04/06/2019
On Tuesday April 2, 2019, non-tenure track professors at Oxy filed with the National Labor Relations Board to hold an election to officially unionize. Oxy’s Student Labor Alliance (SLA) mobilized over 100 students to stand in support of the faculty as they delivered their petition to administration. SLA’s organizing centers on a coalition between the students of Oxy and the employees of the college to create a unified political front from which students’ privileged positionality can be leveraged to uplift the humanity of the campus community at large. We are still actively working to support our staff that face understaffing and overworking in every department. In 1991, Oxy had 56 cleaning staff workers but in 2018 it decreased to only 38. Additionally, there has been a 52.7% decrease in grounds staff, from 23 workers in 1991 to only 11 in 2018 despite a significant increase in the workload. Although workers won 4 new bargaining-unit positions last summer during their contract negotiations, the issue is far from being resolved. Cleaning, grounds, and other facilities staff are still suffering the physical damage and mental toll of being overworked every day at Oxy. While most of the public organizing SLA has been a part of revolves around the long-unionized custodial, dining, grounds, and facilities staff, SLA fully supports the work of Oxy faculty who constitute a great part of the community and are also at the mercy of exploitation by the administration. One-third of Oxy professors are non-tenure track, and many face job insecurity with their appointments varying “from full time to part time from semester to semester or year to year" (American Association of University Professors), along with not being fairly compensated for their work.
This mobilization comes off the heels of Black Studies Associate Professor Courtney Baker’s resignation Monday April 1, citing “hostility from the senior administration about preserving American Studies,” the need to compensate faculty serving on advisory boards who “are effectively conducting at least 150% of the work of single-appointment faculty,” and the need to hire faculty who can adequately address Oxy’s “recent history of blackface, invocations of an A***n alliance, [and] the repeated celebration of a leading eugenicist.” All of these incidents call to the forefront the need to uplift the labor of all members of the Oxy community and actively fight against legacies of settler-colonial exploitation and white supremacy that undermine the livelihoods of Oxy students, staff, faculty, and neighbors. Labor issues are inextricably enmeshed with the all of the oppressive social structures that aggrieve our campus and it is vitally important to organize around them. For all of these reasons, we as the Student Labor Alliance are in full support of the list of demands articulated by the ASOC Direct Action committee to begin to address the constant exploitation our community faces.
Links:
Status of Non-Tenure Track Faculty (American Association of University Professors)
https://www.aaup.org/report/status-non-tenure-track-faculty
Professor Baker’s letter to the editor
https://www.theoccidentalnews.com/opinions/2019/04/03/letter-to-the-editor-i-stand-with-the-yale-faculty-who-resigned-from-an-exploited-program-in-ethnicity-race-migration-i-am-doing-the-same/2897396
