Academic Labor Organizing

Braverman's analysis of the changing division of labor is crucial for understanding the impact of the neoliberal assault on higher education on academic labor. Much like Taylorism a century ago, adjunctification of the faculty, online education, and data driven planning are rationalizing academic labor. Teaching is being " unbundled " and its components parts automated, outsourced, and transferred to a growing middle level administration. As a result, faculty are becoming " just-in-time, " deskilled, disempowered, contingent labor. This newly emerging new division of labor is fundamentally transforming higher education. No longer merely subject to commercialization, academic labor is being reorganized to resemble the interchangeable contingent work that is ubiquitous throughout the labor market. To resist these developments it is necessary for faculty to study the new division of academic labor in order to devise new organizing tactics and strategies, such as the systemwide local and Metro organizing models.

In this chapter, we map the relationship between the conditions of academic labor--casualization, precariousness, intensification and extensifi cation of work, surveillance, and audit culture--and our research and teaching practices, as well as the impact of these practices on our students’ learning conditions. Focusing on the role that ideologies about language and communication play in mediating our understandings of who we are/should be as workers, we show how the critique of academic labor can benefit from a political-economic perspective on its digital labor components. By examining dominant institutional discourses and pedagogical practices, we uncover how the structural and everyday dynamics associated with online teaching adhere
to an ideology of “connectivity/connectedness” sustained by reducing communication to its economically productive aspects.
Such a move systematically fetishizes our labor, reducing it to a disembodied transmission of information while contributing to an increasingly precarious and unequal ‘Uberized’ working environment.

"Abstract: This article empirically scrutinizes the first unionization experience at a foundation, non-public university in Turkey, namely at Istanbul Bilgi University. This academic
unionization experience is contextualised both historically and theoretically. Firstly the take-over of the Bilgi University by a ‘for-profit university company’ based in Baltimore/
USA, namely the Laureate Edu., Inc. is analysed within the financial accumulation regime of the 1990’s and 2000’s. Secondly the articulation of Bilgi University with the financial
accumulation regime through new forms of possession and management is scrutinized with respect to its effects on the wage-labour regime at the university. This very process is the key to understanding the material-symbolic ‘distributional’ conflicts which have influenced the formation of the unionization movement as well as the emergence of rival
discourses produced by various actors. Thirdly and lastly, the unionization process is chronically
narrated, the types of violations of rights during the unionization process are enumerated, and the organizational limits and the practice of Sosyal-"# as well as inter-union conflicts
are brought to fore. By trying to avoid a simplifying discourse of ‘victory or defeat’, the issues in question have been critically reflected upon with the help of the following theoretical
approaches: cultural political economy, critical discourse analysis, new approaches to the union movement focusing on organisational power, and cycles of contention.


Öz: Bu makale, görgül olarak, Türkiye’de bir vakıf üniversitesinde (İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi) ilk kez kalkışılmış olan bir sendikalaşma tecrübesini ele almaktadır. Söz konusu tecrübe, gerek tarihsel, gerekse teorik olarak çerçevesine oturtulmaya çalışılmaktadır. İlk olarak, Bilgi Üniversitesi’nin Baltimore/ABD merkezli bir kâr amaçlı üniversite şirketi (KAÜŞ) olan Laureate Edu., Inc. tarafından devralınışı, 1990’lar ve 2000’lerdeki finansal birikim rejimi çerçevesinde incelenmiştir. İkinci olarak, Bilgi Üniversitesi’nin, yeni temellük ve işletmecilik biçimleriyle birlikte finansal birikim rejimine eklemlenmesinin, Üniversite’deki ücret-emek rejimi üzerindeki etkileri ele alınmaktadır. Söz konusu süreç, sendikalaşma hareketinin oluşumunu da etkilemiş olan maddi ve simgesel ‘bölüşümsel’ çatışmaları ve farklı aktörlerce üretilmiş bulunan rakip söylemlerin ortaya çıkışını anlayabilmek bakımından da kilit bir öneme sahiptir. Üçüncü ve son olarak ise, sendikalaşma sürecine ilişkin bir vakayıname verilmekte, sendikalaşma sürecindeki türlü hak ihlâlleri sıralanmakta ve Sosyal-İş’in örgütsel kapasitesindeki ve pratiğindeki sınırlılıklar ile sendika içi çatışmalar ortaya konmaktadır. Söz konusu meseleler, basitleştirici bir ‘zafer veya mağlubiyet’ söyleminden uzak durulmaya çalışılarak, aşağıdaki teorik yaklaşımların ışığında irdelenmeye çalışılmıştır: kültürel politik ekonomi, eleştirel söylem teorisi, sendikal harekete ilişkin olarak örgütsel gücü öne çıkartan yeni yaklaşımlar ve muhalefet çevrimi yaklaşımı.
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On-line education is rationalizing and fragmenting faculty labor into discreet parts and allocating it to an assembly line of adjunct faculty, corporate contractors, staff technicians, and administrators. This emerging division of academic labor is a dangerous threat to faculty control over teaching and participation in shared governance. The model for this new division of academic labor is an Arizona public community college, Rio Salado, which uses coercive data driven pre-dictive modeling to move students through standardized courses taught asynchronously along a virtual assembly line. The Rio Salado model is being used in California to deskill and disempower community college faculty, threatening public higher education as we know it. A critical understanding of this newly emerging division of academic labor in order to draw lessons for faculty organizing to shift the balance of control over teaching and governance. For profit universities are being touted as the model of public higher education of the future, one composed of mostly adjunct faculty teaching large numbers of students on an automated higher education assembly line. But the for profits are not the model of the future. Rather, they are merely knock off versions of the little known Arizona public Rio Salado College. This statewide community college is almost completely on-line and attracts primarily low waged full-time workers into virtual classrooms taught almost entirely by deskilled, disempowered adjuncts professors. The Rio Salado model illustrates the newly emerging division of academic labor in which cloned classes focused on task completion rather than learning are taught remotely by an assembly line of adjuncts, outside corporate contractors, and non-faculty staff technicians. Stripped of their contribution to shared governance, adjuncts and the few full-time faculty that oversee them are being deskilled and disempowered, much of what they do transferred to administrators and staff technicians. ! ! In this rapidly emerging model faculty working conditions have become the flip side of student learning conditions. Low-waged contingent adjuncts are teaching primarily first generation working class and students of color tracked into to low cost, high output on-line degree programs that in turn channel students into low waged service work and a lifetime of student debt. The rapidity in which this change is occurring makes it urgent that the new division of academic labor be critically examined so as to inform new strategies for faculty organizing and resistance.

The School District of Philadelphia’s “doomsday budget” in May 2013 slashed 3,500 staff and $300 million from an already stressed infrastructure of resource-poor, dilapidated schools. When educators entered their buildings in September, they found themselves working without critical staff like counselors and nurses, and attempting to deliver their lessons in overcrowded classrooms with no supplies. Arguing that neoliberalism must be understood as “an experience” and not merely a set of policy assemblages, this article explores how teachers’ narratives of self, constructions of their school and the districts’ struggle, and their larger responses to the perceived contradictions of neoliberal education policies coming to bear on their students came to constitute a rising critical consciousness. Drawing on 30 interviews with teachers and administrators, and 9 months of participant observation at a neighborhood high school, Johnson High, this article further ethnographically depicts the ways in which resistance and complicity to neoliberal education reforms were inextricably bound up in teachers praxis, educational care, and political engagements.