The Plight of a PTL: Underpaid and Scrambling for Work
Part-time lecturers at Rutgers are underpaid and scrambling for jobs in lieu of a proper income, according to the Rutgers chapter of the American Association of University Professors American Federation of Teachers (AAUP-AFT).
Jeffrey Dowd, a professor in the Sociology department at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, is one of the organizers mobilizing graduate students and part-time lecturers, or PTLs, at Rutgers. He and others with AAUP-AFT are currently negotiating a contract with the administration.
From 1997 to 2017, the number of tenure-track professors has steadily declined whereas the number of PTLs has increased dramatically, meaning more faculty members are receiving limited contracts and lower pay, according to a report conducted by the AAUP-AFT.
AAUP-AFT is proposing to create more positions like Dowd’s, full-time positions with job security but without tenure. Although tenure is a long-term goal, Dowd stressed the importance of being a full-time faculty member. He explained how he and his wife struggled on their yearly contracts as PTLs during graduate school.
“Every year we were wondering if we had funding. We’d be asking ourselves, ‘are we going to have health insurance next year?’” he said.
When Dowd started as a PTL and teacher’s assistant (TA) at Rutgers in 2003, he was paid about $4,000 or less a semester. AAUP AFT negotiated PTLs to be paid $5,000 a semester, starting in Fall 2016. Students pay an average of $1,888.60 per class with 27% of classes averaging 10–19 students. The union is proposing to raise the payment per class to $7,500.
With a lack of job security and low wages, PTLs scramble to find work elsewhere.
“Their main job is searching for jobs,” explained Dowd. “That’s their full-time job because of this rampant job insecurity of being a PTL and not having enough money, so you always have to take any other job that comes along because you’re paid so little.”
In addition to negotiations and attending bargaining meetings, the AAUP-AFT works with students through protests across campus. These kind of demonstrations aren’t new in the PTL fight: Dowd participated in a “grade-in” in 2010 to protest and stall contract negotiations. Graduate students brought their papers to grade and occupied the president’s office.
“So we seem to always have to do these things to push the administration. It doesn’t happen just because it’s the right thing to happen,” Dowd said. “We can make the best arguments at the bargaining table, but at the end of the day in some ways, it’s about power. Can we mobilize the faculty and can we make sure the students know what’s going on?”
AAUP AFT is holding protests across all three campuses of Rutgers University. For more information about their proposals and their contract fight, visit http://equitysecuritydignity.org/.
