Can New Jersey Adjuncts Break Down a Stone Wall? by Bill Lipkin

On October 26, as part of the start of Campus Equity Week activities in New Jersey, United Adjunct Faculty of NJ held its Delegate Assembly meeting. Present were 68 delegates from 10 Community College Chapters and members of the AFTNJ Executive Board. A major focus of the Assembly was on the Affordable Care Act and how it was already affecting adjuncts in the state.

The State of New Jersey had issued a letter several weeks before concerning the ACA and the four year Colleges and Universities in NJ. This letter instructed HR directors to determine hours worked for adjuncts by crediting them 8 hours for every day they had a class on the campus. In other words if you had one Monday/Wednesday/Friday class (3 credits) that would count as 8 hours per day or 24 hours a week. You would not be able to teach on Tuesday or Thursday. We did convince the State how ridiculous this was since an adjunct would be able to teach all day on those three days, teaching 18 credits and still be credited with 24 hours a week. Plus this did not address on-line courses.

A Message from the NEA Contingent Faculty Caucus

by Judy Olson, reposted from the Contingent Academics Mailing List and detailing the process by which the Contingent Faculty Caucus (CFC) brought a concrete action to help contingent faculty across the country gain access to unemployment benefits more easily and that representatives across the entire education spectrum approved by unanimous voice vote. Usually I wish for pictures; this time it would be an audio of the voice vote. Now read the whole thing. It's worth it.  Judy explains,

Thursday was the last day of the National Education Association's Representative Assembly (RA). It was a successful RA for the Contingent Faculty Caucus; we are building power and visibility and have achieved an important victory for contingent faculty.

The NEA is the largest education union in the country, with almost 3 million members, the vast majority in K-12. On one hand, NEA is big and powerful; on the other, higher ed is a tiny minority trying to be heard amid all the noise, and contingent faculty are a weak minority within that minority. Our challenge is that we must constantly educate our K-12 colleagues about our issues; they have no idea what our working conditions are or that we constitute a significant majority of higher ed's teaching workforce.