Ellen Schrecker backs “National Adjunct Walkout Day” as a brilliant tactic

Adjunct instructors at colleges around the nation plan on Wednesday to stage events designed to call attention to their low pay and poor working conditions. On Tuesday, The Chronicle interviewed Ellen Schrecker, a professor of history at Yeshiva University who has extensively researched academic labor and the broader labor movement, to get her assessment of adjuncts’ hopes of bringing about change. An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Q. Wednesday is being called "National Adjunct Walkout Day," but nearly all of the activities planned do not actually involve anyone walking off their job. Instead, they focus on gaining support for adjunct instructors through information tables, posters, leaflets, meetings with lawmakers, and speeches and demonstrations on campuses. At the University of California at Santa Cruz, there is going to be a fake religious pilgrimage to a patron saint of adjuncts, "Saint Precaria." Are such tactics likely to give the adjunct-organizing movement much traction? Would adjuncts be better off just walking off their jobs?

A. This is absolutely a brilliant tactic because what adjuncts need to do is inform the general public, especially their own students, about their situation and the precarity … of their employment, and how it is impacting the education of most students, especially undergraduates, in a very negative way. The problem that adjuncts face in organizing, in improving their working conditions, is simply the utter unawareness on the part of the general public about their situation. Students don’t know how terrible their working conditions are.

Q. What do you think it will take for adjuncts to win major improvements in their working conditions?

A. Years of organizing, years of education, and—as the American public is becoming increasingly aware of economic inequality—plugging in their situation through the broader social and economic problems that we are all facing. ...