Working Without a Union in New Mexico

By Niame Adele and Christine Rack

Our governor, Bill Richardson, gained some fame and attention with his presidential campaign. He has also been an active, and generally progressive, leader. Under his administration, faculty in higher education finally gained the right to bargain collectively in a state that traditionally has been slow to recognize employees’ rights to organize. That win prompted the national AAUP to work with chapter leaders interested in organizing both contingent and tenure-eligible faculty here at the University of New Mexico. While many faculty expressed an interest in being part of a bargaining unit, the assessment of the local leadership was that a critical mass for an organizing drive had not yet been reached.

The favorite academic complaint here is that New Mexico’s higher education salaries are far below those in other states. This disparity is unsurprising, as the state of New Mexico annually vies with Mississippi for the first or second poorest ranking in the nation. Our state is less than 50 percent "Anglo" and has high rates of street crime, extensive federal land ownership, and a large number of medically uninsured, often undocumented, and hungry citizens. On the other hand, we host two of the national laboratories, one of them recently turned over to the Bechtel Corporation, where geniuses develop nuclear weapons and are now striving to exploit the academic resources of the state. As a consequence, there are pockets of military-industrial-complex glitter amid the minority, often rural, indigenous residents, resulting in high levels of wage and status inequality and contributing to New Mexico’s ranking as the third most unequal state.

And so it is also at UNM, the flagship public university. Last semester the university administration revealed a serious deficit from the research administration unit, now reported to be three million dollars. In addition to the budget issue, the number of top administrators has grown from ten to twenty-five between 2002 and 2008, with thirteen "associate vice presidents" reclassified as "below deans" and presumably not contributing to administrative bloat. "Voting" faculty (a category that does not include part-timers) formally charged the administration with violations of faculty governance traditions for making poor fiscal decisions devoid of departmental input or consultation. Adding insult to injury, the administration attempted to pass the debt down to the colleges. When it became apparent that many departments would cut part-time instruction, and consequently reduce considerably the number of courses offered, administrators backed off from this plan. Regular, full-time faculty teach around 50 percent of undergraduate courses at UNM, and this crisis has only served to shed light on how dependent the system has become on its academic permatemps.

Like many other places in the world today, New Mexico is trying to find an identity in the increasingly privatized, corporatized, and militarized environment of twenty-first-century America. Part-time faculty in New Mexico find many allies among our tenure-line colleagues and points of solidarity with the metastasizing hordes of temporary, contract employment. Our governor has slashed taxes for business and developed an attractive economic environment for the film industry—we even have a private company planning tourist trips into space. Despite high concentrations of local PhDs, most of the well-paid jobs, including academic jobs, still go to applicants from outside.

Attempting to improve working conditions for contingent faculty in this climate, contingents and regular faculty at UNM formed a local AAUP contingent faculty committee in 2003. In 2004, we embarrassed the president at a university forum by reading out loud one of our contracts—expect nothing, get nothing, be canceled at any time. This action resulted in a three-year-long set of meetings with the provost at which "low-lying fruit"—gym privileges, tuition remissions, orientation for part-time faculty—were identified. While we discussed the issues ad nauseam, no substantive changes were instituted to improve part-time conditions or relations. We left our last meeting with some administrators intent on simply replacing us with graduate student labor (which has been increased).

For administrators, these meetings provided an opportunity to claim they had put serious effort and years of work into the problem. The meetings, however, did prompt the provost’s office to authorize and fund a 2005 telephone survey of part-time faculty at the university’s main and branch campuses. In addition, our committee decided that, given the lack of change, we would go to the legislature (in spite of being admonished not to) and to extend our activities to the entire state of New Mexico.

Over time, we settled on three guiding strategies for our lobbying efforts: (1) to present the issue of part-time faculty compensation and working conditions as one that all of us (administrators, tenure-line faculty, students, and part-timers) could agree was a problem that all of us would want to change; (2) to seek a new money stream for improved compensation for part-timers rather than competing with our already underpaid full-time colleagues for a larger piece of the budget; and (3) to seek a comparison measure based on full-time teaching (contingent) faculty, not tenure-line faculty.

We combined efforts with our state representative, Danice Picraux, herself a PhD in political science who has taught part time in New Mexico institutions. With examples and help from Washington State and the California Faculty Association, we crafted legislation, which passed easily, to form a "best practices" task force in 2005. The task force involved higher education administrators statewide, teaching them about contingent working conditions and creating a sense that "something ought to be done."

In 2007, Picraux proposed, and the legislature passed, a bill (HB384) requiring all public colleges and universities to report the rates of pay and benefits of all faculty members, so that part-time salaries could be more easily compared to full-time salaries. Last year, for the first time, institutions were compelled to report this information. After visiting all these institutions and carefully framing the questionnaire, the analysts from the New Mexico Higher Education Department (NMHED) published the first statewide report in January 2008. The report buried the lead (part-timers make half as much as full-time faculty at their specific institutions, not accounting for benefits) and avoided publishing the actual numbers or mentioning specific colleges and universities to save the institutions from embarrassment. Since the law requires this information to be gathered every year, however, the NHMED and the interested constituencies are working together to structure the survey to collect clear and useful data.

The hope of those who supported HB384 was that identifying disparities would result in a series of appropriations to address them. It does seem that the principal higher education administrators in the state have stopped claiming that institutions cannot afford to pay more and are actually trying to estimate the costs of addressing the problem, and thus determine the necessary appropriations. Unfortunately, the last meeting of the statewide group of NMHED and higher education administrative and research staff began (again) the search for low-lying fruit.

This year, the NMHED is planning a statewide survey of part-time faculty. The department seems to have an underlying interest in calculating the actual number or percentage of part-time faculty members who are professionally committed to this career and dependent on its income, as opposed to those who fit the more comfortable stereotype of part-timers as people who teach for "fun" and are supported by full-time employment elsewhere, comfortable pensions, or well-off partners. Based on the 2005 survey, we estimate that at UNM, the largest of the twenty-two institutions in the state, approximately one-third of the 1,000 non-retiree part-timers on the faculty are supporting themselves with this work.

Despite slow progress, we find our state administration largely cooperative. With various allies and constituencies, we continue to chip away at the obstructing bureaucratic and economic structures built over the past decades.

A shorter version of this article appeared in the print edition of Academe.

Niame Adele and Christine Rack are contingent faculty members in the sociology department at the University of New Mexico and members of the Contingent Faculty Committee of the UNM AAUP chapter. Their e-mail addresses are niame@unm.edu and rack@unm.edu.

Comment on this article.

 Printer-Friendly Page