Contract crisis

Dalhousie’s School of Social Work hired Shaun Bartone in January 2013 to teach two full-year courses and a half-year course.

He signed his contract in April of the same year, completed the courses’ syllabi and ordered the textbooks in June. Dal didn’t start paying him until the first week of August.

While moving to Halifax from Fredericton and completing his PhD in sociology at the University of New Brunswick, Bartone received an email from the interim director of the School of Social Work.

Without any explanation, she said he would be teaching one less course.

Bartone was out $9,000. He was soon hired to stock produce at an Atlantic Superstore.

“It’s hard for me to find another part-time position that looks like it belongs with the rest of my résumé,” he said. “Meanwhile, stocking fruit at the Superstore at least keeps me fed and pays my rent.”

His course was given to another limited-term professor at the School of Social Work, Cassandra Hanrahan, as an overage. Hanrahan and Bartone, along with five others, were panellists at “Seeing the Invisible Academic,” a talk on Oct. 28 for Fair Employment Week.

The talk was co-sponsored by the Dalhousie Faculty Association (DFA), the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), CUPE 3912 and the Association of Nova Scotia University Teachers (ANSUT).

The seven panellists discussed their opinions and experiences as being contract staff at Dal, the University of King’s College and St. Mary’s University. Contract staff are not tenured, meaning universities can pay them less and give them no benefits to do similar work to tenured staff.

An increase of contract staff with a decrease in pay

Former CAUT president Wayne Peters said that a third of academics are now contract staff. Only a fifth were contract staff 15 years ago.

The Canadian government changed the employment insurance (EI) policies in the past 15 years. Every worker in Canada has some part of their paycheque put aside for EI, but Peters said that only a third of those who need it receive benefits. Now EI also forces its participants to take any job offer, even if it pays poorly. Dal English professor Jason Haslam is a tenured professor and attended the Oct. 29 talk. But in the five years that he wasn’t tenured, he said that he was on EI every summer. Contract academics are usually paid for 10 months of the year.

Most contract staff are paid $6,000 per course. In order to make a slight living, they must take on six to eight courses, leav- ing them no time to conduct research. Even if they do have time for research, universities don’t usually pay for them to do it. “Equal pay for equal work is the only thing that is really fair employment,” Bartone said. The audience applauded.

No time for research

Hanrahan is in her sixth year of limited-term work in Dal’s School of Social Work. In her first contract, she negotiated for time to produce research. Over the years, she has built up enough of a research platform to receive $150,000 for a three-year research grant from an external organization. However, her con- tract expires in June 2015.

The organization that gave her the grant said it is common for those receiving the research grants to be limited-term staff. If her contract does not get renewed before the grant ends, the university must take responsibility for her research.

“I came in trusting that things wouldn’t last as long as they have,” she said. “In fact, they haven’t only lasted, but they’ve gotten worse.”

Forced to leave

Panelist Matthew Furlong co-founded the King’s Teachers’ Association for teaching fellows. The contracts for teaching fellows run for 12 months, with a possibility of being renewed twice. He said he usually didn’t know if his contract was renewed until the day before the contract term started.

Though Furlong taught at King’s from 2010 to 2013, he stopped after that. He is now the communications officer for ANSUT.

“I don’t have the energy to move between schools or cities or provinces teaching class-by-class just to suffer psychologically and financially and to force sub-par teaching on students,” he said.

Did it happen overnight?

Panelists and the audience began to speak more about the core of the issues fuelling this increase of contract staff. Karen Foster, Canadian Research Chair for Sustainable Futures in Atlantic, attributed it to a demographic boom that was then followed by a trough and a shrinking tax base.

Foster added that tenured professors don’t have the same interests as contract staff, and often don’t think about them.

“Equal pay for equal work is a moral principle that people can get behind,” the Dal sociology tenure-track professor said. “If you don’t get behind that, then what the hell is wrong with you?”

“The business model is taking over everything”

Peters advocated for a return to social unionism to fight against the “WalMart managerial style” of the university.

Last year, Hanrahan said Dal raised $288 million from fundraising, yet operating budgets keep getting slashed.

Furlong agreed that to change the conditions for contract academics, those within the university must fuel these changes, rather than waiting for the government to do it.

He said that he accidentally perpetrated this “production”-like mindset when he told his students at King’s not to call him “professor” because that’s not how the university sees him, and they need to understand this structure.

He would tell his students: “The reason that I’m putting this out to you is because if you want to know your future, look at me. It might not be in this situation, but it might be in a call centre or a factory.”

“But I’m actually helping the process along because precisely the psychology this regime demands is fear and anxiety and uncertainty,” Furlong added. Furlong said that we see the best example of flexible labour in the university.