Am I unreasonable? Maybe I’m getting just too, too cranky in my old age. Couple of days ago over at Adjunctorium I published a long whine about the unpaid labor expected of adjunct faculty, and today I’m getting even more annoyed with the whole thing. Not that I wasn’t already annoyed at having to teach excruciating freshman comp courses to keep food on the table.
But this is beyond the pale. Is there any other industry whose management assumes employees just love donating their time to the corporate cause?
At the end of every summer, the college puts on a variety of elaborate conference. It must take weeks for the admin staff to organize this thing, because it is a very big deal that involves coordinating a lot of (paid! full-time!) faculty. Adjuncts are, of course, expected to attend the departmental meeting—that will be two hours (plus another 40 minutes, round trip, of driving time) on Thursday. But then we’re also invited to attend any or all of this amazing array of meetings:
Learning Sessions Scheduled for Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Tue Aug 14 9:30 – 11:30 AM Conversations to Improve General Education Learning Q120A &B
Tue Aug 14 12:00 – 1:15 PM Having a Blast With Honor Projects K101 Honors Office – Note location is in K Building North Entrance (Not KSC)
Tue Aug 14 1:30 – 2:45 PM Who Are Jane and John Q. Underprepared Student? Q120B
Tue Aug 14 1:30 – 2:45 PM Changes are Coming in Distance Learning E132
Tue Aug 14 1:30 – 3:00 PM Blackboard Essentials: Course Setup Q130
Tue Aug 14 2:30 – 3:30 PM Media Made Easy E109
Tue Aug 14 2:30 – 3:45 PM Studying Abroad in Vietnam Q120B
Tue Aug 14 3:00 – 4:00 PM eBeam Engage Devices E134
Tue Aug 14 3:30 – 5:00 PM Blackboard Gradebook Q130
Learning Sessions for Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Wed Aug 15 11:00 – 1:00 PM Canvas Overview Q130 – Class is full – please no walk-ins
Wed Aug 15 01:00 – 02:15 PM Distance Learning – Past, Present & Future E142
Wed Aug 15 01:00 – 02:25 PM Three Weeks to Make It! Q120B
Wed Aug 15 01:00 – 02:30 PM Prezi Q130 – Class is full – please no walk-ins
Wed Aug 15 2:30 – 4:30 PM Canvas Overview Q130
Wed Aug 15 2:30 – 04:00 PM Learning Centered College Q120B
NOTE>>>> Please make sure to check the room locations. Most are scheduled in E and Q buildings.
The Center for Teaching and Learning Conference Rooms, Q120/Q130/Q125 are located in Q Building at the south end of campus accessible off of 32nd Street at Grovers, 17811 North 32nd Street. If general parking is full, Employee Parking is located on the east side of building. Take the road on south end of Q Building to the Employee Parking area. Enter through the Mathematics Department. Q Conference is on North west quadrant of building.
Some of these are very valuable. I would like, for example, to hear about dealing with unprepared students, who comprise about 60% to 80% of classmates in my sections. I’m always interested in “changes that are coming” in distance education. (Note, however, the timing conflict of the only two sessions that really would be useful.) Prezi is pretty cool software in the cloud, and I wouldn’t mind learning more about it. Canvas is a course management program that is slated to replace the universally hated Blackboard, and of course I’d like to learn about it, even though I’ve built my own quite adequate CMS sites in WordPress.
But consider:
We do not go on the clock until August 20. I will not be paid before September 1, and even then, it won’t be much. In fact, because the District outsources payroll to PeopleSoft, which uses a lagging paycheck approach, I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t get paid until September 15. Either way, attending meetings on August 14th, 15th, and 16th is pure and simple unpaid work.
And yes, as interesting as some of these topics may be, I do consider attending meetings associated with my “job” to be work.
I use the scare quotes advisedly: though the District claims we are its employees, we are not. We are contract workers, on the order of contract cleaning ladies and lawn men. Except that I pay the guy who rakes the yard a great deal better, by the hour, than the District pays me….
Consider also:
I have already donated over 40 hours of unpaid work in course prep, and I am not done. I still have to add new sets of links to two websites, and I still have to update the magazine-writing course’s website. Since that’s only five weeks and its now pretty formulaic, it shouldn’t take for-freaking-EVER, as the changes in the new syllabi and sites for the comp courses did. But still: we’re looking at two to four more hours of prep time.
By the time I finish, I will have put in about 46 to 48 hours of unpaid labor. It can’t be avoided—you’d be crazy to walk into a college classroom unprepared. Especially into these classrooms…it’s not like we have what you’d call self-starting students here. You have to be convincingly in control on the first day, and you have to stay in control for 16 long weeks. Slip up in the first week, and you are doomed. So are your students, though they may not see it that way. 😉
And as for these unpaid shindigs? I’ll probably go to at least a couple of them. The information is valuable and it does help me to do my “job.” But…as contract workers, which is what we are in reality, we should be paid for these work-related meetings. The departmental meeting (2 hours) plus the unprepared students talkfest (1.25 hours) plus the intro to Canvas (2 hours) will add 5.25 hours of unpaid work time to the freebie hours I’ve already donated to the district. That’s well over 50 hours of off-the-clock work!
