BY DAVID KOCIEMBA
COCAL XIII check-in table; photo by David Kociemba
The 13th Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor international conference this year was about organizing solutions to the international problem of faculty contingency. Held in San Jose this year August 3-5, COCAL presenters and attendees came from Mexico, the United States, Quebec, and English-speaking Canada. As this blog’s readers well know, contingent faculty are the strong majority of faculty in the US.
Many presentations and workshops focused on the need for face-to-face organizing techniques, activating all of the membership for a truly powerful and democratic union, the importance of issue and contract campaigns built around diversity issues, and recruiting allies in the student body, area unions, the community, and the legislature. The member-driven model of organizing familiar to AAUP members was the focus of this international conference.
Caprice Lawless, chair of the AAUP committee on contingency and the profession and an Academe Blog contributor, gave an inspiring talk on how her advocacy chapter built membership and participation through no-budget methods. When the administration was going to charge them $250/day in commercial insurance for a membership table in the student union, they instead tailgated for their membership drive. When the administration seized their mailboxes and tied up the bulletin boards in red tape, they used white boards, fridges, and microwaves. When adjunct faculty got a $4/week raise, they did a social media campaign taking photos of professors using the tools of their trade to look for it, including putting paychecks under their microscopes to look. Her presentation (and a later workshop on masks, signs, and puppets run by Nupur Modi-Parekh of the Ruckus Society) is an important reminder that faculty have a huge advantage in creativity over hostile administrations and governments. Being creative and funny can make your serious message memorable and sharable.
COCAL’s workshops provided grounded case studies and training on how to use social media, talk to reporters, train for direct actions, and start regularly lobbying your legislature. The conference also included an hour for attendees to reconvene and share their experiences. Chapters should look to post messages on Facebook between 1–3 pm on Thursday and Friday, because people are cheerful about the end of the week. Inward-facing groups on Facebook can be an important way to facilitate internal education and brainstorming. Twitter can be an excellent venue for interacting with reporters. When talking with reporters, practice your 10-second sound bites as much as you would your 15-minute conference paper presentation. It’s critical to vary your message based on whether you’re addressing issues that affect parents, students, faculty, citizens, or state legislators. Practice makes perfect for direct actions as well. Taking an hour to gather before a march can reduce anxiety, make sure everyone’s on the same page, and plan responses to typical shenanigans. Political organizing places pressure on the administration on a new front. The work gains allies, builds coalitions, and gives you leverage at the table. “The closed mouth never gets fed,” California Faculty Association staff presenters Djibril Diop and Mario Guerrera observed.
COCAL translaters; photo by David Kociemba
Presentations, audience questions, and many discussions were simultaneously translated into French, Spanish, and English to facilitate free dialogue. While there were a few shocking stories of oppression, what was surprising was how familiar and difficult the problems are across national, cultural, and linguistic lines. Liberal political parties win elections only to immediately pivot from focusing on workers to businesses. Conservative governments punish higher education through funding cuts, culture wars, and strike-breaking. The idea of education as a public good is under assault everywhere. Unions continue to struggle to be as representative, open, and democratic as they could be. The long-lasting problems of low per-course wages, lack of regularization, and failure to convert adjunct faculty from within to full-time positions produces poverty for adjunct faculty across national borders, with one example being that a quarter of US adjunct faculty are on at least one form of government assistance, according to the Berkeley Labor Center in 2015. Most shocking was the presentation by Fernando Guzman, executive committee member of Mexico’s SUPAUAQ, on how his state governor meddled with a union election and kept the ballots unavailable due to “national security”, resulting in parallel unions at his institution. The history of unions is replete with such nefarious tactics, and they are something to watch out for again.
But the conference was mainly about making progress on the issues of precarity that higher education faces. The fact that our problems are society’s problems means that our work can be supported by many allies and their work can be a source of activism and solidarity for us. We are only as alone as we let ourselves become.
The 2020 COCAL conference will be in Mexico. As always, COCAL depends on the financial and logistical support of faculty organizations and individual faculty members. If your chapter is looking to learn more about solutions to precarity, or has tactics and stories to share, reach out to http://cocalinternational.org/.
