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Sunday, March 30, 2008
When A “Job Market” Isn’t One
The academic labor market isn’t a market in “jobs.” It’s a market in contingent labor.
crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com
So Brainstorm comrade Dan Greenberg has had a couple of great posts about academic labor in the sciences recently. A few days ago, he commented on the fake undersupply of scientists, essentially pointing out that labor markets are socially structured. When capitalists, universities, and farm employers don’t want to pay fair wages for work, they ask governments to help by saying that fruit pickers or software engineers are “in short supply,” so can they please import some workers willing to accept the low wages?
What this really means is that they’re in short supply at the crappy wages being offered, and the employers are begging the government to rig--I mean “socially structure"--the market in their favor. As Dan puts it, “The abundantly endowed Gates Foundation might attempt a useful experiment in talent supply. Advertise doubled pay for software engineers. A negligible response is not likely.”
In today’s post, Dan observes that we’re eating our young. (Okay, okay, he more politely quoted someone saying “We’re eating our seed corn.")
Thousands of young Ph.D.‘s are stacked up in minimum-wage postdoc holding patterns for lack of full-fledged positions. For years it’s been predicted that droves of old-timers would be stepping down from academic posts, making room for a new generation. But the seniors of science continue to show wondrous durability, perhaps because the grant system is loaded in their favor.
This is one area where I’ve done a bit of work. Dan’s also employing what passes for “labor market” theory in writing about academic labor--when he talks about science “seniors” not clearing out, he’s suggesting that the system has a glitch and that sooner or later we’ll be able to employ those thousands of young PhDs.
The problem with this line of thinking (NOT Dan’s thinking) is that it assumes, inaccurately, that the academic labor market is a market in “jobs” when it is actually a market in contingent labor. When you look at it as if were what we call it--the “job market"--something we dearly wish it was--it looks mysteriously broken, and we don’t know how to fix it. Brilliant labor economists like William G. Bowen make ridiculously erroneous projections about it.
But when you look at it for what it is--a labor market in contingency--you see that it’s actually functioning brilliantly. Exploitative, dishonest as hell, cannibalizing of the young--but functioning just as it is designed to do, to produce ultra-cheap workers--first as students, then as postdocs or contingent faculty. Increasingly undergraduate workers are drawn into this contingent labor market. The tenure-stream employment in many sectors--certain sciences, many humanities--is increasingly epiphenomenal, providing a layer of legitimacy/public relations, some grant income, an upper-management candidate pool, and day-to-day supervision of contingent workers.
As an added benefit, the minority who end up working in the tenure stream do so at lower wages because the price of the tenured is undercut by all the contingents. The “job market,” so-called, is therefore a rhetoric of the labor system and not a description of it. A true “labor market” analysis of academic labor would have to begin not with the superstructure of tenure-track jobs but with a rigorous analysis of the contingent base--the ways that the system produces and legitimates contingency. Including the legitimation provided by the institutional myth-making of presidents who urge “teaching for love” on other people while whacking away the cheese for themselves.
All this is discussed in detail in the free downloadable pdf of the introduction to How The University Works.
Comments
To what degree is this generational? In the research universities the established older generation still has pretty cushy jobs, while peons increasingly do the actual work?
But second, when the expensive research professors retire, are they always replaced? A budgeting university might decide it doesn’t need that much research in history, English, Foreign Language and Literature, Anthropology, or other non-income-producing areas.
Is this something working from the bottom up? During my last actual involvement in the university system around 1985, the local community colleges were already substantially adjunctified and the local university (which offered about 4 PhDs) was moving fast in that direction. Did the trend hit the Ivy Leagues only later?
My angle on this is pretty specific. I see humanities generalism as having been damaged three different ways. One, by the demotion of the humanities and the adjunctification of humanities teaching, which starves the next generation of scholars. Second, by the apparent dwindling of the free-lance intellectual world (cf. Jacoby’s “The Last Intellectuals"). And third, by attempts to make the humanities seem scientific by narrowing and methodologizing them. (Analytic philosophy and “Theory” are, to me, symmetrical examples of this.)
My hope is that disgruntled ex-academics will revive the free-lance intellectual world, but I’m not sure that there’s a market. I suppose I could name a fourth negative trend: the replacement of the old-style book-type book market with a poppy escapist fluff market.
Currently, by an overwhelming majority, the norm of faculty experience is contingent appointment, not tenurability. At least 70% of all faculty appointments are contingent--a figure that doesn’t include graduate employees or deal with the fact that academic employers often under-report the numbers of faculty employed contingency. In 1970, 3/4 of faculty were tenurable.
It’s not just the humanities--it’s the sciences. It’s not just academic employment; it’s everywhere you can find quality management--police departments, the military, civil service employment. Everywhere you go you find a labor pyramid with a big fat pad of contingency at the bottom--filled by the young, the old, the student (average age of undergraduates: 26), the imprisoned, the formerly imprisoned, the recently arrived, the undocumented, women with children, women whose children are grown.... the list is endlesss.
Everything has become contingent and since we long ago “agreed” that certain people are a good fit for contingency--they deserve it, or we feel they want it--the money-masters just kept enlarging the margins where those people “deserving” contingency reside.