The mystification is this: Why is it assumed that teachers at all levels, from K-12 through college, should attend meetings during periods when they are not paid for their time?
I know a few people who are grade school teachers and it seems that they spend a lot of time “setting up their classrooms” during the summer and this isn’t something they’re paid to do, either. How many of the adjunct are women? How many of the full-time faculty are women? Maybe I’m just a cynic, but it seems women are more often asked to do this unpaid labor than men.
@ Linda: Most of them, in both cases. There are men in both cohorts, but they form a tiny minority.
I’ve never found any of these things valuable, so I would just decline the invitation.
Do you at least get some free snacks?
@ frugalscholar: Sometimes.
I decided to go to ONE, on “the future of distance learning,” because the description suggests something far more specific than some vague “future.” It appears they plan to address a new policy that I hadn’t heard of, which SEEMS to be that 100% online courses are going to be morphed into hybrid courses.
Hope not — the whole point of an online course is to avoid that many traipses to campus. The community colleges define “hybrid” as courses that meet once a week, unlike GDU, where you met them once or twice a semester.
So much work is now coming in to the Copyeditor’s Desk — we just got two new inquiries — that I don’t think I can cope with another course to have to meet in person.
Postscript: Good thing I trudged out there for the meeting, which indeed was a waste of time. Went by the department to pick up the wad of syllabi & course packets for the 102 section, which meets before the office opens on Monday — and lo! They were short by six packets! Think there’s still time for the copy center to print up new packages and send them over.
Have you dumped the idea of the Real Estate classes? Maybe I missed a post 🙂
@ Sandra J: Oh, yeah…there’s that, too.
Well, I expected — wrongly — that we’d get into that Small Business Administration development program. That would absorb a phenomenal amount of time, and so I had pretty well decided, earlier in the summer, that it would be best to focus on one thing or another: either work all out on learning real estate and getting into that industry or work all out on the editorial business.
Even without the AAME program glomming time out of my schedule, over the summer the light dawned: as a practical matter, I don’t need a new business. I already have a business. And it’s a business I know well. Why start a new business that I have to learn from the ground up?
Our problem has been that we don’t market ourselves well enough. If I went into real estate, I’d have to market myself there. So since I’m going to have to learn marketing, again: why not put the focus and the energy into marketing the editing business?
Writing and editing sounds a heck of a lot better than flogging real estate. At least you can do the former in your pajamas.
True. But at least you have a shot at making a decent living in real estate. Maybe.
I don’t know if it will make you feel any better, but in the business world, it isn’t any different if you want to get ahead. At the very big company where I spend the last 30 years of my working career, the official work week consisted of 35 hours (9-5 with an hour for lunch). As a practical matter, I worked something more like a 50 to 60 hour week, not counting business dinners, travel and conferences. There were a lot of those!
I guess the biggest difference is that we had pretty good benefits and were paid reasonably well, compared to academia.
@ Pat: Yup. I also have worked 60-hour weeks in the Real World. The difference is, I was paid a living wage. And during all those long weeks I was an employee, not a contract worker who wasn’t even on the clock. Betcha a company wouldn’t expect you to start working on the job before you were on the payroll. Hell…it may not even be legal!
Come to think of it, at ASU when they furloughed us, we were not allowed to work on the days when we weren’t paid. People offered to come in and keep doing the work for free, but HR said that violated some rule somewhere.
Yes, it’s illegal to require workers to work or come in for meetings without paying them. If they don’t want to pay, they have to make it optional. This from a former HR person.
Oops, one caveat. If your job is classified as “exempt” then by law you are paid by the job and not by the hours. So then you do whatever the job requires for your salary. You don’t choose exempt or nonexempt. HR determines this based on your job duties.
@ Barb: Yes, quite a few of us at GDU were exempt — my job was exempt, conveniently for the deans, and except for my associate editor, everyone else was on year-to-year contracts. It was convenient (while it lasted), because nobody much cared whether I was physically on the campus or not, as long as the work got done. Which it did.
Astonishingly, to get rid of my associate editor, the College changed her status from nonexempt to exempt, without informing either her or me. This, of course, allowed them to terminate her without cause.
That was as close as I ever came to going straight through the roof. I advised her to talk to a lawyer. According to the university’s rules (which I managed to track down), as her immediate supervisor I had to approve a switch to exempt, and of course she had to agree to it. Most people are not especially litigious, though, and she was among the unlitigious. Me, I would have sued the damn university until the president’s sky-high office collapsed into the basement.
On the other hand, because she let it drop, she did get a pretty fair f/t editorial job out there just two or three months later. She and one of the research associates were the only ones of our entire crew who landed on their feet.
The other survivor, who was bright enough to see the proverbial handwriting, got herself into a first-rate graduate program in Illinois, leaving as she finished the master’s — timing couldn’t have been better, as her department at GDU went down in flames within a year.
Of the others, one had a nervous breakdown. One, who already had a degree in law and was back on the campus hoping to change careers into, of all things, editorial, stumbled off to teach at a questionable proprietary school. One became engaged in an endless fight with a pack of jackals in said flaming department; I ended up literally ripping her away from her committee chair and finding her a new chair, a lurking MacArthur Genius scholar whose dual tenure removed him from the department and whose ferocity was legendary.
Heh. What a place!