AFT and the Freelancers Union Partner to Support Contingent Faculty

Today, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Freelancers Union announced a new partnership that will enable contingent faculty across the country to access tailored benefits and connect, share and learn with others in their professions.

The partnership brings together the nation’s largest union of contingent faculty and the nation’s largest union of freelance workers, with a mission to support the lives, needs and opportunities of this growing new workforce.

Today’s announcement was made at the AFT convention and follows Freelancers Union’s earlier announcement of its National Benefits Platform at the Clinton Global Initiative’s CGI America 2014 meeting last month. The National Benefits Platform enables any independent worker in America to search by ZIP code for a suite of tailored benefits available to them.

You can read more about the new partnership in The Chronicle, and from the AFT’s Press Release.

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Workers’ Comp Issues for an Injured Adjunct

Linda Lee, and adjunct from the Philadelphia region, wrote this article which was published in The Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Adjunct Project. After injuring herself on campus grounds, she learned that being an adjunct had repercussions for her treatment, and she shares the important lessons she learned.  

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The Adjunct Tightrope

by Michelle Martin

In Spring 2013, after 8 years of grad school, getting married and having twin daughters in the process, I finally finished my doctorate in English.  Along the way I taught freshman composition numerous times, business writing, intro to the short story, intro to fiction, Contemporary American Fiction, even History of the English Language, for which I wasn’t well-qualified but I gamely took on anyway because – as you might have guessed – I needed the money.  The latter class I taught in Fall 2013, the semester after I finished grad school when I began my adjunct career.  Prior to this, I had taught in the capacity of graduate teaching assistant. While that situation possesses its own set of exploitative complexities, since it is technically not contingent labor, I’ll begin my account with the Fall ’13 semester.