An a non-academic, I’m not really sure where this series of posts is going. I agree with the descriptions of what is going on. What I don’t see is how these descriptions are supposed to fit into the non-academic working world, to which they apply without even the fringe of legitimation provided by tenured positions.
That applies to rhetorical statements like “we’re eating our young.” All of society is based around getting the utmost out of labor, not just academia. So is this supposed to lead to a general critique of late capitalism? Or is the emphasis on *our* young supposed to call on solidarity within the academic community?
The latter is all well and good, I suppose. But if the focus is to get academics to believe that they are workers, and then go down the classic paths of unionization, then academic managers are of course going to take up the specialized knowledge and self-image of union-breakers as well. In the current U.S., that’s often a losing game for the workers.
“We’re eating our young."
My understanding of this is that when the current crop of scholars retires, there will be no one to replace them, because the following generation has mostly been cheap non-tenure-track labor.
John, you’re essentially correct, though it’s not that there’s “no one to replace” retiring senior faculty--quite the reverse. There are many, many folks qualified to replace senior faculty--many of whom have done less scholarship in entire careers than many applicants for tenure-track jobs. It’s that the full-time jobs of retiring senior faculty are eliminated (and then the department has to “re-apply” for the line, etc etc).
Rich, you are completely right that it’s not an exclusively academic phenomenon. But believe me, faculty have already “gone down the classic path of unionization"--44% of all tenure track faculty are unionized, 3 or 4 times the rate of unionization in the country generally. And, likewise, academic management has long, long ago adopted the “specialized knowledge” of union-busting.
In fact, it can be argued that some of the most sophisticated labor-management techniques today are based on campus practice.
In fact, it can be argued that some of the most sophisticated labor-manageme
The President of Portland Community College in Oregon was aggressively applying business-management principles to his school quite early in the 80s, with labor flexibility being a primary goal. Can’t remember his name at the moment but he was a real innovator.
Yes, and when I say “sophisticated,” I mean in the sense that the Iraq war was managed in sophisticated ways to fatten profits whether or not military goals were accomplished. (Just as the quality management of higher education has resulted in procedures that continuously improve revenue and cut costs while generating empty claims about educational “outcomes” irrespective of whether any authentic educating transpires....)
I’m not surprised that tenure track faculty are highly unionized—white collar jobs in public employment is one of the most highly unionized sectors, if I remember rightly. But is the contingent labor highly unionized? I didn’t have the impression that grad student unions, much less unions for non-tenured faculty, were that widespread.
Let me try out a competing theory: academic managers have their primary loyalty to the group of tenured faculty, from which they are mostly drawn. The academic “unions” then function like a guild, of which academia can be said to be one of the last, controlling entry to the privileged positions and keeping out the majority of potential workers. This would indicate that academic solidarity as such doesn’t really exist, and the primary conflict isn’t between a managerial and a worker class, but between the masters and journeymen/apprentices of a guild.
I don’t know enough about the situation to know whether this competing theory is really supported or not, I’m just generally suspicious about “we’re eating our young” statements, which attempt to assume into existence a solidarity (whose young?) that may not exist.
I remember the drive to unionize the secretarial staff at Yale (twenty-five years ago?).
It was a fascinating litmus test of “solidarity”: which faculty would cross the picket lines to teach? More than we would care to have believed. (A harbinger of Yale’s treatment of its graduate student unionization effort down the line.) The unionization of Yale’s secretaries was considered revolutionary in the annals of university labor organizing.
One of the trustees of the Yale Corporation at the time—funny how Yale has never been embarassed by the fact that the Board of Trustees openly calls itself a corporation—recounted to some of us that since she was a scientist and not a corporate manager, she could sometimes make remarks at the meetings that were more honest than many would dare. “Aren’t we embarassed that Yale is paying people so little money?”
The real question now is why it is less embarassing for academia to pay its contingent faculty less than its secretarial and janitorial staff—as is often the case around the country.
AHA-Erlebnis
Tenured faculty is like the UAW. The UAW is slowly shrinking but manages to hold onto its wages in the face of stiff labor market competition. Management figures that, when the old union members retire or are bought out, they can be replaced at half wage. The problem in the university is that the customers are indifferent to quality. The students show up regardless of who’s teaching. So I don’t see a solution.
By the way, Marc should join those of us on the right who are immigration restrictionists. He sounds like Pat Buchanan.
Hey, AHA. I was at Yale 81-85, though as a remarkably callow undergrad. BJK, I didn’t make any comment whatever on immigration! I simply commented on the way that employers ask government to rig the “market” in their favor. Nice bit of cheeseball ad hominem smearing, though. If you had the courage to sign your name, you might get yourself a job over at Fox news!
Rich, you’re on to something. One of the steadily larger functions of academic tenure is to create a candidate pool for administration (who have been torching job security and workplace due process for everyone except themselves). There is a steadily closer link between tenure as a labor aristocracy and management. This is a feature widespread in American workplaces, including those with powerful unions, as BJK points out--albeit in a Fox-News-I-love-management sort of way.
American labor unions have helped to bargain multiple-tier workplaces into being since the 1980s--which was really unjust and a form of suicide. Fortunately we are at last seeing strong evidence of a counter-trend.