and nonwhites or even the college educated and high school dropouts.<\/p>\n

I hope this explains a lot of the discontent you may see among adjuncts. I am just one. I am not\u00a0unique. Thousands of us across the country are just trying to survive. It seems sometimes like\u00a0administration is just making it harder and harder, looking for any and every excuse to cut our pay or\u00a0even take away our jobs. Already our budgets are cut to the bone. You can do a lot to help. I hope you\u00a0will take this opportunity to fight with the union for a fair contract during the upcoming contract\u00a0negotiation.<\/p>\n

Thanks for listening,<\/p>\n

Just another adjunct<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest post by Donna Kalinowsky Dear Community College President, Perhaps you do not know what life is like for an adjunct. When I started here in 1992 or so, I\u00a0made about $9000 per year. Even then, that was not much. I was eligible for Section 8 housing, food\u00a0stamps, fuel assistance, Medicaid, head start for my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":269,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/269"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2591"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2593,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2591\/revisions\/2593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}