BY JONATHAN REES

We’ve been arguing over salaries at my university. Sometimes we get cost-of-living adjustments, but those almost never keep up with inflation (even during years when inflation is low). There’s a model developed by our Faculty Compensation Committee designed to allocate additional funds on the basis of equity, but what is equity, anyway? That model is both very complicated and like a trade secret around campus (which is a whole ‘nother story), but we know that it involves compression, inversion, differences between disciplines, and differences in similar disciplines compared to the salaries at our peer institutions.

A lot of us think that this model completely broke down during the pandemic—maybe even earlier. People started moving, leaving academia, or retiring early as the cost of living in my adopted hometown of Pueblo, Colorado, began to skyrocket at the same time inflation did. That’s when my AAUP chapter started organizing around the salary issue, both in the hopes of using public pressure to get better wages in the short term and eventually becoming the first collective bargaining chapter in Colorado (which is again a whole ‘nother story). As a result, I periodically get invited to visit the President’s Office to talk about wages, but only in my capacity as an individual faculty member (which is yet again a whole ‘nother story).

My last visit, which I asked for this time, was in September. I wanted to explain to the president that every time administrators cited the Faculty Compensation Committee model as a demonstration that their efforts to fix salaries have been successful, it just makes most of my colleagues and I angry because too many of us are still having trouble making ends meet. The response I got from the president was (to paraphrase) that he has to go on the basis of numbers, and if the numbers say we’re doing great, then we’re doing great. But what happens if the numbers themselves are lying? More importantly, if our peer institutions also pay salaries that faculty can’t live comfortably on, how does that make it justifiable? After all, two wrongs don’t make a right.

That’s when I had an epiphany: No more fighting like seagulls over discarded bread. We are all well-educated human beings who deserve a comfortable life in return for our highly specialized labor. We have to stop arguing over table scraps and instead grow the pie.

Sadly, this shouldn’t have required an epiphany. As far back as 1906, a founder of the American Federation of Teachers, Margaret Haley, explained:

Two ideals are struggling for supremacy in American life today: one is the industrial ideal dominating through the supremacy of commercialism, which subordinates the worker to the product and the machine; the other, the ideal of democracy, the ideal of the educators, which places humanity above all machines, and demands that all activity shall be the expression of life. If this ideal of the educators cannot be carried over into the industrial field then the ideal of industrialism will be carried over into the school. Those two ideals can no more continue to exist in American life than our nation could have continued half slave and half free.

The best proof that industrialism being carried over into school is the existence of our huge contingent labor force. It doesn’t take an epiphany to understand that most administrations would gladly run an all-contingent university if they could, as long as the market will allow it. The common humanity and the quality of the education that these well-educated workers provide don’t really matter when there’s pennies available to pinch.

At the same meeting somebody told me about that speech by Margaret Haley, I learned about a shift in the thinking about contingency coming out of the American Federation of Teachers in California. [I’m sorry I can’t credit this properly, because I don’t know the exact source. Drop a note in the comments if you know so that we all know who to thank.] For years, they’ve been setting a reduction in the use of contingent labor as a goal and haven’t gotten anywhere. And why would you expect them to? Once you accept the premise that some people being exploited is okay, you’ve lost the moral high ground. Therefore, the new long term goal out of the Higher Ed Division of the California Federation of Teachers is to eliminate contingency entirely.

I applaud this shift. Their struggle is my struggle. As long as we accept the premise that the market rules everything, we’re all just seagulls.

Contributing editor Jonathan Rees is professor of history at Colorado State University Pueblo.