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Dear Permanent Faculty:
National Adjunct Walkout Day on February 25th is a call from our American colleagues to fight for better conditions for contract faculty across all geographical borders. As tenure track or tenured faculty we can easily forget how we too are subject to the same systems and practices that do damage to our contract colleagues. We will undoubtedly feel it more personally in the coming years if public pressure isn’t placed on our administrations and governments now.
We are not suggesting a walk out but we are hoping that we use this day to speak with one another, and with our students about the unjust conditions our contract faculty colleagues face every day. Let us know about your discussions, and we’ll get your message to a sister school in the U.S. It’s critical that we note our participation in a system that places our contract faculty in a precarious situation and how we can and should work to change it.
This is an invitation to join in an international movement. Posters and buttons have been sent to your programs and departments. And a fact sheet is appended to this message. Please use these resources as we stand in solidarity with our colleagues throughout the academic world.
February 25th presents an opportunity to make a strong international statement about the direction that education systems have taken. Let’s take advantage of that opportunity.
Put a poster on your door!
Wear a button in solidarity with your colleagues!
Discuss the facts with your colleagues and students!
Let us know what you did by writing a short message on our WLUFA blog: https://advocatewlufa.wordpress.com/. We will tweet a link to your blog to a sister school in the US.
Thanks,
WLUFA Communications Committee
- Contract Faculty
The WLUFA Advocate Blog 
The wildly variable pay, benefits and conditions seem to be big issues here in Ontario and more broadly across both of our countries. As a member of CUPE at the University of Guelph I get very good health/dental, pension and life insurance benefits only because I started contract work there over 20 years ago. Newer recruits get poorly funded second class benefits through the union. Through a union CA negotiated recognition of long term service, I can now earn about 20% more pay per course, over and above the top of the pay grid. We have always had a sliding pay scale grid at Guelph unlike WLU where there is almost no monetary recognition (some token change for seniority) of qualification or experience. While WLU offers me $125 for professional development expenses per term, I now get $450 at Guelph. I often teach at both places on the same day so the disparity is rather disappointingly apparent. There are also many real problems at Guelph of course, I do not want to paint a happy picture, but rather point out a few of the discrepancies. At Guelph we are allocated regular faculty offices, shared of course (with actual keys), but we have the exclusive use of them when we are on campus. WLU gives us a rather visible stigma by putting us in little “aquarium rooms” with swipe card locks that often fail. Booked by the 1/2 hour like a cheap motel. We wait in the hall while our colleagues try to disengage and vacate on the hour. I commute 60-70 minutes to campus and WLU often has me coming in three days a week for three 50 minute lectures. Scheduling and work predictability and security are still huge issues at both campuses. I do not mean to disparage the union here at WLU or say that CUPE is better but progress can be made here and down the road. I have no more time to tell you about the University of Waterloo, perhaps another time…
Victor Gulewitsch (Anthropology)
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