By Geoff Johnson
As I sit here before my computer unemployed yet fully engaged in the act of doing unpaid yet expected work, I ponder upon an America made transient, isolated, and precarious in the name of efficiency, flexibility, and convenience.
As a “part-time” (I actually work 115+% of a full-time load at two combined institutions so that each school can pay me around 50% less than what my full-time colleagues make) community college instructor, I’m generally unemployed during the summer, but will spend 100’s of hours having to work on an online class shell for an upcoming Humanities (from 1400-present) class.
Because the overwhelming number of commercial Humanities textbooks approaching the time period fixate on the triumphal narrative expansion of Western European culture and its own internal issues, a proper teaching of the period effectively requires an instructor to not simply design what amounts to a textbook of their own, but a class shell of module outlines, assignments, video lectures, etc., the work of such a course no longer falls the traditional two-to-three week prep period and following class term.
For many part-time community college instructors, like an increasing number of the 36% of Americans who make up the US contingent labor workforce, working online is not an option, but an obligation. After first accepting to teach Humanities online in the Spring of 2020 my reward for doing a hopefully adequate job was to be offered the opportunity to continually teach online, and to teach additional online courses requiring additional online preps.
To be fair, I do enjoy teaching and I don’t fault either my scheduler or Dean for the assignment, but to be clear, I work in an exploitive situation.
As a worker whose employment is contingent on enrollment on a term-by-term basis, or who, without the protection true academic freedom of tenure, can find oneself without a job or even a career, the idea that one is “asked to” or “offered” work is a mischaracterization of what goes on in a contingent workers’ head, whether academic or not. Asks and offers are really more the effective giving of economic ultimatums in the form of options: you can accept the assignment, or not be hired, or seen as difficult, and not be hired in the future, or simply excluded from being considered for a future option, and not be hired. Get the point?
The assertion that contingent workers enjoy choice only works if a worker has the option to truly look for work or withdraw from the labor market. In truth, contingent workers, paid less and lacking the status of a full-time job with some trappings of job security, rarely enjoy this luxury. The convenience and flexibility of these jobs exists only for people who don’t really need to live off them. The convenience and flexibility of such jobs lies more with employers, who in fact benefit from a transient pool of workers who impermanence and precarity necessarily makes them harder to organize.
The trickling down of contingency manifests itself in other ways as well. Increasing numbers of younger workers, more likely to enter into and remain in contingent working conditions, lack the capacity to build wealth, let alone consider the option of home ownership. Of course, they can choose to live with their parents, provided their parents are less precarious than themselves, or they can rent, an option made more tenuous by vast and largely faceless megarich and investor groups buying up properties, and renting out what they can’t sell off at inflated prices to people who will in turn never be ability to build their own equity.
There is another option, and that is to simply choose transience altogether by living in one’s car. My own son, as a sort of personal test of discipline, did this for a few months, though to be clear, he was never homeless in any obligatory sense. The same could not be said of those he encountered, often staying in the parking lots of defunct stores and restaurants. These folks generally did not fit the model of the unhoused as mentally ill and drug-addicted, or the itinerant types romanticized in Nomadland. Nearly all of them had jobs, many were college-educated, like one young engineer who bunked in a late model Tesla, thinking this was the way he would best accumulate savings to afford buying a home.
Young America is increasingly being told to pick itself from the car seat and in a place where the ever more present threat of triple-digit heat from climate change can turn their cars into death traps.
More recently, as a contingent faculty union rep, I was approached for the first time this Fall by multiple unhoused part-time faculty simply looking for the creation of a safe parking space at the institution where they taught, thinking it might be of use to our much larger unhoused student population as well. The administration balked, citing costs regarding liability, access to showers, etc.
And now I return to writing my class shell, unsettled but obligated to move forward, keeping ahead of car living.