Power Despite Precarity

Joe Berry is a founder of the Chicago Coalition of Academic Labor and a long-time leader of the international COCAL and New Faculty Majority. He has served on many national contingent faculty committees. He is the author of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education (Monthly Review Press, 2005). Helena Worthen is a novelist, union activist and retired contingent faculty worker. Her book, What Did You Learn at Work Today? The Forbidden Lessons of Labor Education (Hardball, 2013) won the 2014 Best Book award from the United Association for Labor Education.

Photographs

Series Preface

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Introduction

PART I - THE CASE OF THE LECTURERS IN THE CSU SYSTEM

1. Student Strikes and Union Battles

2. Layoffs and Hard Years for Organizing

3. Revolution in the Union

4. “They have nothing to teach us”

PART II - HIGHER ED WAS NEVER A LEVEL TERRAIN OF STRUGGLE

5. Four Transitions and How Casualization Served Managers

PART III - WHAT WE WANT AND WHAT THE CFA GOT

6. Blue Sky #1 Organizing and Economics

7. Blue Sky #2 Job Security, Academic Freedom and the Common Good

8. Beyond the Sausage-making: A Close Look at the CFA-CSU Contract

PART IV - THE DIFFICULTY OF THINKING STRATEGICALLY

9. Strategies Emerging From Practice

10. The Contingent Faculty Movement as a Social Movement

PART V - SEVEN TROUBLESOME QUESTIONS

11. What Gets People Moving?

12. Who is the Enemy? Who are Our Allies?

13. What is “Professionalism” for Us?

14. How Does It Feel?

15. Is this legal?

16. What About Leftists?

17. How Do We Deal With Union Politics?

PART VI - USING THE POWER WE HAVE

18. Hopes and Dangers

Essential Terms

John Hess: A Life in the Movement

Notes

Bibliography

Index