Folks like @Mindysan33 and others whom I’ve forgotten who are faculty might be interested in this, if you/they haven’t seen it already:
Over the past two decades, higher education employment has undergone a radical transformation with faculty becoming contingent, staff being outsourced, and postdocs and graduate students becoming a larger share of the workforce. For example, the faculty has shifted from one composed mostly of tenure-track, full-time employees to one made up of contingent, part-time teachers. Non-tenure-track instructors now make up 70 percent of college faculty. Their pay for teaching eight courses averages $22,400 a year―less than the annual salary of most fast-food workers.
In The Gig Academy , Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott assess the impact of this disturbing workforce development. Providing an overarching framework that takes the concept of the gig economy and applies it to the university workforce, this book scrutinizes labor restructuring across both academic and nonacademic spheres. By synthesizing these employment trends, the book reveals the magnitude of the problem for individual workers across all institutional types and job categories while illustrating the damaging effects of these changes on student outcomes, campus community, and institutional effectiveness. A pointed critique of contemporary neoliberalism, the book also includes an analysis of the growing divide between employees and administrators.
There was a discussion a few years ago about how academic employment resembles Hollywood employment. There are a large number of desperate people toiling for very little in the hopes of securing one of the very few dream jobs. The dream of a job researching and talking about a topic that you love with academic freedom and relatively little interference from supervisors is a very different dream than the fame and fortune of an A lister in Hollywood, but the dynamic of many people trying to win the job lottery is similar.
One difference is that if you’re an A-lister and make crap films/shows, you can slide back down into the “desperate people toiling” category. Once you have tenure . . . .
It depends on the state. Some yes (Michigan, Maryland, California, some others), some no. Tenure generally supersedes that, though. A friend in grad school got a tenure-track job at Western Michigan and on his first day they faculty had a strike. He said it was a bit weird, not going to your job for the first few weeks because you were on strike over something you weren’t really familiar with, and in reality were just happy to have a job.
