Contingency and Transient America: Fight Contingency Now!
". . . when you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your objective was to drain the swamp."
by Geoff Johnson
Last week, as I stood on the floor of the NEA Convention to speak for a New Business Item calling for resources to be put forth to the organizing of graduate assistants, I noted that at this, the largest teacher’s union convention for the largest union in the United States, this was the only one of some 100 public education items that addressed an issue specific to higher education. I remarked as well that I was speaking as a contingent faculty member who came to unions in part through my joining the then NEA-affiliated CFA as a graduate student. Notably, the author of the New Business Item, a Florida graduate assistant, in her proposal referenced a past Business item dedicated to contingent faculty.
To be clear, it was not that NEA leadership do not care about higher ed or academic contingency, but given the wholesale attacks on the Department of Education, academic freedom, DEI, and Trans students and teachers, just to start, they can perhaps be forgiven in the moment, especially when the hall got to hear of the passage of the Big Bad Bill as it happened.
It recalls an old expression which goes “when you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your objective was to drain the swamp.”
The real aspect of alligators and a swamp clearly not being drained aside, the daily trauma induced by the Trump administration has made us not simply reactive rather than proactive, but ignore many of the problems that led us into this mess.
And contingency, not simply academic contingency is a big part of that, and contingency cannot be ignored.
By contingency, I’m referring to the notion of a person’s conditionality of value or worth determined by those who wish to use or exploit at minimal cost or concern. This contingency has roots in the very culture of capitalism. As Michel Foucault noted in his analysis of Adam Smith in The Order of Things, what Smith does in his Wealth of Nations is reduce labor, or human output, into a unit of capital. Effectively, people could be reduced an economic unit only valued by their productivity.
This contingency has of course a deeper and obviously more malevolent root—the chattel slavery born from Henry the Navigator and the Papal Bull of 1452 which sanctioned the placing of non-Christians in perpetual servitude, coupled with the 1453 writings of Gomes Eanes de Azurara tying Black Africans to the “curse of Ham.”
This is not to suggest that chattel slavery and the labor contingency of today are the same. They are not. However, they are born in part from a similar impulse to devalue others for the sake of profit and expediency.
Contingency is a force which often creeps into human capitalist enterprise once the means of production are established enough that the worker can be reduced from an individual to a tool or delivery device. Once the factory determines that a task can be accomplished by a being of lesser status, say someone outside the dominant race, gender, or age group, unless stopped by social forces, there will be a push to hire someone with the least agency at the least cost.
Further, when employing someone for a certain number of hours a week might socially obligate the factory or enterprise owner to provide a living wage, health benefits, job security, or support in old age, the next step is to keep an employee’s work hours below the obligation threshold. If the employee can’t live on the hours provided, it is the employee’s responsibility to work another job, yet still magically maintain their commitment to not only the old job, but the second one as well.
By the way, this has never been about sustaining the worker—worker attrition is built into the system. After all, workers who quit, fall ill, or die create a transience that is positively referenced by management as “flexibility” or “fluidity.”
In the California community college system, part-time employment was limited to evening standalone classes in adult ed and for substitute teaching until 1967, when a law established that faculty teaching under 60% of a full-time load could effectively remain in permanent status. It should be noted that it wasn’t for another nine years that California public educators could even unionize, and when they did, the focus was on preserving the working conditions of full-time employees, which made the expansion and exploitation of part-time faculty much easier.
This ultimately turned into a deficit strategy as administrators and politicians alike acquiesced to contingent hiring on a large scale thus creating an effective 70/30 contingent to full-time/tenure track ratio which has not budged in decades despite calls for a 75/25 full-time to part-time ratio in 1988.
More disturbingly, many local unions, ever-concerned with preserving and promoting the needs of full-time faculty, negotiated salary schedules which furthered inequity or limited the role of contingent faculty in their institutions to largely teaching.
Part of this is driven by the California education code’s own description of these faculty as “temporary” in spite of many of them having worked continuously at their institutions for decades.
The end result is a precarious faculty. According to AFT’s “Army of Temps Report,” 25% of contingent faculty nationwide are on some form of public assistance, with significant numbers having to do things such as ration medicine or forgo medical treatment. 47% reported that they had no idea how they would retire.
Beyond academia, US part-time employment has risen to 13.9% of all workers, a record high.
Part-time work, and in particular, involuntary part-time work, is not simply economically disadvantageous for those who live it—it is a public health issue in that the “rates of fair/poor health are greatest among part-time workers,” and that “state policies do not moderate health consequences of involuntary part-time work.”
By the way, this information is based on the contingent climate which existed prior to Trump 2.0.
Of course, the fight against contingency, academic or otherwise is ongoing, but more often than not pushed to the side.
Recently, a contingent colleague of mine was at a political rally and got into a discussion with a former labor organizer from her union’s statewide affiliate. When speaking to the organizer about a push to radically challenge academic contingency through a model known as “One-Tier,” which would seek to establish true pay and working parity between part-and full-time faculty, the organizer’s response was “how can you talk about that while the world is burning?”
Had I the chance, I would have asked him just why it is that the world is burning.
The devaluing or underfunding of higher education has been most facilitated by contingency, not only of faculty, but even staff and student workers via reduced hours, low pay, lack of job security, and no benefits. At the same time, it has allowed the few full-time tenure/track faculty who do have it to be seen as elitist and out-of-touch.
Despite efforts to defend academic freedom, contingency has enabled its decline. Contingent faculty, who by the very nature of the job status lack it, will self-censor for the sake of remaining employed, whether it be to not offend students, department chairs, or administrators. Speaking out comes at a cost, and those with wealth and power have doggedly worked to make that price dear.
Beyond academia, working class and minoritized people have grown cynical over the centrist Democratic narrative which offers regularly half-hearted social justice measures while attacking labor and remaining tied to Wall Street. For their support, working class and minoritized peoples are rewarded with contingent policy, and always with the promise of a better that never comes.
Even when truly progressive figures, such as Bernie Sanders, AOC, or more recently Zohran Mamdani, actually attempt to address the inequity, they are shut down by the elites within their own party—the secure, the entrenched, who’d rather simply be the loyal opposition. These same elites will never even attempt to co-opt the progressives out of fear of giving them legitimacy.
While people think of the disaffected jumping to Trump, the greater reality is that they either chose not to vote, or did not simply feel the solidarity to organize.
And so we are where we are, and no, no one is going to save you except for yourselves because you will be told by others to wait your turn, and it’s not coming.
The contingent masses (and not just contingent faculty) must organize and fight for what they want, and challenge the narrative of human devaluation. Never has it served us to wait to be seen. We must be our own champions and fight contingency now in a way that serves us.
Otherwise, you can be sure that not only will the swamp never be drained, but that the alligators will be well-fed.
Geoff Johnson is Southeast San Diego resident and a contingent professor of English and Humanities at San Diego Mesa and Southwestern Colleges. He is also President of the AFT Adjunct/Contingent Caucus, and organizer with the March in March, advocating for student affordability, access, academic freedom, and worker rights for all higher ed workers.