Dean’s Blog - Precarity and Academic Work

Although it hasn’t caught on much in North America, the term "precarity" (precariedad, précarité, Prekarität or precarietà ) is widely used in Europe and elsewhere to describe the condition of those whose employment is contingent, limited-term, part-time or generally uncertain. There is a lively literature on precarity that focuses not just on the insecurity of working conditions or job quality but also on its social or psychological manifestations.

While the term might be relatively new, the condition of precarity is not. There has always been precarious work of various sorts. However, precarity is today associated with a particular kind of employment condition that is increasingly prevalent. Again, this includes contingent work and temping, fixed-term contract and involuntary part-time work, along with certain types of dependent self-employment situations. "The one thing all these forms of employment have in common", one commentator explains, "is that although they enable people to stay above subsistence level, they cannot guarantee anybody’s livelihood on a permanent basis."

People living precariously are not necessarily poor, nor are they members of the "working class" in the strictest sense. Indeed, the term "precariat" has been coined to describe a new class, which is a subset of the urban middle class, particularly associated with intellectuals or other "knowledge workers" who may enjoy relatively high social status while struggling with uncertain employment conditions. (Mind you, some analysts also use the term for those in low-paying, low-prestige, service jobs - the so-called "McJobs" - in addition to how I am using it here.)

Thanks to the promotional genius of Italian activists, precarious workers now even have their own patron saint - San Precario - who first appeared at the Euro May Day march in Milan in 2004. (Euro May Day is itself a new invention, designed as an update on the traditional May Day to champion specifically the cause of "flex" and "temp" workers, and other "precarious" people living in Europe.) As one writer says,

San Precario is an unusual and generous saint, a comforter for many situations in life. Whether he is one’s own patron saint can be established by asking oneself a few questions: Where will my money come from tomorrow? How safe is my job? What happens if I fall ill? How do I finance my studies, what will I do afterwards? Why is work constantly on my mind? How will I live? Anyone affected by one or several of these questions can get used to the idea that he [or she] is precarious.

Does this ring a bell? Academic workers tend to have at least some direct experience with precarity. In the best scenario, precarity is a condition only of one’s early career. In this case, it is typically expected that precarity will give way to security, once one moves into a tenure-stream position and eventually achieves tenure and promotion.

This was my own experience with precarity. I barely survived my last year as a full-time grad student in Toronto by supplementing my scholarship income and grader/marker wage with an evening job in a campus parking lot (where I sometimes met my well-heeled UofT students wheeling in with their late-model sports cars). I had two children already, and so I felt that I had to look for full-time work even though I had not yet finished my dissertation. I was fortunate to find such work, but ended up spending three years on limited-term contracts at the University of Saskatchewan, and one more at the University of Victoria, before landing a non-precarious job at the University College of the Cariboo (now Thompson Rivers University).

While working at a university college might not have been my first choice when I started my Ph.D., I was certainly not complaining when I got my first "permanent" appointment. I was tired of not knowing until May or June each year whether I was going to have full-time employment after my summer classes were over. This was the early 1990s. And I counted myself as one of the lucky ones. I can point to many members from my cohort who never did get permanent academic appointments of any sort. The academic job shortage that stretched from the late 1980s until the end of the 1990s forced scores of highly qualified people into years of precarious employment, and ultimately led many to abandon altogether their hopes of permanent academic work. The effects of those years can still be seen in the demographics of university faculties across North America. There is a relative shortage of mid-career academics in many departments, especially in the humanities and social sciences, and those who are in this category usually spent at least some time in precarious employment as sessionals or limited-contract instructors.

Today, things are much better for most aspirants to permanent academic employment. Budget deficits at the provincial and federal levels in Canada have been largely wrestled to the ground, and postsecondary enrollment has risen. Thus, more money has been made available throughout the system for the replacement of tenure-stream faculty. Given the large number of professors retiring, universities have simply had to appoint more entry-level, probationary faculty. Supply and demand perform their function, and thus talented graduates don’t have to wait so long (or at all) in precarious jobs before beginning their careers with tenure-track posts. Seen from this perspective, one might conclude that the current generation of academics, at least in some disciplines, experiences significantly less precarity than did mine.

Yet precarity is by no means a thing of the past. Simply put, there are still many more qualified academics than there are tenure-stream positions in our universities. And the use of sessional instructors is as high (or higher) than ever. While replacement of retiring professors has picked up, overall faculty budgets have not increased to the point that allows for adequate full-time staffing, particularly in the Arts and Sciences. Moreover, the imperative to perform at ever-higher levels of research productivity, coupled with the competition among universities to recruit and retain the best, has meant that the average teaching load for tenured or tenure-stream faculty members has been reduced, often sharply, even while enrollment has increased.

So we still need lots of people to teach students in our universities. By necessity, these classes are covered with large numbers of contract employees in addition to permanent faculty. While there is a noticeable improvement in job prospects for some newly-minted Ph.D. holders in certain disciplines, there are many who do not find permanent academic employment. And a great deal of academic work is still being done by people hired on a part-time, limited-term or contractual basis. These positions are often poorly paid, come with little or no benefits, and provide no job security. For a significant percentage of the folks in these contractual appointments, moreover, a tenure-track position will never be in the offing. Unlike precarious academic workers waiting their turn for probationary appointments, many of our contract academic staff can be expected to be doing what they are doing now for the rest of their working lives.

This observation highlights one of the most stark realities of academic employment: namely, that one can find oneself as an academic either living a life with enviable job security or extreme precarity. It is without a doubt that tenured university professors enjoy perhaps the greatest level of job security among major occupational groups - not to mention relatively high pay, flexible work hours and a good deal of autonomy in their workday life. Yet those academics who do not procure tenured appointments remain among the most insecure workers among us.  

It is in this latter category that one finds academics under the patronage of the venerable San Precario. The issue of what are the implications of precarity in academe - not only for the precarious academic workers themselves, but for our students, for the tenured professoriate and for the university system as a whole - is something that all of us should consider closely. (Hence, you can expect more on this topic at a later date.)