Looking for some temporary stability, the chance to get back to secure paycheques for the first time since I left the federal government in 2012, and the ability to repair the countless things that have been worn down and damaged during the PhD — I am casting a net wide for jobs I can start at soon.
Based on my own experiences and discussions with others, however, I am excluding two fields which might seem among the most obvious for me: the academic precariat and the environmental NGO precariat. I know plenty of people caught up in the low pay, overwork, and stress of postdoc positions, lecturing, adjunct professorships, and similar. The common theme seems to be coldhearted skinflint employers, intolerable working conditions, and jobs where you spend half your time fundraising for the grants to pay your own salary. I feel much the same about the eNGO sector, which is even more poorly paid and insecure, even more a game of always working to win the grant to pay your salary for the next month of grant applications, and a social culture that broadly demands ideological conformity to a theory of change and set of objectives that I do not see as very likely to produce the public policy wins sought. (Believing this, or at least pointing it out, tends to risk making one unemployable in the sector.)
I feel like the common pattern in both the junior academic and the eNGO world is to demand that employees give more than they can sustainably, provide them less material and moral support than they need to keep going long term, and then condemn them for insufficient loyalty when this combination pushes them out into other employment. I suspect I can get more done on the environmental file by getting a decent job that provides genuine time off and working as a volunteer for groups that seem to have a sound strategy.
Professors in Poverty | How Adjunctification Hurts Everyone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrN0NG67gno
“For the amount of work I did for my writing classes that I taught at the community college, I made around $5 an hour. That’s below minimum wage. For a job that requires a graduate degree.
…
One of my main sources for this video, The Adjunct Underclass, has a lot of this kind of math in it, so I definitely recommend checking it out if you want more detailed breakdowns of these kind of calculations, because it’s actually kind of sickening to see it all laid out like this.
Because each class pays so little, contingent faculty often end up having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. There are horror stories of adjuncts who teach at three or four different schools and have 18 hour days filled with teaching, prepping, grading and driving to and from their four separate teaching jobs. And sometimes even that isn’t enough. Around 25% of part time faculty are on public assistance.
There are professors who have to sleep in their cars. There are professors who are homeless, professors who cannot afford medical care because, oh yeah, I forgot to mention, none of these jobs include any kind of benefits either.”
Analysis of the survey revealed seven classes: a wealthy “elite”; a prosperous salaried “middle class” consisting of professionals and managers; a class of technical experts; a class of ‘new affluent’ workers, and at the lower levels of the class structure, in addition to an ageing traditional working class, a ‘precariat’ characterised by very low levels of capital and lasting precarious economic security, and a group of emergent service workers. The fracturing of the middle sectors of the social structure into distinguishable factions separated by generational, economic, cultural, and social characteristics was considered notable by the authors of the research
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_British_Class_Survey
Other laborers in the smithy might not have been quite so fortunate. Apprentices, of course, were proper blacksmiths in training and might one day look to be as well respected as the master from whom they learned their trade. But for the up-and-coming apprentice, the blacksmith’s guild was an obstacle, not a helper; it was in the interest of the guild members to restrict new entry as much as possible in order to avoid competing down their prices, which may have left those who finished their apprenticeships (‘journeymen’ in the parlance), stuck in subordinate positions until age and death opened up space in the local guild for a new master.
https://acoup.blog/2020/10/02/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-iii-hammer-time/
Henry was nearly 30 when he finished his thesis. (He had extended his dphil by a year to give him more time to fund his degree.) Although he still wanted to be an academic, he couldn’t help but compare himself with friends who had gone into other fields. In many other professions, nine years of training would easily lead to lucrative opportunities. But many of the roles open to postgraduates like Henry were fixed-term contract (or “casual”) positions – teaching-heavy jobs that often last just nine months to a year. These jobs are often poorly compensated and typically lack employment rights such as sick pay. Even so, competition for them is intense, so Henry felt lucky to secure a year-long lectureship at one of the 44 colleges that make up Oxford.
https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/03/01/oxford-universitys-other-diversity-crisis
“One might expect that a university as rich as Oxford – which has an estimated total endowment of £6.4bn, if colleges are included – would be able to fund many well-paid academic positions, and would be especially keen to employ its high-achieving graduates. But Henry’s role only paid a stipend of around £14,500. (A stipend is a fixed amount of money that is provided for training to offset specific expenses. It is not legally considered compensation for work performed.) That amount is not unusual for a stipendiary lectureship at Oxford, even today. At the time of writing, an advertised job at a college was offering a stipend of between £13,700 and £15,500 a year.”
Casual contracts offer a chance for academics to develop a professional relationship with the university but, paradoxically, their demands on academics’ time make it very difficult to secure a permanent position. Since teaching obligations and part-time work consumed his days and nights, Henry found it near-impossible to immerse himself in his own work. But, as he discovered when applying for jobs, institutions place the most value on research – even for fixed-term positions with no research element. The prospect of a permanent job seemed to recede ever further into the distance. “I know of no other industry where this absurd situation could possibly exist,” he told me. “A situation where doing your actual job well” – teaching – “is detrimental to your career prospects.”
Harvard Tells Grad Students to Get Food Stamps to Supplement The Unlivable Wages It Pays Them
The university is hosting an event encouraging graduate students to apply for federal food assistance.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/93kwaa/harvard-tells-grad-students-to-get-food-stamps-to-supplement-the-unlivable-wages-it-pays-them
UBC staff now ineligible for AMS Food Bank due to insufficient funding
The AMS will no longer allow UBC staff to use the AMS Food Bank due to rising costs.
AMS President Eshana Bhangu announced the policy change at the March 29 AMS Council meeting, adding that UBC staff members seeking help from the AMS Food Bank will now be diverted to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank. According to a letter sent to the Board of Governors and signed by Bhangu and Anisha Sandhu, the interim VP academic and university affairs, the AMS Food Bank is encountering financial difficulties, making it impossible to sustain the current level of service to UBC students and staff.
The announcement comes after a large jump in usage over the past year from 7,496 visits in the 2021/22 policy year to an anticipated 15,861 by the end of 2022/23 policy year.
https://ubyssey.ca/news/staff-ineligible-for-ams-food-bank/
Let me say that again: only one third of all faculty work the way all of you think all faculty works. Just one third. This is a big part of what I mean when I say that the United States’ university system is being pillaged without the public knowing; if you told most people ‘only one third of college instructors are actually professors, most of your little Johnny’s classes are taught by non-professors now,’ they’d be shocked! But that’s the current situation.
https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-explained-or-what-on-earth-is-an-adjunct/
“The working conditions for nearly all adjuncts are shamefully bad, which is why universities and departments go to such lengths to disguise the nature of those appointments. While all non-tenure-track academics have limited job security, adjuncts have effectively none, since they need to negotiate new contracts every semester or every academic year. This job security question is an important one because academics are, of course, supposed to talk about difficult subjects and say difficult things; one is left with the strong sense that university leadership prefers adjuncts because they lack the sort of protections that make academic freedom work.
At the same time, adjuncts are paid awfully. As noted, adjuncts aren’t paid a salary but rather contracted on a per-course basis – they are effectively freelancers (and if you are thinking ‘freelance teacher’ sounds like a terrible idea, well, it is) – and the per-course payments are typically extremely low. The average per-course pay is around $3,556, though that conceals a lot of variation, with some adjuncts paid closer to $8-10,000 and many, many more paid less than $2,000 per course offered. At a 2/2 load, an adjunct being paid that way would be paid a total of $14,224 per year, without benefits, compared to a tenure-track professor who might be paid $60-75,000 (in the humanities, more in STEM or business) with benefits to teach the same amount.”