Bargaining Session 11 | October 6, 2022
This week’s bargaining session was brief but significant. For the 5th week in a row, the university’s team showed up with zero counter proposals. If it were up to them, they would not have shown up at all. This was reflected in Tyce’s tone, which was impatient and agitational from the start.
All about the money
Part-time faculty bargaining committee member, Alice Eve Cohen, shared an impassioned speech illustrating the sacrifices part-time faculty make for such low pay.
“I was deeply honored to win the 2020 Distinguished Teaching Award, and it meant the world to me to receive a congratulatory email from President McBride, who told me that the university deeply values my contribution. But the university does not “value” my contribution, nor that of other part-time faculty members. After 23 years of service, I teach three courses and my total annual income is $13,500.”
Tyce’s response to Cohen’s moving statement demonstrated, in a single question, the university’s entire neoliberal philosophy. She asked if the bargaining committee had run the numbers on what our proposals would cost. The New School has and always will be more concerned with profit than people. Additionally, the burden of cost analysis should not fall on bargaining committee volunteers. Part-time faculty are actively fighting against unpaid labor, and that must be reflected at the bargaining table, too.
Setting expectations
Tyce reaffirmed that there will be a three-day bargaining session next week and the university’s team will be able to provide the entirety of their counter proposals in one full package. Despite Tyce’s insistence, the bargaining committee has never set an expectation that counter proposals be made in their entirety at once. Proposal by proposal bargaining is always how part-time faculty and the New School have done things.
Whose Zoom?
Finally, there was extended back and forth about who would be hosting the next Zoom bargaining session, further illustrating the university’s unwillingness to work with part-time faculty on even the most basic of issues.